librarysushi's posterous

When I first got into the innovation/design space, I thought the work would be researching, analyzing, brainstorming, concepting, prototyping and hopefully piloting new ideas. And I was mostly right, except this is only half of my job. The other half is about selling but not so much as a salesman, but as a storyteller.

There are many types of stories I tell. Some stories are about real people from the research - the challenges and work-arounds they have created. Other stories are about a new future where a concept is part of daily life. The stories of the future as present is the focus of this post.

Innovation, especially radical, new value creating innovation means change. Change is difficult. Humans in general have a hard time imagining something different than what is. Behavioral economics tells us that people tend to value the present over the future. Change usually entails changing the present (which most find annoying or painful) for a potentially better future state. Until they can experience that future state, the present is just fine. In the end, it is difficult to convince most people to change.

Human Centered Design as a practice encourages the creation of prototypes as a means to help your audience see and experience that which has yet to be. Storytelling is what makes a prototype come to life. If you as an innovator wish to succeed, you have to be able to create and tell a convincing story. Just to be clear, a story is not SPIN – innovators don’t try to disguise the truth or whitewash the facts, true storytelling is about acknowledging the difficulties while clearly expressing how and why life will be different and better because of your concept.

 I have spent a lot of time over the years constructing and telling stories about what could be. I have had some successes and plenty of failures. Early on, in an effort to get my success rate up I looked to learn from some of the best storytellers – Hollywood screenwriters. Initially the idea that Hollywood screenplays and the business stories I needed to tell were even remotely related seemed unlikely. But deeper down it turns out that whether you are Steven Spielberg or just some innovator trying to bring a new idea to life – all stories at heart, are the same.

If good stories are about how and why life changes, then every story has to start out with an ‘inciting incident’ – something that throws things out of balance. I would argue that good innovation stories do a good job of showing how the present is not quite as it seems.  In a business context, the inciting incident could be future forecasts that are heading down instead of up, a customer incident that highlights a poor experience with the company, or a process breakdown that leaves departments blaming each other while nothing gets done. The stories that convince people to accept radical innovation show that the present state is not good enough and must be overcome.

Good stories show the conflict between what is expected and what is. As Robert McKee describes in his book on screenwriting, the story, in an effort to restore balance, must show how the “protagonist’s subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality”. Most innovators, at some point, are seen as dreamers - unrealistic and overly idealistic, unaware of the mean realities of the business world. From an innovation story aspect, this means you will need to reorient the audience away from this notion. We need to show the struggle that will be necessary to overcome the present reality in order to create the new reality where your concept is desirable, easily made and profitable. Basically stated: Innovation stories cannot be fairytales!

To be convincing, they must acknowledge the “darkside” of humanity. Sounds a little ominous I know, but let’s be honest, there will be plenty of barriers blocking your concepts eventual success and most of those barriers will be human. Typically with a radical innovation there will be winners and losers. Talking honestly about the struggles to make a concept come into reality, as well as who wins and loses helps overcome inherent skepticism and create a positive and realistic sense that this innovation may actually be possible.

My experience has shown that business executives have a well-honed sense of skepticism. Executives are always searching for the truth between the lines, beyond the spin and beneath the surface. Good executives know that subordinates like to tell positive stories. An innovator is more believable when they acknowledge the barriers and hurdles that they will face to make this concept become real, but they must also show how they can overcome these issues and lead to a “new state of balance” and a better balance sheet in the process.

I know a lot of times innovators will try to sell a new concept on emotion alone. It rarely works. We all know that emotion can often overcome logic. But if your story logic is faulty, there will be no emotion. We have all seen movies where the character does something that breaks the logic of the story and from that point on the movie fails to engage. In a business context, I see this all the time, the leaps of logic are too big or unexplained and the concept will fall flat. The stories we tell must have a consistent logic. (If you have done good research and analysis, you should have design principles that provide the basic logic – but that’s another blog post) If an executive believes in your logic and can follow your storyline, the odds are you will make an emotional connection.

A good business story will show progress through change. It will detail the difficulties to success, it will show how to overcome these difficulties and it will show a new reality where the concept is desirable, viable and profitable. There will be a strong logic that is hard to contradict and there will be an emotional tie-in to something bigger. It turns out that constructing stories that build momentum and convince executives to invest resources takes a lot of thought, time and hard work. If you plan to be a successful innovator, plan on spending at least half of your time thinking through your stories that will sell the concept.

 Why has Human Centered Design moved so much closer to the mainstream of business practice in the last couple of years?

(download)

Click here to download:

human-centered-design-and-complexity-part-1-mAyfAjdIJjscEdvcGGDr.zip (141 KB)

·      - Firms like IDEO, among others, have been getting a lot of PR

·      - Various books on the subject have flooded the business book space

·      - Business, in general, is hungry for the next fad

On a deeper level I think it has to do with the increasing complexity of the marketplace and life in general. Things have always been complicated, but over the last 20 years, they are increasingly more complex. The emergence of “wicked problems” that vex business and government alike, are now daily discussions in the media.  So what’s the difference between complicated worlds and complex ones?

[Note: This whole blog emerged out of reading the first couple chapters of “Complex Adaptive Systems: An introduction to computational models of social life” by John Miller and Scott Page.]

Complicated systems are the sum of its pieces. Take one piece away and the system is reduced by that one piece but continues to function. From Descartes on, the Western World has functioned as though all systems could be reduced to their parts and pieces. More importantly, by studying the pieces individually, we could eventually understand the whole system.

Complex systems, on the other hand, are more than the sum of their parts; the parts are dependent upon each other. By removing one part, the systems react in unpredictable and often disproportionate ways.

In short, a complex system disappears when a part is removed, but complicated systems keep on going, just one part less. “Removing a seat from a car makes it less complicated; removing the timing belt makes it less complex (and useless).” (Complex Adaptive Systems, p9)

(download)

Click here to download:

human-centered-design-and-complexity-part-1-oiIydrnIoedbhgiGjFzJ.zip (114 KB)

Modern business, which emerged out of the same Renaissance as the scientific method, was able to find ways to understand the complicated nature of their competitive space by trying to isolate pieces and simplifying. This worked well right through most of the 20^th century. With the introduction of network technologies, the internet, social systems that previously seemed almost manageable became nonlinear and difficult to dissect – they have become extremely complex.

So here enters Human Centered Design (aka Design Thinking). One explanation for HCD’s emergence in the mid 1980’s was the proliferation of skill sets that it takes to run a business and understanding that all these perspectives of understanding had to be integrated to create really good products.  All of these multiple silos from R&D, Marketing, Accounting, Finance to IT, Engineering, Packaging, Sales, etc. are needed to get a good product produced and to consumers. Some noticed that when all of these were present in a team and collaborated, the product typically was better and sold more.

The opposite side of that would say that to succeed in the marketplace, you need a holistic perspective in order to produce the better product. As the market continues to get more complex, knowing what to make becomes difficult. Or in broader terms the social behavior of consumers could no longer be easily reduced to its component parts. “One and one may well make two, but to really understand two we must know both the nature of ‘one’ and the meaning of ‘and’ ”. [Complex Adaptive Systems, p.3]

I believe HCD emerged because at a fundamental level, the practice of the designer -based on the nonlinear, the right brain and the intuitive, is better equipped (but by no means perfect) to deal with the meaning of “and”.

Design Research focuses on understanding humans as part of a much broader context of place, people, networks, etc. Typically the same person doing the research is the one designing.  This is key. The time spent in the field watching, interacting and understanding the full context of the target market creates a deep understanding and empathy. They are in effect creating indirect computational models – or constructed intuition. Where mathematical models and statistical analysis look to simplify and average, HCD looks to use the best nonlinear computer around, the human brain to synthesize complicated models of human interaction.

At some point the science of agent-based modeling will get to the point where it can be applicable to the daily problems of business the same way mathematical modeling and statistical analysis are presently. Until then, HCD is a humble but dependable stand-in

(Part 2 – Will look at what HCD can learn from the growing science of complex adaptive systems)

Here are three videos summarizing a session our group sponsored in the Grand Rapids community with the Keller Future's Center. We brought in LUMA Institute to facilitate a three day workshop to teach Human Centered Design to Students, Professors and Administrators as well as take on a key issue in our community: Transportation.

Day 1 was about Creating Empathy

Day 2 was about Creating Concepts

Day 3 was about Creating Tangible Prototypes

For the last ten weeks, we took over a floor in an old building and sequestered ourselves in order to figure out what we knew...

After three and half of years of doing projects we knew there was a lot of overlap, common themes - "if we only had the time to figure out what it all meant". So we stopped, put all projects on hold for 10 weeks and did a phase zero project - or as it is jokingly known as "Le Grande Synthesis".

Turns out we knew a lot and putting it together made it very powerful both for us as a group but also for the organization. After 10 weeks we walked away with four solid Growth Platforms that basically create a path to achieving our Strategic Growth Goals. It was a sign of maturation of the group, we had gone from a directional collection of projects to a highly organized and analyzed body of knowledge that we can apply into the organization. I am not sure an outside design firm could replicate this, not for lack of talent but none would have done over 14 projects contigiously and therefore have the knowledge of the projects to make a phase zero valuable.

So what is phase zero?

We first took all our projects from the past and dug out the boards. Reviewed each project all the way back to the original ethnographies or other research. This is why we needed a floor of a building - to lay out all our projects side by side and see what we knew.

(download)

Click here to download:

phase-zero-creating-growth-platforms-xJhujczBDewlzuhfCwvG.zip (27 KB)

From there we started to level up projects. Some of projects had gotten only to concept, others had a significant build out but had not yet been tested and then others have gone to Live Model Test. Different types of insight and understanding came out of each, to do solid analysis and synthesis meant doing some leveling.

We looked ahead into trends and scenarios to understand how things might continue to evolve and what environment our business model should expect to find itself in the next 10 to 15 years.

We also created a large competitive landscape, looking at substitutes, new entrants and rivals - learning there that others well outside our industry have come to offer viable substitutes which should concern us and yet remain mostly unrecognized by the organization.

Combining insights, foresight, hindsight and outsights - we were able to develop four strategic platforms which will enable the organization to question the present and start building the future.

Working on the final report-out

I think what I enjoyed most about 5X5 night was the focus on ideas – any old idea, didn’t have to be a business idea, or the next internet business model, just ideas.

(Looking out from the judge's table)

It is true great businesses come from ideas, but I have to say few great ideas come from established businesses. There is a reason for this – business from the field of business management – is about harnessing an already created idea and maximizing its value. Business is about monetizing an idea, creating an algorithm for efficient application of that idea to the world to be bought and sold.

(download)

Click here to download:

a-culture-of-ideas-and-5x5-night-ssgdbcgxCkgtwruyxIJr.zip (259 KB)

(photo credit: Paul Jendrasiak for GRNow)

This is great, don’t get me wrong, but you are not going to see a lot of amazing ideas come from business. There are whole sections in the bookstore discussing how hard it is for companies to innovate beyond their first good idea (I should know, I have read most of them). Their ideas are incremental around what they already do, few are willing to disrupt “what ain’t broke”.  No, the big ideas will be coming from individuals and groups of people with a passion beyond just monetary reward.  These will be the ideas that will change our communities.

I hope this effort becomes one of many places where ideas in Grand Rapids are discussed, debated and acted upon. To be a hub of design, we need more than just business thinking, we need lots of ideas, some of them great.

I talk to a lot of people who want to make their ideas into something more than just an idea. Getting from a scrap of an idea to a functioning business model is an exciting and treacherous path, well suited to the naïve and the bull-headed. Having started a few endeavors of my own, I think back to the blissful ignorance that I had at the beginning of each project and the hindsight that I have after everything is said in done: half of the things I thought would be a problem were not, and half the problems I had, I would never had known unless I tried it.

For someone with an idea, the main advice I give is to do two things:

·      Think about how you can prototype any and all aspects of your idea to test it out in real life,

·      Think about your business model, the whole system of things that need to come together to create a sustainable business

Prototyping

(Rough prototype service outline to be tried on potential consumers)

The sooner you try something out, the sooner you discover the problems you could have never predicted. It’s absolutely necessary to think through an idea, but often it can be just as productive to create rough estimations of your idea and just try it out, on yourself, and more importantly with others. At a corporate level, for new endeavors, you can’t just go to launch, I believe you have to do small tests. In our group we do live testing of our models whenever possible. This means creating a rough business system to test on as few as 6 people up to 30 or more.  For entrepreneur it could mean trying your product and service with different channels on a small scale to gauge reaction, or trying out different branding approaches, or product service offerings. Whatever it is, set up with the focus on learning instead of just getting it right. If it works the first time, someone else has probably figured it out and is making money on it.

Business model

(Best way to think about your model is the Business Model Generator)

So you have spent some time building out a good idea – what next? I would suggest thinking about your business model. I don’t want to sound all MBA and stuff, but innovation of the business model is where real value can be found. Think of Threadless – people have been making T-shirts for years, they just came up with a kick-ass model that sold t-shirts in whole different way. Thinking about the business model or system can push your idea to a whole new level.

How can you innovate on your supply chain? your channel? the way you brand? the networks you set up? the packaging? the way you advertise? etc.  How does your idea become a business? In my mind, it is when you have a model that emphasizes something different than the traditional players already in the market. You may sell something that everyone else has such as t-shirts, but do it differently to attract a new audience or a broader audience. A lot of the big companies that you see dominating the market, came from a business model innovation, not just a product innovation. Dell, Starbucks, McDonalds, Swatch, Sara Lee – companies most wouldn’t put in the innovative company bucket.

Between prototyping and thinking about your model, you can save yourself a lot of grief up front and get to something meaningful sooner, even if it is the discovery that your idea isn’t going to work and it is time to move to the next one. It’s all about learning.

Being in an “innovation” department in a large corporation, I keep an eye on the trends. Companies: Small, Medium and Large say they want innovation but this is only half-hearted. They need innovation to stay competitive and yet innovation ‘screws up’ the finely tuned engine that brings in the money, day by day.

There are two main perils that any innovation group has to maneuver to survive in a company. The most obvious is the internal immune system.  Any group that is developing significantly different ideas, especially business models will slowly be devoured by the white blood cells of the organization – the people and processes that say “you can’t do that” or “that won’t work” and will fight you tooth & nail to make sure you fail.

The white blood cells are there to protect the process that makes money – what Roger Martin might call the “algorithm” of the business.

One way to evade the immune system is to have an innovation group that works on projects as a partner, doing some of their work to help the organization overcome key challenges within the confines of the ‘algorithm’. Hopefully, the group still has time to do more radical things and insert them when possible into the broader, domesticated conversation. But, if you are not careful, there lies the other danger: Regressing towards the Mean.

Sorry to bring up a statistical term (from my past when I used to spend hours analyzing quantitative data) but it works here. Back in the 1880s an English gentleman by the name of Sir Francis Galton noted that, on average, the children of tall parents are shorter than their parents and the children of short parents are taller than their parents –there is a regression towards the mean.

Take the same principle and apply it to ideas. An innovation group’s focus should be in developing ideas that are unique to the customer and marketplace while being potentially profitable. But if the innovation group spends most of its time trying to solve challenges of the current business model (the mean), its ideas will tend to huddle there as well.  The groups reason for being, slowly erodes and you will find the group absorbed into the organization. And a year will go by and another “innovation” group will emerge. For this reason, companies, especially big ones, get out-maneuvered by start-ups who don’t have the baggage of success and have no choice but to create something new to the market, valuable to the customer and profitable enough to keep going.

Last week as a team we put the Business Model Generator to work. I got a group of eight together to go through our business model. For as well as we think we know our model, working on the canvas proved a challenge – mostly because we got too caught up in the detail and had a hard time abstracting our business up.

 It is easier for us to look at another business and see what their model is, then it is to break out of our own space to understand our own!

What did we learn? On the right hand side of the map – Customer Segment, Value Proposition – there was a lot of confusion. We spent a lot of time trying to clearly define our customers. As we clarified which segment we were talking about, it became clear how each piece of the canvas might change. It all depends who we focus on. More interesting is to map what we have currently to know who the de facto customer is!

The left side of the map was much easier to do.  Key Activities, Key Resources, Key Partners and Cost Structure are well defined in our company.  The Key Partners piece got us thinking about mapping some of our partners to better understand how their business and ours intersects.

So we mapped our business, now what?

We managed to map out one segment. We should map out all our key segments and see how they are different and how they overlap, especially when it comes to value proposition. What this does is it forces us to think critically about our model, how we make money and what are option are moving forward.

Once we are satisfied we understand our current business, the fun begins as we start showing how things we are working on either reinforce what we have but in new way, or change the model. If we can get people’s heads around the Canvas, we can really start to have some strategic conversations about what we have and where we want to go.

Afterall, business model innovation is about the discovery of different model options in our existing industry. We do this because it will ENLARGE the overall market - either by bringing new consumers into our space or encouraging the ones we have to be more engaged wih us.

Inadvertently we have become business model cartographers – let the explorations begin!

[If you haven’t already checked out: http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/  it's a great site and a great book]

Seems like you see it over and over again – previously successful companies that suddenly find themselves in situations struggling for relevancy or worse, survival. Basically if you are not trying to hack your current model, someone else probably is. Managing risk is as much about finding the next model as it is protecting what you have.

Last weekend’s NYT Business section had an interesting article about Zagat’s Restaurant Survey. Here’s a successful model that was slow to move into the digital age. Zagat should own the restaurant space online, instead there are plenty of competitors including Yelp and OpenTable. Zagat’s is not even on the first page of results.

To stay in the game, we all have to be trying new ideas, in this case how would Zagat’s model change and add value to the Restaurant experience with the advent of web and mobile tools– not just selection and review, but reservations, maps and rewards, etc. Probably should have been thinking about this circa 2002, not 2010.

Zagat’s had a great brand and product platform but didn’t seem to understand how to capitalize the internet/mobile world. All successful companies got to where they are with some form of good product. Finding the next great product or service may keep things going, but just as often new value comes from taking a current product platform and creating something much bigger.  Most would talk about Apple here, but how about Ford 150 trucks instead.

Ford has had great trucks for six decades, It is the best-selling vehicle in United States for 24 years and the best-selling truck for 34 years. But Ford saw a chance to transform the truck space and transformed the Ford 150 into a business platform with applications, services and hardware. The truck is an analog iTunes with multiple players with Rubbermaid, Home Depot, Sprint, Microsoft and others all using the platform. This puts the F-150 in totally different space – it’s no longer just a truck. They will keep putting out better trucks but to manage risk Ford looked to create something bigger of which the F-150 is the hub.

Managing risk sometimes means creating multiple models under one business. The Swatch Group is an interesting example. There was a point where Asian watch makers nearly wiped out Swiss watches. The Swatch Group (then known as SMH) decided to compete at the low, mid and luxury markets. To compete in the mass market, Swatch had to totally rethink both manufacturing but also the nature of the watch as low cost jewelry – a fashion statement. At the same time it produces Omega (James Bond’s watch) among other high-end brands with a totally different business model.

(download)

Click here to download:

business-innovation-is-the-enterprise-risk-management-strategy-HlEJDAAkucnbEnsscGey.zip (143 KB)

Instead of seeing risk management as a way to preserve what they have, these companies chose to manage their risk by innovating new products, platforms and models.

The projects that we are working on are about identifying risks to our model and finding ways to go through it. It’s not about replacing the golden goose but taking time to hatch goslings for the future growth. Poor management of risk is waiting until the current model is old and on its last legs to birth new ones. For one thing, it takes time to find a feasible and viable new model and then grow it to adulthood.

So how do you find the next model? The Human Centered Design mindset, skill set and toolset we use is designed to reduce risk – both in time, money and resources:

Understanding and empathizing with your target market helps increase the odds that what you develop will be relevant and inspire the customer or distributor to purchase.

Synthesis of mass amounts of data is about uncovering deep insights that help us create key principles. Most companies take data at surface value and move straight to implementation. Taking the time for synthesis is where the big ideas come from.

Concepting and Prototyping are about learning quickly, failing when it costs little, and iterating until you have a viable, feasible and desirable outcome. It costs X to fail with a rough prototype, it costs 10X with a finished prototype and 100X to modify or change a product after its launched.

Our practice of Live Prototyping to quickly iterate in a small, controlled setting is how we manage the risk of a new idea. By spending the time and money to test it on a small scale, we learn how to more quickly scale up. In the end it takes no more time to Live Prototype and get to scale, then to do a full scale launch with no live testing and having to fix things afterwards. It is NOT about ‘time to launch’, it’s about time to profitable model.  The metrics are on learning and creating value, not the core model metrics of a fully developed business.

In my mind, this is the nature of risk management in the ‘beta’ world we live and work in.

Why Typical Visioning Sessions Fail (or the Challenge of Imagining the Future in Public School Systems)

My wife and I currently have two children in the Grand Rapids Public School system and while our children have had mostly good experiences within GRPS, we believe they aren't being challenged to they degree they could or have the resources in the classroom that their suburban counterparts receive as part of their schooling. We are resisting private schools because they are overpriced for what they are delivering, and frankly we believe that the better public schools are as good for the price, and really do not want to move from our home on the Westside to go to a better resourced district.

Moreover, we watch the teachers within the system struggle to manage the affects of our City's core urban poverty. This, coupled with the limited resources make it nearly impossible to extend a meaningful learning environment in classrooms stretched to the max. While we've resigned to stay in the district, we hope that there are ways we collectively can offer our talents to help create schools the City needs for our future.

Many would agree with my statement that the current public school paradigm is stifling creativity in our children. Our children are taught – through a standardized framework – that that there is one right answer on that multiple choice test. Yet we know the world they are going into is so much more complicated. We are not equipping our children to think for themselves - there is often no one right answer, and the best answer may not have been created or imagined.

It is as if we have forgotten to trust our children to learn. Creativity in children comes from fostering a sense of wonder in learning and the encouragement and empowerment to solve problems that matter with the skills they are being taught. That said – there are very few things other than the alphabet and multiplication tables that are worth learning through rote. Yet that seems to be the direction we are heading. Forcing teachers “to teach to the test” has reduced the creative process to an afterthought. And ironically, creativity in schools continues to be hindered by the standardized approach used to improve our education system with so called “education reform.”

This Saturday I participated in a Grand Rapids Public Schools mini-visioning session as part of an effort to build their five-year strategic direction. I want to give credit to the GRPS for attempting to reach out to the community - it is appreciated. For as much concern and editorial blabber as there is over education, I was disappointed to see so many empty tables. I hope the other sessions are better attended! Parents, citizens need to step up. In my mind you can’t complain unless you get involved.

So what does this have to do with innovation? I encountered in this session the same shortcomings as in other organizations (profit, non-profit and gov’t) when it comes to generating something a new and better vision for the future. There seems to be a belief that innovation is a random act of mental lightening – the stereotypical light bulb suddenly appearing. Fundamentally, this is one of the reasons these sessions don’t result in much except for the reiteration of last year’s idea. Let me explain why.

Recall the last ‘visioning’ or ‘ideation’ session you may have participated in? Typically someone gets up and gives a summation PowerPoint of how the world is changing and the macro-trends shaping it. It is not complete with out the ‘rousing’ YouTube classic “Did You Know”. Followed immediately with an activity where participants are apparently supposed to readily come up something new. I see this often, where trends are shown but not contextualized to be relevant to the audience – in this case, citizens concerned about the Grand Rapids Public Schools. Trends don’t matter unless you make them real for the problem at hand!

I am surprised every time this happens – in so many other areas of life we are provided tools and processes that help us work through difficult or complex situations – and yet, something, say as important as the future generations of our country (our children) or the future of a company and its employees, we leave it to chance that people in the audience will be struck by the light bulb muse and deliver ideas that can drive to a new future. The more jaded will say that visioning sessions aren’t really for new ideas, its purpose is to get people to feel ownership and get alignment on ideas that the management team already has. I am not that jaded…

It’s easy to criticize but I would like to offer some suggestions. What could happen instead? Perhaps, on Saturday instead of moving immediately to getting feedback on what the school system should do, we could have worked together on the trends as a group to understand what they mean to us as parents and as a public school system. In place of overwhelming statistics such there as “will be more people in China speaking English than in the US in the near future” or “the pace of technology continues to speed up”, we could ask what the key trends are that we need to be thinking about to educate our children to compete in a global marketplace. Things such as:

·      What is the future of work? 

·      Where do we want our nation to play in the global economy?

·      What are employers looking for and thinking about as they try to hire for increasingly complex jobs?

·      What role will innovation and creativity play as we move away from the information age to the creative age?

·      What are the many possible futures being imagined by think-tanks and futurists – what skills would our children and our country need to thrive in these futur

 What are the Mindsets, Skill sets and Tool sets we will need to compete as well as to answer the growing issues around human sustainability in a world of limited resources?

A simple exercise to get would-be collaborators engaged would be a context map. Parents need to be create a good grasp of the situation, we don’t think about the future of education every day. A context map is a tool that is used to understand how external factors, trends and forces influence the issue at hand. It's a group activity where we build as a group our understanding. Once we have a systematic view of the external environment, parents would be better equipped to respond in more meaningful ways.

 Another approach I have used often when starting a visioning session is called ‘Cover Story’. The idea here is to think about an ideal future state – in this case – for our public school system. The idea is simple: imagine the best possible future for GRPS – in fact, it is so great that a national magazine has decided to put it on the cover – Time, Newsweek, Wired, Fast Company, you get the idea. The role of the collaborators in the room is to pretend this has already happened and been reported out in this high-profile article. We then work together to imagine a cover, the quotes, the big headline, the images and sidebars. Once this is done 30 minutes later – we get into new groups and work backwards. What would need to happen for this actually to occur. I like this exercise because it allows for big imagination but it’s also practical in figuring out what it would take to get from here to there, or in this case, from there to here.

 Until we take the time to parse out and understand why these massive changes are relevant to us in Grand Rapids in our context, saying things like ‘collaboration’, 'creativity' and ‘problem solving skills’ are not very meaningful. How do we implement collaboration if we don’t understand how collaboration fits into the context of children from Grand Rapids competing globally?

 By engaging the participants to imagine a future based on context they understand, I will guarantee the outcomes will be better. It won’t take any more time than the 3 hours I spent on Saturday but it will give a heck of a lot more information for the administration to work with. A collective story of the future put together by parents and concerned citizens could take GRPS to a new place. I don’t know about you but I am tired of short-cut thinking and a general lack of imagination. If we are not willing to take the time and effort to think this through and try innovative approaches to imagine our future, why should we expect children to take school seriously?