Avoiding Innovation Traps

Let’s face it: thinking is hard, tiring and time-consuming. But most people like to work on things that are easy, effortless and fast. It’s no wonder that when working on an innovation project, teams tend to take shortcuts, make snap judgments based on their preconceptions, and follow loose procedures. Sadly, such sloppy, biased and undisciplined thinking leads to poor results.

For that reason, at my company we have identified many of the ways that thinking can go wrong, which we call “innovation traps.” The design of our innovation method, which we use both internally and with our clients, helps avoid these traps.

Innovation traps include common cognitive biases (systematic errors in judgment, knowledge, and reasoning), information-processing shortcuts (heuristics), and non-compliance with best practices in systematic thinking. There are many such traps, so this column and the next will just hit the highlights.

Overconfidence

Overconfidence is thinking that you know more about a topic than you really do. Research shows that the less people know about a topic, the more confident they are in their judgments about it. Conversely, people who really know a topic are not overconfident in their judgments. Even Socrates, one of the ancient world’s greatest philosophers, toward the end of his life said, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.”

How to avoid this trap? Make an effort to become aware of what you don’t know about what you’re working on. We ask our innovation clients to make an “un-knowledge” list containing what they don’t know about their case. We also try to have more than one team working on a case, which leads to a more complete list of their knowledge gaps.

Confirmation bias

Another dangerous trap is confirmation bias. Rather than collecting information and then making a decision, people often first make the decision — sometimes unconsciously — and then collect information. The problem is that they seek out only data that supports the decision, and dismiss anything that undermines their judgment. For example, investors who bought subprime mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 financial crisis paid attention only to information that said it was a secure, high-yield investment.

How to avoid this trap? As with overconfidence, have at least two innovation teams work on a case in a friendly competition. Knowing that your ideas will be judged against others provides a powerful incentive to make sure your ideas are as good as they can be, and are based in reality.

Ease of recall

Is it more dangerous to drive a car, or ride in an airplane? People are more likely to be afraid when in an airplane, even though riding in a car is at least 72 times (and, depending on definitions, as much as 625,000 times) as dangerous as flying. Part of the reason for this mismatch between belief and reality is that vivid memories of events that are easily recalled, like spectacular airplane crashes, are seen as happening more frequently than they really do.

How to avoid this trap? Ease of recall means that you can’t just trust your intuition about the facts and numbers involved in your innovation case. Avoid this trap by verifying the facts and looking for supporting evidence.

Challenge ill-framing

Challenge ill-framing is the tendency to “frame” a challenge (a statement of the problem or case you’re working on) in an ineffective way. A good challenge is stated as a straightforward “How to?” question (e.g., “How to improve the innovativeness of our firm?”). Unfortunately, most challenge statements are ill-framed and suffer from mistakes like these: (a) They are not framed as a “How to?” question (“We must become more innovative”); (b) They include a solution, which limits ideas (“How to become more innovative by hiring only designers?”); and (c) They include the word “and” and are thus two or more challenges in one (“How to become more innovative and improve the profit margin?”).

How to avoid this trap? Take your time writing your initial challenge statement, and be ready to restate it as you find out more about your case. Before you settle on a final challenge statement, check it. A clean, crisp and concise final challenge statement is essential for doing good ideation and ensures that you get the right ideas for the right problem.

Poor ideation

Many ideation efforts lead to poor results because the ideators do not know, or do not comply with, the procedural ground rules that make for an effective ideation session. This leads to ideas that are too safe, too few, and too unproductive. In his 1953 book Applied Imagination, Alex Osborn introduced his four general rules of brainstorming. These rules ensure that you produce more, better and more original ideas.

How to avoid this trap? Before the start of ideation, review Osborn’s rules of brainstorming with all session participants. These rules are: 1. Defer judgment. No killing of ideas. 2. Go for quantity. Quantity breeds quality. 3. The wilder the better. 4. Combine and improve on ideas. During ideation, participants must make an effort to comply with these rules, and the facilitator must enforce compliance.

The first four innovation traps above are important mostly when exploring your problem or case; the last one comes to the fore when ideating. In the next column, we’ll discuss five more innovation traps that you must avoid when creating ideas, developing and evaluating them, and putting them into action.

Avoiding innovation traps (Part 1)