Web Directions

Unfortunately, we can­not guar­an­tee the accu­racy of this transcription.

Thank you. Good morn­ing. People in the back still awake back there? How many of you are morn­ing peo­ple? Raise your hand if I’m coher­ent to you. So I am not a morn­ing per­son, and that will be revealed in the next 45 min­utes. It is also – I’m work­ing to the dis­ad­van­tage that I’m an American, which is two prob­lems: One, it means I’m not very bright, but sec­ond, it means that it’s about 3:00 A.M. my local time, so 3:00 A.M. is not usu­ally a time when I’m try­ing to be artic­u­late and intel­li­gent. So what I’m going to do and try and wake myself up is I actu­ally have a very spe­cial story to tell you about this conference.

So I have a web­site, like many of you do, where I write things, and I try to be coher­ent, but I have a prob­lem, like many of you do, that my gram­mar is not always what my English teacher would hope it would be. So peo­ple some­times come by my web­site and they read a blog entry, and they leave me a note that says ‘Scott, you’ve spelled this wrong,’ or ‘It’s not “it’s” with an apos­tro­phe’ or some­thing like that. And I got one of these notes recently, about three or four weeks ago, and if the per­son is polite and they’re actu­ally very help­ful, I usu­ally respond and say ‘Thank you so much. I appre­ci­ate the help. Can I send you a copy of my book?’

So this hap­pened a few weeks ago. I sent her this email back say­ing ‘Thank you. Can I send you a copy of my book?’ and she was very flat­tered. She said ‘Yes, that would be great. The prob­lem is I’m really far away, I’m in Australia, so it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense for you to send the book that far.’ And I responded and I said, ‘Well, truly it’s kind of a small-​​world thing that you’re in Australia, because I’m going to be in Australia in two or three weeks. Ha ha – isn’t that funny?’ And she replies and says ‘Yeah, you know, actu­ally, I’m going to be in at a con­fer­ence in Sydney, Australia, and you’re the speaker at the con­fer­ence.’ And I replied to her and say ‘You know what? I’ll give you a copy.’ And she said ‘No, I’m a shy per­son, and I don’t think that you can find me at the conference.’

So my solu­tion, given that this is a keynote and hop­ing that she’s an early riser: Is Vicky Falkland here? Anybody see some­one stand­ing up? Vicky, come on up, please, let me give you the book.

[Applause]

Excellent, glad that worked out.

Now we got that out of the way I can actu­ally do my job and talk to you about inno­va­tion. So I’m going to talk to you aboutThe Myths of Innovation. The idea for this book and the idea of this talk is that we are very bad in the tech sec­tor under­stand­ing his­tory, and we repeat mis­takes all the time, again and again and again. And you don’t notice this when you are young in the indus­try – when you are 21, 22, 25, and you’re doing every­thing new for the first time and you think every­thing in the past [is] to be for­got­ten and ignored, because what you are doing is so new.

And that was my expe­ri­ence. Working on Internet Explorer in the mid-’90s I felt like we were doing stuff that had never been done before. And then by the time I got older, I’m now 35 years old, by the time I got older I recog­nised [that] I’d seen in my own career the rep­e­ti­tions of cer­tain kinds of mis­takes when you came to think about inno­va­tion. So the book is an attempt to go back through his­tory and use his­tory – the truth of his­tory, not the mythol­ogy, not the leg­endary sto­ries, but the truth of his­tory – as a guide for help­ing us all thing about how we actu­ally do cre­ative work today. So that’s what I’m going to talk to you about.

The first leg­end I want to talk to you about is this guy – how many peo­ple know who this is? Isaac Newton. Can any­one in the front row tell me what the 10-​​second ver­sion of the story is? He saw an apple fall and dis­cov­ered grav­ity. How many of you have heard this story before? About 70% of you, 80% of you. Now, this is prob­a­bly the great­est leg­end in all the world when it comes to think­ing about dis­cov­er­ing inno­va­tion and inven­tion. And the sad part of the story is that it is not true. I know that breaks many of your hearts because you base your life on these apple sto­ries, but it’s not true.

The true part of the story is this. Sir Newton, very late in his life, after he had been world-​​famous, he had a biog­ra­pher come [who] wanted to write a story of his life. And the biog­ra­pher was press­ing him and was ask­ing him ‘Hey, how do you come up with your ideas? Where do they come from? What it is that you do?’ And Isaac Newton was a cur­mud­geonly mad-​​scientist kind of guy. He prob­a­bly was not a very easy to inter­view. And what Newton did say at the end of that inter­view was he offered an anec­dote – he was intend­ing to offer the story as an anecdote.

And he said: He may have when he was younger looked out a win­dow out to the tree grove in his back­yard, and if he saw an apple fall, he may have asked the ques­tion, ‘Well, why does it fall? Why did it fall at that rate of speed? Why did it fall at that angle?’ and asked all kinds of ques­tions like that.

And he was intend­ing, as best as I can tell, to try to sug­gest a thought process – ask ques­tions, be curi­ous, not to take things for granted. But the nugget of the story was so pow­er­ful that that nugget lives on much longer than the rest of the biog­ra­phy did. And another writer named Voltaire, an inno­v­a­tive writer in the French Enlightenment, he took that part of the story, the apple-​​falling part – all the con­di­tions [Newton] may have seen 20 years ago, the con­di­tions went out the win­dow, and Voltaire used this story as a way to help high­light the work of Newton, to help pro­mote the idea of enlight­en­ment, the new sci­en­tific age.

Then 50 years went by, and another writer took an even smaller part of the story and mod­i­fied it. Instead of ‘Newton had pos­si­bly seen an apple fall in his back­yard,’ the story then became ‘Newton was actu­ally under the tree and it hit him on the head.’ And that’s the story that we know. That’s the story that’s told again and again, cer­tainly in American car­toons. This story comes up again and again and again.

Now, this is a pat­tern here that is played out in many dif­fer­ent leg­ends and mytholo­gies about inven­tion and inno­va­tion. And the pat­tern is called the myth of epiphany – the idea there’s a sin­gu­lar moment in time that is the pow­er­ful moment, that that is the moment when some­thing was cre­ated or born or brought into the world. So in the story, Newton is the vic­tim or the pas­sive par­tic­i­pant in a moment of epiphany – he is struck by the apple and that’s where the dis­cov­ery of grav­ity came from.

Now, Newton was alive in the late 1700s. Now, how many peo­ple think that we didn’t know about grav­ity before 1700? That’s the story; we like to believe that some­how there was a sin­gle moment in time when grav­ity was all of a sud­den all at once dis­cov­ered, as if up until no one knew what would hap­pen if you put some­thing down. That would be a sur­prise. So that’s a pat­tern that played out: It’s the sin­gu­lar moment. Before that moment there is noth­ing; after that moment there is everything.

I’m actu­ally only going to talk to you about three myths today. I’m going to talk some more about the myth of epiphany. I’m going to talk to about the his­tory of inno­va­tion and some of the things that we are not really told and we kind of ignored. And the last thing – which is prob­a­bly most impor­tant to you, because many of you are devel­op­ers and design­ers and inno­va­tors your­self – the mythol­ogy around how peo­ple respond to innovation.

So another famous story fit­ting on this myth of epiphany, if there is a sin­gu­lar moment, involves this guy Archimedes. How many peo­ple know a story about Archimedes in the bath­tub, any­body? Can any­one give me the 10-​​second ver­sion of the bath­tub story? He said ‘Eureka!’ and jumped out of the bath. Asked to mea­sure the amount of gold.

Most of the time I do a lot of pub­lic speak­ing and talk about inno­va­tion a lot. Most peo­ple remem­ber bath­tub and some­one run­ning through the streets naked yelling ‘Eureka!’ Those are the two parts peo­ple remem­ber – very few remem­ber what it was that he actu­ally dis­cov­ered. So Archimedes was a rock-​​star/​innovator/​inventor guy. He was sort of like da Vinci, but he was 1500 years ear­lier than da Vinci. This was early Roman-​​era time. And the king asked Archimedes, as the rock-​​star creative-​​thinker guy, he said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this prob­lem. I got this gift from another king­dom, this gold crown. I don’t trust this king – I don’t believe this crown is gold. I want you, Archimedes, to deter­mine if it is actu­ally made of gold or not.’

And Archimedes said, ‘Yeah, I can do that, no prob­lem – I’m Archimedes. They’re going to be talk­ing about me at web-​​development con­fer­ences 2000 years from now, so I can take care of it.’ But it was actu­ally really dif­fi­cult. No one had ever done this before. So he spent a lot of time – we don’t really know how much time, but a lot of time – com­ing up with dif­fer­ent ways to try to solve the prob­lem. And he kept fail­ing, could not find a solu­tion. One day he gets into the bath­tub, and we assume he gets in the bath­tub as a kind of stress relief – he’s try­ing to escape the prob­lem for a lit­tle while – and notices that when he puts his arm or leg into the water, that the water dis­places equal to the vol­ume of his arm. Now he knows the vol­ume of something.

If you know the vol­ume of some­thing and the weight of some­thing, you can com­pute its den­sity. And he knew that gold and lead had dif­fer­ent den­si­ties, he could tell them apart and he could have an answer for his crown. That’s the true part of the story, that’s the part that most peo­ple for­get, and I’m sure you’ll just remem­ber naked person/‘Eureka!’ By the way, ‘eureka’ is the Greek word for ‘I have found it, I have done it’; that’s why he was say­ing that when he ran through the streets.

Now, this story plays on the same mytholo­gies, in that we know this sin­gu­lar moment when some­thing hap­pens. The story is pow­er­ful because it lets us believe there’s a sin­gu­lar moment. The bath­tub is the pow­er­ful thing: When he got into the bath­tub, some­thing mag­i­cal hap­pened that we can­not describe; it’s mag­i­cal, it’s some­thing out­side of us.

Now back to the Newton story briefly, in the Newton story, the mythol­o­gised ver­sion, Newton is under the tree, apple falls and hits him on the head, and that’s the dis­cov­ery of grav­ity. Now, in that ver­sion of the story, who is the pro­tag­o­nist? The apple. What’s Newton doing? Nothing. Newton is lying down, he’s like a slacker guy, he’s chill­ing out, apple hits him on the head, now he gets the idea. So all the myths of epiphany that you have ever heard about acci­den­tal occur­rences, about momen­tary break­through, all of a sud­den some­body got an idea they’ve never had before, they played on the notion that some­how all ideas are exter­nal to us, that there is a muse out there that is myth­i­cal and mag­i­cal, and if we are lucky, we’ll be blessed by it.

But if we are not lucky, then it’s not our fault – the bur­den of being inno­v­a­tive or inven­tive is not on us. And that’s part of why these myths of epiphany are so per­va­sive and so pow­er­ful, is because they com­fort us. They are enter­tain­ing, they are acci­den­tal, they are funny. And they make it seem like Newton didn’t spend, I don’t know, his entire life ask­ing ques­tions about sci­ence, didn’t spend his entire life doing exper­i­ments try­ing to solve prob­lems, it dis­counts all the things that we don’t want to admit to our­selves are true, about how real cre­ative work happens.

Now there’s lots of research that’s been done in the last 30 or 40 years about what’s really going on in our brains when we have a new idea, what’s the cre­ative process like inter­nally. This is stuff that peo­ple like Archimedes and Newton didn’t have access to, but we have access to it now. So one of the goals of the book was to try to take all this infor­ma­tion and dis­til that into these mytholo­gies and try to break them apart.

So we like to think of ideas as these dis­crete things, that they are things that you can hold, and if only we could get a big pile of them and keep them together in our office, when­ever we need one we could pull one out, and now we have an epiphany and it’d be great. We like to think of it that way, these dis­crete units of things. But the truth of the psy­chol­ogy, all the psy­cho­log­i­cal research that has been done, is that we know the best way to think about what goes on in our mind, is much more of a pat­tern sys­tem. There’s a process of thoughts, many of which are dis­carded and dis­counted, but [they] lead you in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion that even­tu­ally leads you to some­thing that is a bet­ter idea that you could have thought of oth­er­wise. It’s much more of a process of feel rather than a dis­crete indi­vid­ual idea.

Any per­son who sits down at their desk and says ‘I’m going to have a break­through now’ is guar­an­teed to fail. Because that’s not really using the process of the way we under­stand the cog­ni­tive processes, how they work. A much bet­ter approach is ‘I have to solve a prob­lem. I’m going to pick a really hard prob­lem and allow my brain to focus on that prob­lem and try out dif­fer­ent things against that prob­lem, and if I’m lucky, or if I’m cre­ative, I’ll come up with a cre­ative solu­tion to a problem.’

But I’m not think­ing break­through, I’m not think­ing epiphany. In fact, most of the peo­ple, all the leg­ends you know of – da Vinci, the Google founders, the Flickr folks, any­one you know of – very few of them actu­ally even use the word inno­va­tion. They just have a prob­lem they want to solve, and it hap­pens to be a hard prob­lem that can­not be solved con­ven­tion­ally, so they have to go out of the maps to come up with a way to solve it.

So all the sto­ries that we tell, most of the myths, the stuff that shows up in films, is the top part of the pyra­mid – we focus on the moment when it was fin­ished, or when the idea was com­plete in someone’s mind. But if you pick any idea, any­thing, any tech­nol­ogy, any cre­ative move­ment in any field, and you’ll always find there’s this much larger pyra­mid of work, fairly ordinary-​​looking work that makes those epiphany moments possible.

Another anec­dote: The tele­phone was invented in the late 1800s by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson. Does any­one know a story about the inven­tion of the tele­phone? Most Americans when I ask them they know the story, I guess there must have been a TV com­mer­cial or some­thing that used it at some point, but the thing was ‘Alexander Graham Bell said “Watson, come here. I need you.” ’ That’s the phrase that most Americans know, that’s the only story they know about the inven­tion of the tele­phone – that’s it, that’s the one.

There’s one bit of knowl­edge that peo­ple know about this great inven­tion, that’s the one they know, which is com­pletely use­less. You can’t do any­thing with that, it doesn’t help you invent any­thing else new. So most of the sto­ries that we know about these momen­tary dra­matic events, and if you want to be an inno­va­tor, you want to be a cre­ator, you have to unravel those things and look what hap­pened before, what hap­pened 10 min­utes before that moment, 20 min­utes, an hour, a day, a week.

Interesting: I men­tioned the word ‘inno­va­tion’ before, one of the things I did in this book was I know I had my own knowl­edge from study­ing inno­va­tion as some­one who had tried to do it, but I wanted to involve as many peo­ple as I could in the process of under­stand­ing inno­va­tion for writ­ing about it in the book. So I did this sur­vey ask­ing about the word ‘inno­va­tion,’ ask­ing them what the word meant. And this is an exam­ple to me of how you know a word is a kind of a trashy word, a word that shouldn’t be used very much, when you sur­vey 100 peo­ple there’s a very wide dis­tri­b­u­tion of answers to the question.

You’ll notice that on the web some peo­ple like the sar­cas­tic answers, about 2% said, ‘Yes, I’ll tell you. I know what inno­va­tion is, but I won’t tell you.’ Similar, a high dis­tri­b­u­tion of qual­ity of answers, when I asked peo­ple what the great­est inno­va­tor in his­tory was, Thomas Edison scored very high, da Vinci very high. Steve Jobs, believe or not, scored almost 10% on the sur­vey. But again, by and large here more than 50% said it was some­one other than the peo­ple that I listed. That’s a good indi­ca­tor that the word is not very use­ful. The word ‘inno­va­tion’ is not that use­ful to such a wide dis­tri­b­u­tion on how it’s applied or what it means.

One rec­om­men­da­tion to you, about 20 min­utes in in this his­tory les­son: The less you use the word ‘inno­va­tion,’ the more likely you are to actu­ally do it – I guar­an­tee you. If ever you are in a meet­ing where the word inno­va­tion is used once every 30 sec­onds, you are in big trou­ble. You are in big trou­ble, because that means it’s being used for all kinds of dif­fer­ent mean­ings that are not being clar­i­fied. So when peo­ple want to pose as inno­va­tors or cre­ators, they use that word a lot. You can count in press releases and ads, it’s almost always a mistake.

Talking about his­tory, you can dig up in almost any field, break­throughs in almost any field, in sci­ence, med­i­cine, the arts, and you’ll find these sto­ries of inno­va­tion are much more ordi­nary than we like to admit. So this is a pic­ture of a book calledThe Double Helix, which is writ­ten by Watson and Crick, who are the two main researchers on the DNA project in the 1940s. And the book is really short. I rec­om­mend it because it gives you a con­text, as a devel­oper or as a designer, as to what inno­va­tion is actu­ally like.

Now, these guys – we think of sci­ence as this water­mark of rigour and dis­ci­pline, that things are done with a spe­cific pur­pose and there are for­mu­las for every­thing, you go and you fol­low, and it’s very clear what to do next. But read­ing this book, it’s largely a series of hunches that are being fol­lowed and exper­i­ments that are being done with­out the sup­port of the senior peo­ple in the field. They were seen as mav­er­icks, they were seen as peo­ple who did not really par­tic­i­pate in sci­ence, because they were pur­su­ing some­thing that most peo­ple had rejected.

So you can read books like this or sto­ries like this, true sto­ries, and you’ll find that they fol­low hunches, they make mis­takes, they do stu­pid things, but they per­sist, and that’s where the largest thing is going to lead the pos­si­bil­ity of a break­through – they per­sist in spite of all the things that most of us are told and stop, they per­sist anyway.

The other part of the mythol­ogy of inno­va­tion – many of the great exam­ples in Western cul­ture about great­ness and great engi­neer­ing came from the Romans. We have these great sto­ries because we know there are all these build­ings that are there in Rome, they are still stand­ing up, the aque­ducts still work, they can still take hot baths. The sys­tem of engi­neer­ing that was built 2500 years ago, that still works. But we can’t build stuff for more than a month with­out it falling apart, they built stuff that lasted that long. So we like to mythol­o­gise the Romans as if they were these per­fect builders, these great engineers.

The dif­fi­cult part of the story for us to con­sider is this fact – all the crappy build­ings that they built, fell down. We don’t see those. They’re not around for us to com­pare to the good ones. Many Roman build­ings fell down, they took all the mate­ri­als, and they put them into other build­ings. There was sev­eral huge Roman fires, when Nero was emperor which I think was late first cen­tury AD or sec­ond cen­tury, two-​​thirds of Rome burned down.

Now, if you’re build­ing great struc­tures in mar­ble, mar­ble does not burn. They were build­ing out of other mate­ri­als – they were build­ing out of wood. So we have some evi­dence – there isn’t a great deal of evi­dence, there is some evi­dence – that a lot of the con­struc­tion they did was really bad. Most of the city of Rome – we believe the pop­u­la­tion of Rome was some­where between two-​​thirds of a mil­lion and a mil­lion and a half – most of that pop­u­la­tion was in slums. All the movies that we see in the West – the mod­ern movies, the great HBO series which I love, which is fan­tas­tic, which was on recently – we see mostly the mar­ble Rome, the orgy-​​and-​​buffet Rome, where every­one is run­ning around hav­ing a great time with fan­tas­tic wealth.

And those sto­ries are true, [but] that’s for a very small minor­ity of the pop­u­la­tion. Most peo­ple lived in build­ings like these, which were effec­tively slums. They were noto­ri­ous for falling down, for burn­ing down, for crash­ing into other build­ings. The mythol­ogy of Romans as great builders is true to the extent that some­times they made great things, but most of the time, most things they made were very poor. And that was how they learned, they learned by mak­ing those mistakes.

Now, the last story I’ll tell about these mis­take mak­ings, has to do with one other exam­ple,Apollo 13, which was a fan­tas­ti­cally pop­u­lar film, at least in the United States. And this plays on another kind of mythol­ogy. This is the sequestering-​​of-​​disaster mythol­ogy. So all the sto­ries about the space age in the United States, most of them are told from the per­spec­tive of every­thing went well, we got to the moon, we orbited the planet, we made a space sta­tion, we did all these great things. This story is about every­thing going wrong. It’sApollo 13, so every­thing is sup­posed to go wrong, right, to make sure this fan­tas­tic drama.

But the seques­ter­ing of problem-​​solving, the seques­ter­ing of fac­ing dead ends and hav­ing to over­come them, it’s made OK only because it’s a dis­as­ter. It helps pro­mote the idea that all the other mis­sions, the other 15 or 14 Apollo mis­sions, they all went com­pletely smoothly, which is not true. In fact no one died in Apollo 13, but there were sev­eral fatal­i­ties in test mis­sions well before they ever got off the ground.

So a bet­ter story to think about is the his­tory of the space race, the his­tory of NASA, the his­tory of the Apollo mis­sion, is to look at the rate of fail­ures to suc­cesses – the num­ber of rock­ets that were launched off of a launch pad, the num­ber of rock­ets com­pared to the ones that actu­ally got into space. And that ratio is very poor. And that on pur­pose – they did this on pur­pose. Every mis­sion was intended to fail in some way, so they could learn some­thing new, so the next mis­sion would have a slightly higher chance of being suc­cess­ful. That’s really the true story of the space race. And sto­ries like this tend to dis­tract us from the neces­sity of mis­take mak­ing, and the neces­sity of deal­ing with dif­fi­cult situations.

So it’s inter­est­ing to think about the mod­ern day, what are the suc­cesses and what are the fail­ures that we are mak­ing right now, and what are we doing to learn from them. So I saw this in the hand­out, which I think is a great lit­tle tool, but it does raise the ques­tion why, if we think we are so great at inven­tion and inno­va­tion, why is it so hard to send a {TK}privy piece of email? Why is it so hard? We think we have pro­gressed in all these fan­tas­tic ways, we’ve made the world bet­ter, and our tech­nol­ogy is so supe­rior, but then we see things like this, that are clearly arti­facts of the com­plex­i­ties that we have cre­ated for our­selves. So clearly we are not get­ting it all right, we are still doing things wrong today.

Let’s talk about under­stand­ing his­tory. So this bath­tub story that I men­tioned to you, this Archimedes story of the bath­tub, this story it comes from a book, a book calledTen Books on Architecture by Vitruvius. Now this book is prob­a­bly the first par­alan­guage book in the west – it is a book writ­ten by a Roman archi­tect, and he was try­ing to doc­u­ment all the patterns.

He knew pat­terns for archi­tect­ing – how do you make a col­umn? how do you apply the Golden Ratio? – did all this series of lit­tle nuggets of infor­ma­tion you would need if you were try­ing to be an archi­tect. Back then – this was in first-​​century Rome – the pub­lish­ing indus­try wasn’t quite where it is today. The only peo­ple who could pub­lish were peo­ple who had enough money, and they had a lot of con­trol over what they put in their books. So while the books, includ­ing this one, are not strictly about the topic that’s sug­gested in the title.

So this book talks about con­struc­tion, con­struc­tion and my reli­gion beliefs, con­struc­tion and con­struc­tion kind of women I find attrac­tive, con­struc­tion con­struc­tion – it goes in all these dif­fer­ent places. But one of the places that it does go is to talk about Archimedes. So for us, at least for me, I know grow­ing up, there was always this ten­sion in school between the jocks and the geeks, it was this cul­ture dif­fer­ence, there was always some ten­sion between them. And appar­ently that was true even for Vitruvius. So there was a sec­tion in the book where he just all of sud­den, he was talk­ing about how to mix con­crete or some­thing, and all of a sud­den he starts talk­ing about how – I’m going to para­phrase this, but this will be pretty close – how the works of the mind out­last the works of the body. And he thinks of him­self as a worker of the mind, that his ideas and his con­cepts will live on for­ever, because they’re intel­lec­tual, whereas the war­riors and the Olympians, their stuff is very short-​​term.

And he has this philo­soph­i­cal rant, and he fol­lows it up by telling the story of Archimedes, and he tells the story fol­low­ing that, he says ‘Archimedes goes in the bath­tub’ blah blah blah, ‘and this is a great inven­tion for all of us to ever know how to dis­cover gold; this is proof of my the­ory that the mind is greater than the body.’ It lit­er­ally takes up maybe half a page of the book. That is the source of the Archimedes story that 70% of you know.

We don’t have any other his­tor­i­cal records. There’s no news­pa­per – Rome Today – there’s no other way for us to know, [no] patent for his dis­cov­ery that we can ref­er­ence what date was it done, there was noth­ing. That is the story. And that’s the story that gets passed on again and again, because we like it. And we like to think, OK, 2000 years ago, wow, he had plenty of time to research that and prove that those facts are true. No. In many cases the his­tory we believe in, we have a foun­da­tion upon, is not any more accu­rate than the gos­sipy, myth-​​telling tale the PR com­pa­nies do for us today.

Let’s do a hypo­thet­i­cal. Let’s assume for a sec­ond that we are work­ing together on a project with the goal being inno­v­a­tive. We have this chart here, and we have a pro­to­type. We make a pro­to­type that we think is going to change the world in some way, we have some great new idea. The first thing that gets dis­counted by his­tory when we look back­ward are all the fac­tors that have noth­ing to do with design abil­ity or engi­neer­ing abil­ity. We dis­count all these fac­tors almost imme­di­ately while we mythol­o­gise how inven­tion takes place. The role of busi­ness, polit­i­cal, tim­ing, what the eco­nom­ics were, what was going on in the world – there are all kinds of fac­tors, believe it or not.

A news event could hap­pen today that ren­ders all the work that you and I do most irrel­e­vant. If there was a power short­age in Australia, for three months there was no elec­tric­ity, well, all of us would be look­ing for some­thing else to do. And inno­va­tion would cease to hap­pen. No mat­ter how bril­liant or tal­ented any of you were or are. Put that aside. There are all these fac­tors we discount.

Let’s say we’re able to – on our own, we sur­vive, there’s no power short­age, where we invent a new kind of power to sup­port our­selves, we’ve got more pro­to­types, we’ve got more peo­ple involved because they see what we’re doing and it’s kind of inter­est­ing, they come on board. And they come on board and we develop a fol­low­ing. This group of peo­ple are now try­ing to inno­vate in the same direc­tion, we have this group that’s build­ing. And all of a sud­den we’re start­ing to see some­thing is hap­pen­ing, we’re mak­ing this new thing, this new par­a­digm, we’re doing Web 6.0, we’ve got some­thing that we’re doing, that we believe and we think is happening.

And all of a sud­den peo­ple start writ­ing about it, and there are blog­gers who are say­ing, ‘Yeah, this thing is hap­pen­ing. It started at the Web Directions con­fer­ence and it’s going on and it’s going really well. And it’s going to be the future.’ Now, if we were to fol­low the pat­tern, the largest per­cent­age of pat­terns involv­ing inno­v­a­tive projects, what would hap­pen next would be this. Nothing. Nothing would hap­pen. Because most of the time, if you’re doing some­thing inno­v­a­tive, that means there is risk involved, because you are doing some­thing new, you are doing some­thing dif­fer­ent, you are going to a place that other peo­ple have not gone yet, and you don’t know for sure what will be there. So most projects that have the goal of inno­va­tion in them fail, prob­a­bly in the order of some­where between 60% and 80% – I’m mak­ing up a num­ber, but it’s very larger.

The prob­lem, though, regard­ing his­tory, is those sto­ries don’t get books writ­ten about them. They don’t make it to the head­line news. They don’t make the fea­ture film, because those sto­ries don’t play on the mytholo­gies we like to believe in. They don’t play on those, so we dis­count them. So there’s this huge story about his­tory that the true sto­ries of his­tory very rarely get told, because they don’t fit the sto­ries we want to hear.

This involves this guy. Believe it or not, I am going to make this segue work. So Captain Kirk, star­shipEnterprise,Star Trek. This is the only mod­ern myth, the only mod­ern leg­end that we have for explo­ration. And if you were to ask me to make an anal­ogy between inno­va­tion and some other pur­suit, explo­ration would be eas­ily be the right one. Exploration is all the same vari­ables, going to new places, tak­ing on risks, doing uncer­tain things. What explor­ers are sup­posed to be doing, is they’re sup­posed to look at the map and there’s all this good stuff on the map that we’ve already drawn, then there’s a black spot on the map, and they say ‘I want to go there, that’s where I want to go. And not only do I want to go there, I’m going to go there and I’m going to find cool stuff and I’m going to bring it back.’

That’s what explor­ers say. That’s pretty much what inno­va­tors say. They say: Yeah, it’s never been done before. That’s why I want to go there. And I’m so con­fi­dent about my own abil­i­ties or about my idea, I’m going to go to the black spot on the map and I’m going to bring some­thing of value back.

That’s what explor­ers do. The prob­lem, though, is that this guy didn’t really do that. We like to think that he did, but he didn’t. There are all these con­trivances in mak­ing a tele­vi­sion show that affect how you tell the story of explo­ration. First thing, most explor­ers spend most of their time not doing very much, wan­der­ing the ocean. They’re on the black spot on the map. There’s not that much there. They don’t know; they’re wan­der­ing around.

In his case, he had this lit­tle thing called warp drive. Start the episode, no wan­der­ing, there at the planet. Nothing inter­est­ing on the planet, go to the next planet. It’s tele­vi­sion, it’s about speed of nar­ra­tive, it’s not about edu­ca­tional accu­racy or try­ing to con­vey a sense of what explo­ration is truly like.

Same thing for the trans­porter, all these things that are con­trivances of that nar­ra­tive to try to tell a bet­ter television-​​show story, not to tell you the story of inno­va­tion. So if you did up – if you’re look­ing for a way to cross­breed your sense of inno­va­tion, I highly rec­om­mend look­ing at explor­ers and their history.

This pic­ture of Magellan – what did Magellan do? Circumnavigating the planet. The truth is he didn’t. He died about halfway around the world; he didn’t make it. Again the one thing that we know about this guy is not true. The truth is they wan­dered, they made mis­takes, they had to dou­ble back, there was sev­eral mutinies. Magellan was Portuguese, and he was hired by the Spanish Empire. The Spanish and Portuguese didn’t like each other that much then. So he was a Portuguese cap­tain of a Spanish crew. You’re going to travel around the world for two years. All kinds of things went wrong in the story that we don’t usu­ally hear about.

Captain Cook – which is a story many of you should prob­a­bly know, because it has a lot to do with why we’re all here. Captain Cook was an explorer. He also died – died some­where in the Philippines, Fiji, some­where around there. Hawaii? OK, closer to my turf, but good enough.

So my point is explo­ration involves risk and fail­ure. Most explor­ers of this era, we don’t know their names. There’s dozens and dozens of explo­rations that were just as notable when they started as Magellan and Cook, but they didn’t make it back, they failed, they got lost, they died, who knows what hap­pened to them. The his­tory does not tell those sto­ries. So we have a bias towards believ­ing in the mythol­ogy, that the rates of suc­cess are much higher and more mys­ti­cal than they actu­ally are. So my chal­lenge to you, my sec­ond chal­lenge to you, besides not using the word ‘inno­va­tion,’ my sec­ond chal­lenge to you is pick any inven­tion, any one, from the pro­jec­tor that is pro­ject­ing this screen, to your lap­top, the first cell­phone, the first com­puter mouse, any­thing that you use that was invented at some point. I chal­lenge you to spend a half-​​hour look­ing up the his­tory of the ori­gin of that idea, and I guar­an­tee you it will be way more inter­est­ing and way more famil­iar to you, famil­iar to your own prac­tice and work, that you thought pos­si­ble. And that’s the con­nec­tion I’m hop­ing to make in this book and in this talk – that we have con­nec­tions to these peo­ple who invent that are much more hum­ble than the ones that are pro­jected to us by the mythol­ogy. If you want to inno­vate, you want to make those connections.

Getting back to our story. Let’s take a more pos­i­tive spin, let’s assume that our story is going to work out. We’re work­ing on a project together, we make some pro­to­types, have some suc­cess, it becomes a move­ment, there are peo­ple behind us, some­thing is hap­pen­ing, they start talk­ing about some­thing is hap­pen­ing. And then it hap­pens. We have this break­through that is very vis­i­ble, and all of a sud­den we solve a prob­lem that’s never been solved before, and more peo­ple are now using this thing and they’re imple­ment­ing it, and now it’s suc­cess­ful. It’s what­ever we hoped it would achieve. It has been achieved.

And some­thing very strange hap­pens. If you look at the his­tory, which I’ve done, of an inven­tion, and the way peo­ple talked about the inven­tion before the break­through moment, and in the way they talk about it after, it’s entirely dif­fer­ent. In the begin­ning of the story, our story was a story of uncer­tainty, we were a bunch of wacko peo­ple doing stuff that’s off the map. ‘What are they doing? They’re crazy. They’re wast­ing their time.’ Once it hap­pens, now it gets mythol­o­gised, and jour­nal­ists start ask­ing ‘What was the break­through moment? Were you in the bath­tub? Did you get hit by an apple? Where were you when you first thought of…’ Now it becomes a story that they want to tell, because it’s not their fault nec­es­sar­ily – those are the sto­ries that most peo­ple want to hear, the mag­i­cal moments.

So if you look at his­tory, look at his­tory from a designer’s point of view. Let’s say we were try­ing to design a way to tell his­tory. A time­line is a very com­pressed, effec­tive way to con­vey a lot of infor­ma­tion all at once. So most of his­tory – at least the way it’s taught in America – most of his­tory is a series of time­lines that you’re expected to mem­o­rise, or to under­stand the tra­jec­tory: How did A hap­pen? That led to B, that led to C, that led to D.

That’s use­ful if you’re going for vol­ume. If you are study­ing for a high-​​school his­tory exam, it’s usu­ally what you want to do, you want to get as much under­stand­ing of the broad land­scape as pos­si­ble. But this tells you very lit­tle about the indi­vid­ual story. It makes it all seem very cer­tain and pre­or­dained. It makes it seem like one day Alexander Graham Bell woke up, and he just went ‘Oh, it’s time for me to be famous. 1876! Got to go do the “famous” thing. I’ll fill out the patent and I’ll be famous and I’m done.’

That’s all this tells us. The moment in time hap­pened, fol­lowed by another moment in time. It’s use­ful if you’re look­ing to mem­o­rise the whole con­text, but not very use­ful if you’re look­ing to try to be some­one who ends up in this time­line. The time­line is not a use­ful way to under­stand how to get on the timeline.

The same thing for these kinds of his­tory dia­grams; this is more like a graph­i­cal time­line, you’re try­ing to under­stand how are these things con­nected together, and instead of being lin­ear, we’re now going to be graph­i­cal, and show how these things are interdependent.

This is actu­ally some­thing my pub­lisher put together; it’s the his­tory of pro­gram­ming lan­guages. As a designer, it’s a pretty impres­sive piece of work, to put all this together and com­pre­hend it all, to show it visu­ally in a way that other peo­ple can com­pre­hend – a very dif­fi­cult thing to do. However, the effect of this is very sim­i­lar to that effect of this, in that it makes it seem like it is all pre­or­dained, because this view, really if you think about it, this is like the view of God. This is like ‘I see every­thing, and I can see how to put things together.’ And no one who ended up on this dia­gram actu­ally had the ben­e­fit of this dia­gram to help them fig­ure out how to get on it. They were just work­ing at a prob­lem, like I said before; they were try­ing to solve a problem.

So one of the fail­ings of this dia­gram [is] if you spend too much time try­ing to think of his­tory from this per­spec­tive, it allows you to make cer­tain unfair assump­tions. So Object Pascal – any­body here ever pro­grammed an Object Pascal? This allows us to believe that the guy who sat down and designed Object Pascal, when he sat down, he was just think­ing ‘You know, I’m only going to be an inch and a half on this dia­gram – that’s it. That’s my future, Object Pascal. I’m going to sit down and I know from the begin­ning that’s all it’s ever going to be.’ Somehow it was pre­dicted, he knew he was going to fail in that way, because this is what the dia­gram said, didn’t he have access to the dia­gram, didn’t he know?

And some­how it also assumes the peo­ple made Pascal, which went on for a very long period of time, that some­how they knew, some­how there was some secret that, if you were there in that moment, you could have pre­dicted this out­come. Which is unfair. It’s untrue. There is no one who has that kind of pre­dic­tive abil­ity, no mat­ter how many labels they put against your name – futur­ist; inno­va­tion offi­cer; some com­pa­nies have chief inno­va­tion offi­cers. Are there any chief inno­va­tion offi­cers here? Not any more, OK, sorry. I guess you won’t be hir­ing me to do any­thing for you. OK.

So any­way, the golden story here is that these are the com­mon mod­els by which his­tory is taught, the his­tory of every­thing, includ­ing his­tory of inno­va­tion. And they are pretty use­less when it comes to try­ing to fig­ure out how do you work in a way so some­thing you do will be good enough to make it on the dia­gram of the future. I’ve got about 10 min­utes to talk about peo­ple like it when you inno­vate, and if there’s time left we’ll do a lit­tle Q&A.

People like it when you inno­vate. This is a famous photo from tech his­tory. Has any­body heard the term Luddite? Most of you? Good. So the short ver­sion of the Luddite story is as fol­lows. This is industrial-​​age England, and peo­ple in this town in north­ern England, they were work­ing at a tex­tile fac­tory. This is how they made a liv­ing, this is how they fed their fam­i­lies, this is how they fed their chil­dren, so they did every­thing. They went to the fac­tory, they made tex­tiles. The indus­trial age, they’re try­ing to fig­ure out how to auto­mate, how do we use steam power to make these things more effec­tive. They’re fig­ur­ing out how to make an indus­trial loom, a mechan­i­cal loom that can work much faster than humans could.

So one day the com­pany puts these looms into place, fires all the tex­tile work­ers, and then the tex­tile work­ers were not happy about this. Textile work­ers showed up at work one day and they said ‘Wow, we just lost our jobs. I don’t know how I’m going to feed my kids. I don’t know how I’m going to feed my fam­ily. I have no other way to make a liv­ing. This is my liveli­hood,’ and they were pissed. So some of them took a sledge­ham­mer and they took an axe, they went to the looms and they destroyed them.

And for a short period of time there was a group of these peo­ple that went around to dif­fer­ent fac­to­ries, and they had a guer­rilla anti-​​industrial move­ment. They were even­tu­ally sen­tenced, many of them were killed, and the move­ment ended. But for tech­nol­o­gists, the world Luddite is a slur – to call some­one a Luddite usu­ally means you’re say­ing you’re back­wards. They are not keep­ing up with progress, they are reject­ing the future.

The point here is as fol­lows. Most of us tech­nol­o­gists think lud­dites, OK, yeah they’re weird, we’ll just ignore them. The truth is in our own way, we would all respond prob­a­bly the same way the lud­dites did if we were put in the same sit­u­a­tion. So all of you are at a con­fer­ence today, if on Monday you went back to work, you got to your office, your cubi­cle, what­ever, go to your chair, and on your chair is a lit­tle black box with a red blink­ing light with your job title on it. And your boss comes in and taps you on the shoul­der, and says, ‘Hey, sorry, gotta go. You don’t need to be here any­more. This is replac­ing you, sorry.’ I’m sure many of use would have a vio­lent response to that box. We would.

And this is very impor­tant, this is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant thing, the most over­looked thing about inno­va­tion, is that inno­va­tion, the suc­cess­ful inno­va­tion has every­thing to do with human nature. Human nature is way more a fac­tor in which things will suc­ceed or not than the tech­nol­ogy is. So any time you inno­vate, the rea­son why I men­tion this lud­dite thing and the black-​​box thing, any time you inno­vate, there will always be some­one, guar­an­teed, some­one will feel that way about your new idea – they’ll feel threat­ened by it, they’ll feel like it’s going to make them less valu­able, they’ll be afraid of the change involved in your new idea, and that’s prob­a­bly the larger thing you have to over­come is their emo­tional response to change. That’s prob­a­bly a big­ger chal­lenge than the tech­no­log­i­cal chal­lenges that you have to over­come to make something.

The other exam­ple to make this point from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. History of war­fare tech­nol­ogy. So it turns out that the West did not invent gun­pow­der, that was invented by the Eastern coun­tries, China and Korea, sev­eral hun­dred years before the first Spaniard made a rifle. And the truth of the story is they dis­cov­ered gun­pow­der, they recog­nised its poten­tial for war­fare, but their cul­tural val­ues led them to decide that it wasn’t the right choice for them.

In Japan they believed in sword war­fare, that there was a code for how you killed some­one, believe it or not, that was hon­ourable. There was an hon­ourable way to die, an hon­ourable way to fight, and that involved your mas­tery of a skill, your mas­tery of a sword. And if you were going to die at the hand of some­one else’s sword, that was okay, in a way, because you were dying hon­ourably. They saw this gun­pow­der stuff, they recog­nised how easy it would be to cre­ate a bomb or a pro­jec­tile weapon, and it required no skill. They thought it was dis­hon­ourable. None of the war­lords – as much as they were fight­ing each other, none of the war­lords were will­ing to give up their cul­tural val­ues in favour of the tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tage, so they ignored it.

Some peo­ple say that has every­thing to do with why in the 1600s and 1700s, Western coun­tries were able to come into the east and dom­i­nate them, because they had the tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tage. Fine, that’s not the point. The point is that every cul­ture has some bias about cer­tain kinds of tech­nol­ogy, there is some bias that you have that makes you more prone to accept one kind of tech­nol­ogy, and less prone to accept another, based on your per­sonal val­ues. And as an inven­tor, or an inno­va­tor or cre­ator, as some­one who makes new things, part of what you have to fig­ure out for your client or for your cus­tomer, or for your coun­try, who­ever you’re inno­vat­ing for, is how the thing you’re mak­ing is going to play on those cul­tural val­ues. If you can’t fig­ure that out, then you’re basi­cally inno­vat­ing blind. You’re mak­ing some­thing new and you are hop­ing it’s going to fit into the cul­ture that you’re design­ing it for.

I can guar­an­tee you that an anthro­pol­o­gist will look at Twitter, if they aren’t already, in five to ten years now, and ask the ques­tion: Why are there cer­tain pro­files of peo­ple that really like this thing, and other cer­tain pro­files that really think it’s stu­pid? Why? What’s the value sys­tem that’s dif­fer­ent? I’m sure there’s prob­a­bly some­one who is Twittering here now say­ing ‘Scott’s a jerk for pick­ing on Twitter,’ or some­thing – who knows?

This the­ory is not mine, this is the anthro­po­log­i­cal view of inno­va­tion, which is very pow­er­ful, because most tech­nol­o­gists don’t know any­thing about it. But the basic idea is that the fusion, the spread of inno­va­tion, has much more to do with social processes than it does to do with tech­no­log­i­cal processes. If you’re a designer, or a usabil­ity engi­neer, or an ethno­g­ra­pher, you should be really happy, because this sup­ports that work that you are doing, it says you have to under­stand the cus­tomer, you have to under­stand who you are mak­ing the thing for, because that will deter­mine how to make some­thing for them that they’ll actu­ally use, based on your under­stand­ing of them, not your under­stand­ing of the technology.

But his view on this is very inter­est­ing, because he is purely an anthro­pol­o­gist, not a tech­nol­o­gist. Doesn’t know how to write CSS, doesn’t know any­thing about that. He just spent all of his time going to dif­fer­ent cul­tures and ask­ing the ques­tion ‘Why did this tech­nol­ogy get adopted by this tribe, but not that tribe?’ And the book is about inter­est­ing sto­ries that he found when he did that research.

My last story for you is much more cor­po­rate and much more to do with how to inno­vate in the work­place. If you ask me to dis­till down every­thing that I learned from all the research that I did in this book about how inno­va­tion hap­pens in more of a work envi­ron­ment, it’s these three things. Is there del­e­ga­tion of work? Is there risk-​​taking and mistake-​​making? And is there reward for ini­tia­tives? Those are the three.

And I give you a story that illus­trates these three points. How many of you know the com­pany 3M? Everybody. Can any­one here name a prod­uct that you’ve used? Post-​​it Notes. Does any­one know what 3M stands for? Minnesota Mining Manufacturing, so they have Luddites at 3M I guess. So we’ve got Post-​​it Notes and min­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing. One of these things is not like the other; these things don’t relate that much. 3M started as an entre­pre­neur­ial con­cern. It was late industrial-​​age America – 1880, 1890 some­where in there – and the big deal at the time was actu­ally stuff to sup­port indus­try. This is when sky­scrap­ers were being built, the indus­try was huge, so the hot tech sec­tor, believe it or not, was industrial-​​age material.

And they decided they were going to get into the min­ing busi­ness, they were going to mine mate­ri­als that would be used to abrase metal, to sharpen or refine metal. And they built this mine – they made a startup com­pany, they took out a big loan, and they made a mine. They started min­ing, and they very quickly realised they made a big mis­take, because they were min­ing the wrong min­er­als. They were min­ing the effec­tive equiv­a­lent of fool’s gold. It was like fool’s abra­sion mate­r­ial. And they realised they screwed up, and they [thought] ‘What are we going to do? Let’s try this again. We’re going to be more focussed this time.’

They got more money together, they bor­rowed more money, and the sec­ond time they made the startup and they focussed on what was effec­tively sand­pa­per – min­er­als you need to make sand­pa­per. They made their sec­ond mine and they started min­ing the stuff, and it took them sev­eral years, about 10 years, to even­tu­ally have a func­tion­ally prof­itable busi­ness. It was not an overnight suc­cess, but they were mak­ing sand­pa­per, that’s what they did. Again, at the time that was cool – if you went to a bar and some­one asked you what you did, and you said ‘I’m a sand­pa­per engi­neer,’ they’d go ‘Oh, OK – that means you have, like, stock options, right? Yeah, OK.’

So we have this guy, we have this com­pany, there’s an engi­neer at this sand­pa­per com­pany, and one of his clients is some kind of auto­mo­bile man­u­fac­tur­ing plant, and he goes to their lab to show them some pro­to­types of sand­pa­per. And he notices they have a prob­lem. They’re try­ing to paint this trac­tor or this car, this trac­tor in two colours, grey and blue. And they need a reli­able way to sep­a­rate these things from each other so they could paint them in an assembly-​​line type of fash­ion, and they don’t know how to do that. So he looks at it and says ‘I think I could solve that.’

So he went back to his lab at 3M and starts work­ing on this prob­lem: How do you sep­a­rate two dif­fer­ent things? He gets a pro­to­type together, a very rough pro­to­type, and shows it to his boss. His boss looks at it and goes, ‘What are you doing, we’re 3M, Minnesota Mining Manufacture, not paint­ing, not two colours. So get back to sand­pa­per.’ He spent some more time work­ing on sand­pa­per, but this idea is in his head, and he can’t get it out of his head.

So he spends more of his own time work­ing on a pro­to­type, makes a bet­ter pro­to­type, sends to his boss, and his boss says no. The same thing hap­pens again a third time, fourth time. Finally, the boss says, ‘Look, if you’re going to keep doing this, you can’t work here any­more. Get back to work on the sand­pa­per.’ So this guy, his name was Richard Drew, he says ‘I don’t care. This idea in my head is more impor­tant than any­thing else. I am going to do it anyway.’

And he fig­ures out that he as an engi­neer, he has the abil­ity to write receipts to him­self for a cer­tain amount – $50 or some­thing. He needs like $1,000 to fin­ish the pro­to­type, so he just writes those receipts to him­self to fin­ish the pro­to­type. He fin­ishes the pro­to­type, shows it to his boss, shows it to the auto­mo­tive com­pany, and they all like it. And this is the birth of mask­ing tape. This is 1925 or 1924. That was how mask­ing tape was invented.

And every­one liked it, so they were will­ing to make it into a prod­uct, because they thought it would be an indus­trial prod­uct. They took the prod­uct to this auto­mo­bile com­pany, and they started using it. But soon they realised that there was all these appli­ca­tions they had never thought of ever before. And the profit line for mask­ing tape quickly accel­er­ated beyond the profit line for all their sand­pa­per prod­ucts. So that’s a short ver­sion of the story. So it quickly rises faster than the sand­pa­per prod­ucts. The boss goes ‘Wow.’ The boss’s name was William McKnight. The boss goes, ‘Wow, I wanted to kill this prod­uct. I wanted to kill it four times, and finally I let it hap­pen only because this guy had per­sisted. What have I done wrong? I’m the man­ager. I don’t want to make this mis­take again. I want to be an enabler of inno­va­tion. I want to be an enabler of new prod­ucts. What can I do as the man­ager, the boss, to make it eas­ier for Richard Drew to repeat this, or some­one else to do the same thing?’

So William McKnight set upon – he even­tu­ally became the chair­man of the com­pany – he set upon build­ing this phi­los­o­phy for the com­pany, try­ing to sup­port inno­va­tion. And that was what led to the envi­ron­ment that made the Post-​​it Note pow­er­ful. So that’s how you get from min­ing to Post-​​it Notes – a man­ager or a boss or an indi­vid­ual who had some power, decided they were going to make their job about sup­port­ing inno­va­tion rather than thwart­ing it.

So the last thing I’m going to talk to you about is I’m going to break a pre­sen­ta­tion rule, and I’m going to read to you three para­graphs. They are very short para­graphs, three para­graphs from William McKnight’s phi­los­o­phy on how inno­va­tion hap­pens, how to man­age inno­va­tion, I’m going to read it and then I’m going to call out a cou­ple of key things.

‘As our busi­ness grows, it becomes increas­ingly nec­es­sary to del­e­gate respon­si­bil­ity and to encour­age men and women to exer­cise their ini­tia­tive. This requires con­sid­er­able tol­er­ance. Those men and women to whom we del­e­gate author­ity and respon­si­bil­ity, if they are good peo­ple, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way. Mistakes will be made, but if a per­son is essen­tially right, the mis­takes he or she makes are not as seri­ous in the long run as the mis­takes man­age­ment will make if it under­takes to tell those in author­ity exactly how they must do their jobs. Management that is destruc­tively crit­i­cal when mis­takes are made kills ini­tia­tive, and it is essen­tial that we have many peo­ple with ini­tia­tive if we are to con­tinue to grow.’

That’s not bad. Three para­graphs. It took me maybe 45 sec­onds to say that, and I’ve sat through – I worked at Microsoft for a long time, I sat through many exec­u­tive speeches about inno­va­tion, that went on for an hour, 1.5 hours that were much worse than those three para­graphs, and I bet most of you have too. That’s part of my point, is there’s a cou­ple of key ele­ments in here that are very sim­ple to under­stand but dif­fi­cult to do. And that’s really the lever­age point of how inno­va­tion happens.

The first one in here is about del­e­gat­ing respon­si­bil­ity, to say OK, I’m the man­ager, but you’re the indi­vid­ual; your per­spec­tive on this is prob­a­bly more flex­i­ble than mine. I have to empower you to some degree to be cre­ative. I have to – I have to del­e­gate it away.

The sec­ond, mis­takes will be made. Mistakes will be made. It doesn’t say how to respond to mis­takes or how to avoid mis­takes, he’s say­ing mis­takes will be made, period, end of sen­tence. And if we are being cre­ative, we are guar­an­teed we must make mis­takes, because we’re going on a part of the map that we don’t know what’s there. So this is the CEO of the com­pany said we’re going to make mistakes.

Now I’ve read a lot of busi­ness plans and vision doc­u­ments. I’ve never seen one that said ‘20% of our bud­get will be spent mak­ing mis­takes.’ I have never seen that. But that’s effec­tively what he’s say­ing here as the chair­man, that any­one who is lead­ing a project has to say, ‘Where are we going to find time to make mis­takes? Where are we going to make the wacko, crazy pro­to­types that we’re never going to ship, make them crazy on pur­pose so we’ll learn some­thing? And if we’re claim­ing to be an inno­v­a­tive project, we have to match that with this bud­get about mistake-​​making? It can’t hap­pen. We’re not going to inno­vate. This won’t happen.’

The third thing is about ini­tia­tive, reward­ing ini­tia­tive. And peo­ple like Richard Drew, who take a risk, for step­ping out­side of the box to do some­thing that they’re told not to do, they want to find a way to reward that kind of ini­tia­tive. Most man­agers are very crit­i­cal of that kind of ini­tia­tive. ‘How could you dis­re­gard my author­ity’ blah blah. He’s say­ing no. You have to find a way to man­age this so you go the other way. You don’t want to end up with chaos, but you have to find a way.

So one com­ment – pop­u­lar thing that comes up a lot when you talk about inno­va­tion today is Google, and Google’s 20% rule. How many peo­ple have heard of this 20% rule? The 20% rule basi­cally says that if you’re a Google employee, 20% of your time is at your own dis­cre­tion – 20% of the time, if you believe that they work Monday to Friday, that means one day a week is your time. You can do what­ever you want, you can make a project, develop some­thing, hack some­thing, and the idea is every so often those lit­tle hack projects, you’ll pro­pose them as being main­stream projects in the com­pany. But that idea does not come from Google. That was 3M’s idea. They called it some­thing else, the 5% rule, the 10% rule. Basically that was a way for McKnight to say ‘I am del­e­gat­ing author­ity to you as an indi­vid­ual; I am find­ing you an after­noon a week, a cou­ple of hours a month, some amount of time where you are in charge of inno­vat­ing. It’s up to you to do it. I’m not going to tell you how to do it, because I can’t, but you are in charge. Any wacko idea you want to try, you now have three hours a month or a week to do it.’

The last thing I’ll say before I open for ques­tion­ing, the power of his­tory is a really impor­tant theme for me, because this essay, this speech, is almost 60 years old. This is super-​​old by our standards.