Cats the nine lives of innovation pdf

Publication New York, Dorset Press, , c Extent 1 online resource x, pages. Note Includes index Reprint. Label Nine lives : the folklore of cats, Katharine M.

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Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. We are grateful for our gifts and for each other, but family will always be first. I love you, Janell. Finally, I would like to acknowledge not one but two publishers.

First, I want to recognize Management Press of the Australian Institute of Management, who published an earlier version of this book in Australia. Vivienne has provided extensive critiques of the manuscript at each of the various stages and has always been spot on.

I feel like the luckiest guy in the world because I have found an editor who has all the qualities I respect. Herb Schaffner is thoughtful, bright, talented, passionate, hard working, and a great human being.

I look forward to our discussions and value his input. Thanks, Herb. I hope we can do this again some day. I want to salute the publisher for whom Herb works, McGraw-Hill, and the staff that have joined with Herb to support this effort.

My point of view is at sea level. Most of what is written about innovation is geared to the top of the organization. It makes more sense to me to turn the organization upside down.

It is my view that employees are the primary source of innovation in an organization. I believe that all innovation is personal, and to focus exclusively on abstractions such as the organization, strategy, and culture takes our attention away from the true source of all innovation, you and me. High-altitude articles, books, and white papers often identify a technique or practice found inside a company and suggest that the success of the company is a direct result of that technique or practice.

Company X is innovative because it promotes self-managed teams. Company Y is innovative because it hires a diverse workforce. Company Q is not innovative because it has implemented Six Sigma.

Company Z is innovative because specific individuals are assigned the role of sponsor. Company J is innovative because the CEO understands discontinuities. Company HR is innovative because it rewards innovation. As a student of innovation, I read these articles and books with relish. We have let the CAT out of the bag! I assume that any organization is better off if it has innovative people to populate the strategies, structures, and systems.

This is a book about developing the capacity to innovate at all levels of the organization. It is time to turn things upside down. One recent book, Innovation to the Core, comes close to echoing this same view. The authors draw a parallel between the quality movement and the approach to innovation they prescribe. In the quality movement, the early efforts focused on developing specialists in quality. Soon, a massive quality industry emerged that provided quality consulting, quality gurus, quality mouse pads, and quality training.

Eventually, it became that an effective quality effort had to involve each member of the organization as a primary source for quality.

It became standard practice to view each employee as someone who had a role in quality. In other words, quality was driven to the core of the organization, the individual. Quality was turned upside down. The case made in Innovation to the Core is that innovation, like quality, must be driven to the core and become a responsibility of every employee. For this reason, organizations need to train employees to innovate.

I agree. However, the authors of Innovation to the Core stop short of describing what innovation looks like 4 CATS: The Nine Lives of Innovation at the personal level and how we should develop the capacity to innovate in individual employees. I wrote it to describe what innovation looks like at the personal level and to provide a curriculum for training individuals in the tools, concepts, and practices of personal innovation.

Let me start again. This is a book about innovation, but the perspective of the book is personal, and the potential results are both personal and organizational. Is there a little more energy in that? This is about you, a you that has the potential to be more productive than the present you. This is about a you that can have more vitality at work and greater satisfaction with life.

Do I have your full attention now? You see, personal innovation produces the natural energy of life. It makes you want to howl. If you wish to create a vital life, one that is meaningful and deeply satisfying, innovation can help you to get there. Just think about the parts of your life that give you the greatest sense of satisfaction right now. It is often the everyday tasks that provide opportunities for us to innovate.

Think about the parts of your life that have energy for you. Use the list below to stimulate your memory.

Not included on the list are momentous discoveries such as finding the cure for ulcers, identifying a new method for locating black holes in space, or earning a Nobel Prize for the development of a new paradigm in economics. These achievements also would have a rightful place on the list, but their inclusion would detract from the key point. Innovation is at the heart of a life well lived. All innovation, big or small, relies on the same basic set of principles, and those principles are all personal.

In this book they are organized as the Nine Lives of Innovation. Life is a great and exciting adventure. It is the little victories that we experience from these everyday innovations that add up to a fulfilling existence. Innovation reminds us that life, authentically lived, is always a precious and amazing journey. Do you have the courage to claim your happiness? You might start by becoming more innovative. Did Curiosity Really Kill the Cat?

Curiosity is a trait celebrated in cats. Curiosity is also an ingredient in innovation. Cats seem to be attracted to nooks and crannies, but to attribute curiosity exclusively to them is not fair to their human counterparts.

But have you ever seen one die of curiosity? This reminds me of a recent story about a cat that was lodged in the wall of a bar. For two days, men and women worked to release this cat, and ultimately, they were successful. It may have been curiosity that put the cat in this predicament. It may have been hunger or stupidity.

One thing is sure: the cat has a real tale to tell his grandchildren when they make their annual trip to the dump. My experience CHAPTER 1 9 after talking to thousands of potential CATS is that in those few instances when someone thinks he has an example of curiosity killing a cat it turns out to have been a car or a dog, not curiosity.

I believe that old tale about cats and curiosity is designed to keep you in your place, to throttle one of your greatest gifts—your curiosity.

It is also said that a cat has nine lives—a phrase that comes closer to matching my experience with cats. This old saying is the source of the title of this book—The Nine Lives of Innovation. It provides structure to a rather diverse set of ingredients that make up innovation.

By accessing the potential of any one of the Nine Lives, we boost our personal ability to innovate. And once we implement any one of the Lives, we can proudly call our self a CAT. The focus is on the individual. Personal innovation can occur in everyday things and in major initiatives that are part of a large-scale corporate innovation strategy.

The same principles apply to both at the individual level. The Four Basic Challenges to Innovation The four challenges represent universal impediments to innovation, and the Nine Lives represent building blocks from which to fashion strategies to overcome the four challenges.

Harnessing any one of the lives will move you in the direction of 11 12 CATS: The Nine Lives of Innovation innovation, and the more you harness, the more potent your move will be. Each of the challenges will be immediately recognizable, and each of the lives can be learned. These ideas are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. They are simply my personal assessment of what is most important based on my life experience, which includes my reading of the literature. Another way of saying this is that the Nine Lives of Innovation is my theory as to what is most important to innovation at the fundamental human level.

The four challenges to innovation are not negotiable. They are a part of what it means to be human, so ignoring them is not an option. Each requires a powerful antidote once you have developed a clear understanding of its source of power. The four basic challenges that must be overcome in order to enhance your innovation quotient are: 1. The doubts and fears accumulated over a lifetime are there, in part, to keep us safe and secure.

They are also a major distraction to those who would innovate. They can be a straightjacket preventing innovation. In order to survive as human beings, we are endowed with the ability to be normal. In different cultures, normal takes different forms. Innovation requires getting outside the norms, and this is no small task given the amount of practice we have simply being normal.

Even though failure is fundamental to learning, most of us grow up trying to avoid failure. To make progress, we must come to grips with the importance of failure in learning and innovation. To innovate, we must understand and at times even embrace failure. Typical leadership techniques often create an environment that is conducive to some things but toxic for innovation. The Nine Lives of Innovation The challenges listed above are both real and ubiquitous.

My principle-based solutions are an antidote to the toxic nature of the challenges and provide fundamental steps in the personal innovation journey. They are called the Nine Lives of Innovation because each of the lives will move you in the direction of greater personal innovation.

The impact of these lives well lived will be seen in increased personal innovation, and because human beings populate organizations, their organizations will be described as more innovative and having a higher quality of work life. CATS create an innovation friendly environ- ment. There is a constant conversation going on in most minds that must be quieted in order to provide the spaciousness needed for innovation. Clutter also takes the form of distractions of this crazy world that seems to generate new distractions daily.

CATS are always prepared. Innovation favors a prepared mind. The way you organize your experience in the warehouses we call memory can serve you well when it comes time to innovate. One way to counter the effects of being normal is to understand how and why we humans have evolved the way we have. However, while the routine allows us to be human beings, it also can inhibit our ability to innovate.

We need to understand this paradox to understand the role of provocation. CATS welcome physical provocation. To escape from the clutches of what is normal, we can provoke ourselves with objects and other physical provocations. CATS enjoy social provocation.

A conversation can be provocative if we allow ourselves to use the ideas of others for their movement value as well as their content.

There is nothing quite so electric as a group of CATS in conversation. The fur really flies. CATS promote intellectual provocation. To escape the containing power of the norm, we can stimulate our thinking with positive mental assaults and imaginary provocations.

What can I learn from this? CATS fail early and fail well. Since failure is always a part of the formula for innovation, and since a certain amount of failure is needed in order to learn important lessons along the way, one thing becomes clear: CATS learn how to get failure out of the way early so the maximum amount of learning can occur. This approach facilitates innovation and minimizes the cost of failure.

CAT Wranglers understand natural energy. Leadership plays a significant role in the overall innovation process of any organization. Our focus is on the role of leadership in nurturing, developing, and supporting individuals in a way that ensures the energy is natural.

Please note that I am not tackling the whole process of innovation, but only the development of people, CATS, who will be ready, willing, and able to innovate—whatever the process. Some CATS may even be interested in teaching a whole new litter.

The CAT Belts are meant to be a fun way to accomplish both. CAT Nip Can you think of an innovation moment you have experienced recently? We are all somewhat familiar with most or all of these challenges; we experience most of them on a daily basis. A CAT must understand the four challenges inside out in order to truly appreciate the need for the Nine Lives. Car horns, loud music, comments made by detractors, the voice of a former teacher, the voice of judgment in our head, and countless other sources of clutter affect us.

On top of all this is our own personal collection of doubts and fears. Innovation makes some of us quite nervous because it implies change. I believe that sayings like this one are born out of fear, not real experience. But they are nevertheless a challenge. It is a natural human trait that fuels our growth from the time we are born.

Philosopher Tom Morris has gone so far as to suggest that creativity is the meaning of life itself. The quality of our life depends on the release of our own unique brand of creativity. And this internal drive is powerful.

Who can be creative without being curious? We are also bombarded with the clutter of life. The noise created by the clutter of life can drown out thoughts and remove all the spaciousness so important to innovation. In other words, the clutter and distractions keep our minds occupied, often with trivia, leaving no opportunity to innovate.

Being busy has become a badge of honor for some. Maybe this is why there are always books on the best-seller list that promote the beauty of simplicity, the joy of spaciousness, and the power of being in the now.

CHAPTER 3 19 The following recent experience will provide a quick example of the clutter and distractions that have penetrated every part of our lives.

I was on the road and having a meal alone at a restaurant. When I am alone, I like to observe people, so I was tuned to the people around me and what they were doing. At one table, a family of four was having a night out together. There was mom and dad and kids, who were probably 12 and 8.

The thing that was amazing to me was they were all on their mobile phones. They were all talking to someone not present at the table.

We carry devices with us that have the capacity to keep us from having the space to innovate. This is what I mean by distractions and clutter. It is not just the car horns and train whistles, but a host of things we carry around with us to be sure we have no peace of mind. CAT Pause Find a place of solitude, and just listen to the voices inside your head.

After listening to the voices on the inside, turn your attention to the noise on the outside. Just listen. What did you do then? Now find someone to talk about this with, and see what his experience has been with critics. We can develop habits, routines, and protocols that allow us to function and protect us from harm. This is a good thing, with only a few exceptions. Innovation is one exception.

For humans, it is another type of box that is of greater concern: the construct of routine—a critical life tool on the one hand and a cage that prevents innovative exploration on the other. This type of CAT Box represents a vital human capacity without which we might not survive as a species, but it is also a potential barrier to innovation. Now this is a dilemma!

Old ways of doing things are actually hard-wired in the brain; they have a physical manifestation. Consider getting dressed or driving a car if there were no routine, and each and every step along the way had to be considered in the light of all possibilities in order to decide what to do next.

We could spend our whole life doing nothing but getting dressed or backing the car out of the garage. Why does a car have reverse gear? It would seem to be a lot of money for such a small amount of use.

But reverse gear is to a car as creativity is to normal. When you need it, you need it badly. Being normal is just fine for much of your life, but when you need a new idea, it requires escaping from the bonds of normal. In rural Thailand, where elephants are an integral part of life, when calves are young, they are shackled by the leg to a wooden post.

The young elephants eventually give up all resistance. They have become accustomed to the routine. The following are some other examples of normal in action. Notice that each and every one of the individuals mentioned is extremely bright and highly productive. Normal is, well, you know, normal. You mean drill in the ground to try to find oil?

DRAKE, Note that these are accomplished people who completely underestimated the possibilities. CATS in organizations often become so acclimatized to the systems and routines that they fail to see the possibilities that a degree turn of their head would reveal.

They are capable of pulling the post out of the ground but are numbed by what has been accepted as the norm. The following exercises provide a few simple activities that will help you to get a quick idea of the power and importance of normal. It is a beginning on the path to understanding our own paradigms. Notice how awkward it is to do something common in a different way. Associative Boundaries Associative boundaries provide another perspective on the challenge of being normal.

We humans have a tendency to exert our dominion over complex things by organizing them. In general, these structures help us to operate efficiently and effectively in the world. But disciplines have a tendency to become isolated, departments become silos, and roles become fixed. This is engineering, and that is medicine. This is who I am, and that is not. This is so because much of innovation occurs at the intersection of the boundaries between disciplines, departments, and roles.

Frans Johansson, in his book, The Medici Effect, describes dozens of examples of innovation at the intersection. He also highlights the importance of associative boundaries as a challenge to innovation.

This is one challenge of being normal. We all have these boundaries. CAT Pause Think about your associative boundaries.

What parts of your life are so well developed they may have solidified? Think about your professional boundaries, such as banker, accountant, customer service agent, manager, biologist, surgeon, or sales associate. Consider your cultural boundaries. Do you have childrearing boundaries, strongly held beliefs about the right way to raise children? Do you have gender boundaries, what one gender should do or not do? Consider your boundaries for a moment.

How flexible are your boundaries? Now cross them the other way. Why was that so uncomfortable? But make good notes if you are a frequent flyer. Ask someone close to you to describe your most obvious routines. Change one of them for a couple days.

How did that feel? How long do you think it would take to make a new routine feel comfortable? As you have seen from this discussion and the Nips and Pauses presented, much of our life is lived in routine ways. With our routines, we can navigate through life safely and without a lot of thought.

This is a good thing unless we are crossing the street in London and you are from a country that drives on the right side of the road.

Then it can be downright dangerous. Unfortunately, these life-affirming routines get in the way when your want to innovate. Not quite as dangerous as crossing the street in London, but with their own set of challenges. What is harder to see is that our intellectual life also has its routines.

We have routine ways of thinking about things, approaching problems, and organizing experiences. Our reliance on these normal ways of thinking about things also can be a barrier to innovation. And trying new ways of thinking is just as awkward as changing physical routines. But breaking routines is our route to the novel. Being normal is a challenge.

The Third Challenge: Failure When we are infants, we are willing to try anything and often do. They worry about us making fools of ourselves in school and being criticized for being outside what is considered normal. Then it happens. We make a mistake, and someone laughs at us in a way we know is not complementary. It stings. We seek to avoid this unpleasant feeling in the future. We make sure that our possibility of failing is limited. We take fewer risks. This is the beginning of our journey on the road to fearing failure.

CAT Pause There is an often-used exercise that highlights the development of our fear of failure. People are organized in pairs and asked to have a piece of paper and a pencil available. Most participants spend the time apologizing for not being able to do a better job.

There is a great deal of angst. The group then discusses what this activity would have been like if they were five or six years old. All agree that it would have been fun and pleasurable to do the same task at five. The discussion then turns to the difference. Think about this.

What is good, and what is unfortunate? Fear of Failure In the work world, fear of failure is common. Great effort is taken to avoid mistakes and eliminate flubs, flops, glitches, guffaws, stumbles, fumbles, snags, screw-ups, dropped balls, mess-ups, and nicks. This alternative language is testimony to our desire to avoid even saying the word failure.

It loses sight of the fact that failure is the foundation of learning and that innovation depends on a healthy diet of failure, especially when you work in a low-tolerance organization. To eliminate failure would mean eliminating learning and innovation. But the fear is real.

A clever way to show how silly this is comes from a Tony Buzan presentation, and I paraphrase it here: A baby is internally driven to push the limits. While learning to stand and walk, the baby falls hundreds of times. We know about failing well early in life. We start with training wheels and with dad or mom running behind. We try to minimize the bleeding by failing well. When we settle into a job, however, we often fail poorly by covering up what needs to be brought to the surface and discussed and by trying to think everything through before starting.

There is also the nasty habit of running with a project and working hard only to find that we have done the wrong project. These are some of the challenges of failure. CAT Nip See if you can summarize your approach to failure and communicate it to a friend. CAT Pause Think for a moment about your most spectacular failures and what you learned from them. When innovation occurs within an organi- CHAPTER 3 31 zation, a special breed of leadership is required—a brand of leader who is focused on releasing energy rather than consuming it.

It is important to remember that not everyone welcomes innovation. Innovation, by definition, means change, and as we have discussed, we humans are wired for routine. Yet, while our shortterm survival requires routine, our long-term survival has required significant change. So we are, in fact, capable of significant change.

And leadership can help or get in the way. In an organization, we often bring our personal skills to teams, and members of our teams will vary in terms of their willingness to innovate.

This is where leadership can make a major contribution. While the volume of material available on leadership is immense, that which is addressing the relationship of leadership to innovation at a personal level is much smaller. And within that set of things that apply to the leadership needed to support personal innovation, one aspect is dominant: Innovation thrives in an environment filled with natural energy and dies in an environment full of toxic energy.

The challenge for leaders is how to eliminate the toxic and attract the natural. This also makes it important to have CAT Wranglers in the mix. Their job is to create a CATfriendly environment. CATS are also sensitive, and innovating makes them feel vulnerable.

CAT Wranglers respect freedom, eliminate barriers, support divergence, protect vulnerable ideas, and put their own egos aside in favor of serving CATS. Unfortunately, these qualities are different from the qualities we typically find in practice. What was the nature of the leadership? Enough with the negative! It is time to find the positive response to the four challenges. This would be the Nine Lives. All that we have covered to this point has been preparation for the Nine Lives.

With one exception, you can start anywhere in the Nine Lives. Each of these lives is independent and will move you to a higher level of innovation capability. They each take you a step closer to being a fully contributing CAT within your organization and in your life. This is so because, without a full understanding of normal, the provocations are without clear foundation and can be dismissed. You will find the Nine Lives accessible and easy to put to use. If your history with innovation has been less than stellar, or if you have always felt that you were genetically programmed not to be innovative, please give the lives a chance.

The lives will show you that the opposite is true. Your are ready, and if you are willing, you soon will be able. Beware that you might just find yourself pouncing on ideas in a way that surprises you.

This will prove to you that the CAT has always been inside, waiting for the opportunity you are now providing. Nothing is quite as much fun as a herd of CATS on a journey together. Remember to stay alert as you work through the Nine Lives. You may just encounter a personal innovation moment. If you do, pause and write it down. The innovator occasionally must find a place of silence and at times a sense of playfulness to access her full potential. W hether a cacophony of caterwauls or a simple catfight, life is full of noise.

And in the middle of all that noise, sometimes compounding the distraction of the din, there are voices of judgment coming from the past, present, and future. These unwanted voices are criticizing and evaluating every single thing we try to make happen in the world.

This is why a CAT must find ways to quiet the mind and open a space for innovation by moving the clutter of life into the background or by finding ways to use the clutter as a provocation. Of course, there is the rare CAT who relishes the clutter and finds it soothing. This is what is fun about CATS.

They come in all shapes and sizes. And just when you think you have one all figured out, she disappears under a couch. There are experts who believe that all you have to do to have innovation is find a way to remove the effects of your nasty first grade teacher who hated your vulnerable little drawing of a flower. Once the latent effects of that evil person are removed or overcome, you will be free to create, and the ideas will flow. Another point of view is that your ability to innovate is based on tools and concepts that can be taught, and once you have learned them, your ability to innovate will grow.

My belief and my experience are that both are true. This life is focused on freeing you to innovate. The rest of the lives are about the tools, techniques, and concepts.

Consider the following vignette as a way to think about the distinction. A man has been bound with ropes, blindfolded, and tossed into a deep pit. The man struggles and eventually releases his bonds and takes off his blindfold. The ropes are the things that keep you from offering what you have to the pursuit of innovation.

The wall of the pit represents all those things that are yet to be learned so that you can have more to offer. Both are important.

The conscious and unconscious thoughts of a CAT are frequently full of doubts and fears. To innovate, a CAT must either silence the voices or weaken their ability to keep her from taking the actions she needs to make her contributions to the world. The most difficult external voices are the ones closest to home.

These are often voices of loved ones and friends who think they are doing what is best for us by keeping us from doing something that has a high risk of failing. You know, like innovation, for instance.

It is only natural that you want to share your insights with those closest to you. Sharing is not always a good idea!

In fact, when you first express an idea, it may sound a bit lame. They caution, criticize, and question what you are doing.