Ideaflow, Part 1
The Only Business Metric That Matters
Innovation isn’t an event, a workshop, or a sprint. It is a practice.
Over the last seven years, I’ve helped build and operate two world-class corporate venture studios from soup to nuts. As I conceive of it here, a venture studio combines two complementary venture models: a zero-to-one Incubator and a one-to-x Accelerator. Incubators (to return to their original use) keep hundreds of eggs warm, turning them, and keeping them safe as the potential within is slowly realized. Accelerators take those hatched chicks and give them all the resources (pouring in all the gas) they need to grow as fast as possible.
The two models require remarkably different conditions for success, and Ideaflow provides a rich model for understanding these differences in detail.
What is Ideaflow?
Ideaflow is the number of ideas you, your team, or your organization has, divided by the time it takes to generate them. Crucially, this
isn’t a measure of intelligence or talent. Instead, you could say it assesses your state of mind. Rapidly generating divergent possibilities requires you to suspend self-consciousness.
The creative and editorial mindsets are inherently at odds with each other (for reasons I’ll explain in another post) but recognizing the patterning of experience necessary for each allows you to optimize for each.
Before being able to apply this to your team or organization, the authors wisely ensure you inculcate this practice of Idea Flow yourself:
Seed: select a problem and study it.
Sleep: let the unconscious mind process the problem.
Solve: flood the problem with ideas (at least ten).
Now, problems do not have obvious solutions; they are something you don’t even know how to approach. The queuing up process allows our intuitive subconscious to chew on these problems in a looser, random association sort of fashion, presenting fresh solutions or pieces of solutions to the sets of problems we’ve sweated over during the day. Remarkably, insights achieved while dreaming are transmitted chemically, not electrically, in the brain, lending themselves to partially formed rather than complete solutions.
Discipline of Documentation
Now, ideas are a dime a dozen so how does this accumulation of ideas actually help? The truth is, it doesn’t, unless you document and review. As the authors note,
At the d.school … “If you don’t capture it, it didn’t happen.”
I have a weekly method of capturing everything that has occurred to me, along with the tasks and events that happened during that week in a grid-lined notebook. This process I call a “brain dump” and it’s remarkably freeing as I head into the non-work time of the weekend. While this process works very well for me, as I read Ideaflow, I wonder if an even sharper delineation between the problems, the ideas, and the vetted solutions might be richer.
Pre-pandemic, I was always surrounded by whiteboards in my office. I find writing things down, being able to draw, using my hands while talking, and having a giant place to ramble always helped in freeing creativity. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I read this book that I realized I rarely have whiteboard time now. I’ve purchased a small whiteboard as a solution to that.
There are many ways of capturing these ideas when and where they happen. I have friends who capture audio files which they auto-transcribe and then edit (that’s one I might experiment with), post-it notes blizzards, diary by their bedside, and dedicated practitioners of The Artist’s Way suggestion of morning pages. This capture takes practice; we’ve all had the experience of looking back at our “notes” and wondering what the smattering of random words on the page might have meant to us in the moment. There are a few rules of thumb I use:
Write in full sentences.
Date the note.
Include the names of individuals and projects the note might relate to.
Rigor of Review
While writing things down is useful, the real power in this entire process is judicious, dedicated review and triage of your problems and ideas on a regular cadence. As the authors note,
“We want ideaflow, not an idea pond.”
Sparking the insight for solutions is a time-space game and being able to serve up the focused work you’ve done in the past as rich fodder for approaching new problems or seeing old ones in the new light of the present encourages serendipity.
My personal practice is to review the last three weeks of “brain dumps” as I create the latest Friday’s brain dump. Ideaflow suggests reviewing these ideas on a quarterly basis as well, ensuring not just a weekly or monthly rhythm of review, but a seasonal cadence for optimal fermentation.
The next two posts will explore Innovation Sessions, a key building block to expanding this methodology to groups, and finally accelerating this Ideaflow methodology at the scale of an enterprise (and a few experiments I’m running currently to test this out).