Ideo cross-pollination practices

I am scanning through the book - ten faces of innovation. What interest me is how the author’s company - Ideo cultivates cross-pollination. I rephrase and reorganize their practices along the human resource process.

Ideo cross-pollination practices

Recruitment

• Hire people with diverse backgrounds.
  
• Hire people across cultures and geographies.
  

Work Assignment

• Do diverse projects.
  

Learning

• Share knowledge within the company.
  
• Learn from people outside the company.
  
• Learn from clients.
  
• Design environments for people to meet accidental or impromptu.
  

Sense from:

The ten faces of innovation

Tom Kelly & Jonathan Littman

Page 72 to 74

Currency Doubleday

ISBN: 0385512074

1. Show and tell

Whenever Ideo groups get together, we enjoy a hearty show and tell. In the early days of the firm, that meant sharing fresh insights or new technologies during Monday morning meetings, when the entire company sat on the floor of my brother’s office. The firm has gotten a lot bigger since then ( and David’s office got a bit smaller ), so show and tell happens either face to face within smaller design groups or electronically across the firm via email or our intranet-based sharing systems. The Ideo Tech Box, a collection of hundreds of promising technologies for potential application to our work, is a systematic approach to collecting and sharing what we know. Show-and-tell is partly serendipity, often resulting from an accidental discovery or surprise, so it doesn’t always relate to projects the firm is actively working on right now. But it is always about something either new to the World or newly reinvented and is a source of continuous renewal built into the work practices of the organization.

2. Hire lots of people with diverse backgrounds

We’ve never looked at hiring as merely a process of addition or bringing in “more of the same.” If the recruiting task were to hire “another engineer just like Chris,” then the interview would be a simple matter of pattern recognition. We’re more likely to sift through the wide variety of applications looking for someone who will expand our talent pool or stretch the firm’s capabilities.

3. Stir the pot with space

As we’ll discuss in the Set Designer chapter, the company’s physical workspace can be a powerfull tool for advancing your strategic agenda. Grouping all your like-minded people into one floor or building makes sense if you want to emphasize solidarity in one discipline, but at Ideo, we believe there’s magic in cross-pollination and we support that belief with our use of space. We create lots of multi-disciplinary project rooms and leave ample space for “accidental” or impromptu meetings among people from disparate groups. We even make our staircases broad so that people can literally “meet halfway.”

4. Cross cultures and geographies

Ideo favours a cultural melting pot, seasoned with a steady mix of international flavours. No matter where you’re from or how patriotic you may be, I hope you’re willing to concede that there are more new ideas outside your country than inside. Importing new insights is always valuable. I’ve lost track of how many nationalities are represented in our firm, but a few years ago, our Boston office - just for fun - raised a flag for every country represented on their team. Last time I visited, there were eighteen flags hung, a pretty robust tally for an office of forty. And a well-bended international staff just seems to cross-pollinate naturally from other cultures.

5. Host a weekly “Know How” speakers’ series

Nearly every Thursday evening, a World-class thinker shows up to share their thoughts with us. Not only are their insights often fascinating ( Malcolm Gladwell on snap judgments, Howard Rheingold on smart mobs, Jeff Hawkins on the workings of the human brain ), but the shared buzz of many Ideo people seeing a speaker sets off a wave of discussions throughout the firm. Know How is a weekly burst of cross-pollination that keeps the thinking and the conversations continuously fresh.

6. Learn from visitors

My role at Ideo includes the chance to meet with a continuous stream of interesting people who travel long distances to visit us each year. Most are prospective clients who typically spend a couple of hours telling us about their industry, their company and their point of view. Over the years, I’ve participated in more than a thousand such meetings and I think of it as a form of postgraduate education. After each visit, I feel a little more up to date and attuned to current trends and dare I say it, just a little bit wiser for the experience.

7. Seek out diverse projects

There’s an old saying that a forty year career is sometimes the same year repeated forty times. Not at Ideo or at any other company with a culture of continuous learning. The broad range of our client work - spanning dozens of industries - means that we can cross-pollinate from one World to another.

T Talents

I like to introduce my idea of T Talents.

They are curious people who have deep expertise in one subject matter ( the vertical leg of the T ) and board interest in one or many other subject matters ( the horizontal part of the T ). For example, a friend of mine - Joo Hock is an expert in hairdressing, he also have interests in training, community management, events management, singing…

The T Talents idea is a shorten version of Ideo's T-shaped people idea. It is like using TinyURL.com to shorten a long web address to a short one. T-shaped people are people who are so inquisitive about the World that they are willing to try to do what you do. They have a principle skill that describes the vertical leg of the T – they might be mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into others skills, such as anthropology and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behaviour that point to a universal human need.

I share the same view that we need T Talents in the future with Steve Mills of IBM.

The following paragraphs are taken from his thought leadership paper.

In the past and to a great degree, the present - the workforce is dominated by two kinds of people:

1. Business generalists with broad horizontal understanding of the business issues affecting their area.
   
2. Hands-on implementation specialists or people with narrow but deep expertise in a specific, often technical, area.
   

The future of business demands a new breed of knowledge worker: the T-shaped person who combines broad understanding of business processes ( the top, horizontal part of the T ) with deep practical execution in a specific functional area ( the bottom, vertical part of the T ). People who share the same understanding of the business process ( top of the T ) can team with colleagues with different I-shaped specialties ( bottom of the T ) to cover the waterfront of a business need without losing that common vocabulary and understanding of their shared business objective.