Developed by David Owens at Vanderbilt University and customized for the cultural sector with National Arts Strategies, this course is designed to help arts and culture leaders create an environment where new ideas are constantly created, shared, evaluated and the best ones are successfully put to work. One of the toughest challenges for any leader is getting traction for new ideas. Winning support can be a struggle. As a result, powerful new ideas often get stuck. This is especially true in the cultural sector. People involved in arts and culture often have little time and even less money for experimentation and risks. This course will help those in the performing arts, museums, zoos, libraries and other cultural organizations build environments where new management and program ideas flourish. Leading Innovation in Arts & Culture will teach you how to make an "innovation strategy" a fundamental component of your organization's overall strategy. In this seminar you will learn to: - Analyze constraints on innovation in your organization, foresee obstacles and opportunities, and develop a shared vision - Develop a process to manage the demands of multiple stakeholders, shifting priorities and the uncertainty inherent in new initiatives - Create a culture for innovation and risk-taking that generates new perspectives and challenges existing practice - Create a strong customer focus within your organization that anticipates customer needs National Arts Strategies worked with David Owens to customize this course for those working in the cultural sector. They based their work on David Owens’ Leading Strategic Innovation in Organizations course. This highly interactive 8-week course will engage you in a series of class discussions and exercises.
L6-Part 6 History Constraints
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Leading Innovation in Arts and Culture
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Societal Constraints
This week's session explores the perspective of the sociologist and anthropologist. People who adopt this view argue that innovation is likely to be constrained by (1) the views that a society holds of itself, (2) how it enforces those views, and (3) the history by which it came to hold and share those views. In more basic terms, this view suggests that innovation will fail when a society does not see how a proposition for change can make it become more of what it wants to be. Society will oppose changes that are antithetical to the ideals that it holds for itself. This constraint should feel familiar to arts and culture, where so much work challenges how we as individuals, groups and societies see and understand ourselves and our world.
As in other sessions, in addition to the watching the lectures, you are asked to do the diagnostic survey and reflection essay, and participate in the forum discussions. As an additional exercise (All Students), this week will also require you to analyze a case study.
Rencontrer les enseignants
David A. Owens, PhD, PEProfessor
Practice of Management and Innovation
Jim RosenbergIndependent Consultant and Senior Advisor at NAS
[MUSIC].
Now I'd like to talk about history as a constraint.
Like what is the role of history plays, what came before and how does that create
obligation for what comes in the future? And so, history, let's think of this as
the you know, obligations that are created by past beliefs.
You know, how yesterday's actions and experiences and decisions shape, that is
constrain, right today's options and the things that we have as possibilities
today. And so if we're going to innovate, to
what extent do we have to take account of what came before.
You know the past really is never dead. It just sort of keeps coming back and
asserting itself in different ways. So that's what we have to watch out for,
is when things in the past, we're not aware of them.
We don't understand why they are the way they are, and then what it is that we
have to do in order to acknowledge that. And its to, to honor what came before in
a way that allows us to move forward. And it does not constrain what we're
trying to do, go forward. So then we're going to talk about three
things. things in the world.
That is sort of physical infrastructure. The things we connect to.
We're going to talk about knowledge in the world.
The skills of practices. Things that people know, you know, how
they know of them, things that people have come to understand and their
understanding in the world. The kind of cultural practices and
traditions and what kind of obligation that creates that we have to consider as
we innovate at a societal level. So things in the world.
Think about things in the world like the infrastructures.
Now we have segway and I'll drive on the street and I'll drive on the sidewalk
then it becomes a problem. The segway needed this infrastructure in
order to allow adoption to happen. Now without the infrastructure without
the place to write it, it was dead innovation.
I'll show you another innovation early problem the typewriter.
So the early typewriters were problematic, because they had laid out
the keyboards alphabetically and as people would learn to type and type
faster and faster there were constant jams.
And so these kind of jams, I don't know if you've ever played with a a typewriter
like this so it's real easy to get the keys to jam up.
And so in the late 1800's I think it was like 1868 maybe Christoper Sholes came up
with a different layout. And so what he figured out was that there
are these keystrokes that are in close having keys that are closed to each other
made these mechanical things that go up close to each other and they would jam.
And so he set it was all spread out the frequency of these letters.
In, in essence, slowing down the person from typing, and it, it'll create fewer
jams, so basically he spread it out and he came up with, called a QWERTY
keyboard. QWERTY, which is named for the top row of
letters across the the keyboard, as you can see here.
So people like the QWERTY keyboard. People learn how to use it.
People were going along with it. You know it wasn't quite as fast as it
could be. But nonetheless, it was you know people
thought, yeah this is great. Soon someone came out with a different
keyboard. This was Blickensderfer and he came out
with a keyboard and it was faster. It was lighter.
It was cheaper. And also it did not jam.
And the reason it jammed was it use the balls.
So like an IBM select, you can see one of those, it has little balls with all
letters on it and it would go that way. It was mechanical, in was about 20 years
later. In fact, it was very very superior to the
Remington from a technical point of view but was unable to take over what happened
in the intervening 20 years. So when Remington bought the rights to
the Sholes keyboard to QWERTY keyboard. They started a number of secretary
schools that started to professionalize in the you know, based in the profession
of being a secretary, they have people learn how to do it.
So they have about 20 years of head start and even though it's something that came
along that was better, faster, cheaper, they were unable to unseat it.
The people said no thanks, because the keyboard layout was different than the
QWERTY keyboard layout. might have had a, you know something like
this, I use a Dvorak keyboard, even nowadays, you have an option on the
computer, you can actually change the keyboard, and yet people don't.
Well why not? Well, we have this installed base, right,
there's knowledge in the world, we know how to do it, we know this way, this
infrastructure's there. And so if I were to produce a keyboard
that looked like one of these other things here, it would be hard for people
to learn. I couldn't be insured that there would be
enough people in the world that know how to do that.
The QWERTY keyboard, on the other hand, I can assume that everyone knows how to use
that keyboard. This other keyboard, the piano keyboard,
this thing drives me crazy. It's got like three keys, then two, then
three, then two, then all the black keys, and then, you know, there's some place,
some time people know up there, they push, they know, which, what, which one
to push. It really is actually kind of perplexing.
Actually I know how to play the piano and it's still perplexing to me.
Because as you try to learn more and more things it's not intuitive at all, and yet
if you were to produce something that was, you were going to call a keyboard.
It pretty much has a look like this, because there's a history and when, that
history creates obligation for going forth.
Unless what I was doing had something to do with these keys, I probably should
pretty much stick to that kind of keyboard layout.
If I want to assume there's people in the world who can actually use the things.
I'm proposing innovation. Back around the time of the invention of
the gramophone Thomas Edison what he did was he had the gramophone and then a live
person play behind the screen. And trying to get people, training people
to hear the difference between them to say,you know what, the fact is the rise
is actually, the gramophone is actually superior to this person playing.
So the person playing will make mistakes it won't sound as good.
It doesn't sound as in, in the same way as this gramophone here.
So it had reverb. It has all sorts of things that the, the,
the room, sound of the room came with the gramophone.
Which is where the person behind the, on the screen didn't sound as good.
And so what was happening was there were these understandings in the world about
what music is, what does it mean to consume music, that he was actually
changing by doing this. In fact this was an early version of the,
you may be of a generation where you remember there was some ads that were, is
it live or is it memorex. and so he was doing this a long time
before that. Even later, there's still this idea of
what is high-end stereo, you know,, is it vinyl, is it CDs, is it mp3s, and that
people keep you know, there's a constant debate about this, about what does it
mean to here, how can you hear these, these different kinds of music in some
way? What is better?
What does it mean to be high end? And these are things that people have an
understanding and distinct opinions about.
And so the history of what came before is something we have to account for and our
beliefs about these things. Also, if we look back at the industry
constraints we talked about last week about the market.
So if I have a lot of vinyl, I'm really reluctant to buy a bunch of CDs.
If I have a bunch of CDs, I'm really reluctant to go to MP3s.
And so this is this kind of, of adoption cost we're thinking about here as well.
So in addition to the history, creating this kind of knowledge in the world,
these things that people know. It also creates these adoption costs,
these changes then that we have to make, in order to change our lives around these
new things. We adopt innovations for what they say
about us. And so, is there good reason to stand in
line,you know, at the Apple Store, wherever, in the iStore, the G-phone
store. stand around the, the block, you know,
sleep there and camp out there overnight, for that device when you can just order
online, just get it a few days later. I mean do you really need to make a phone
call that day with that thing? Why do people do that?
Well this is what this is about them. So it's more than just the function of
the device it really is just with the device is about them.
If I have one of these then I'm one of those kind of people and one of those
kind of people who art of desirable in certain way.
And so what it says about us is an important aspect of this about
the[UNKNOWN] in the world because people understand what understand what it is and
people understand how to interpret this thing.
And so when they say you're with it, understand, 'oh, he's one of those
people, I like that. So there three ways of history things in
the world, you know, the physical things, infrastructures, things that we connect
to, knowledge in the world with skills, and practices that we undertake in what
they mean. And that also our understandings in the
world of cultural practices and traditions that we have.
And how it is that we express those traditions through time.
So if we want to overcome history constraints again, I think overcoming is
kind of a strong word. I think it's if we want to understand
history constraints and how it is we can operate within them then offer the
following. Let's think about these three things,
like things in the world, knowledge in the world, and understandings in the
world. Think about the physical infrastructure.
I understand and I've, I did spend a little time with the people that created
the Nissan Leaf. And one thing that's happening here is
there's a company that is putting charging stations up and down and across
the state of Tennessee, where Nissan headquarters So there's one problem which
is the cars. If you want to fast charge them.
If you want to charge them quickly. They require a high voltage power system
of 480 volts. And the prob, problem is basically
there's gas stations everywhere. But there's not everywhere that you can
get 480 volts. Most homes will not have a 480 access to
480 volts. It's usually industrial places or, or
eating establishments, places like that. Eating establishments have them because
they have large ovens, and large, you know, washers, and, and, large machines
and heaters and things like that and so they have that kind of voltage there.
So, what they did was they actually partnered up with these eating places to
say, you have the infrastructure in place, you have the 480 volts and that
kind of thing we need. And we have people you know, that we can
bring, so let's collaborate on this and let's actually leverage the
infrastructure that you have and allow us to charge cars while people are here.
In fact, you can charge one of these cars to about 80 or 90% of the charge within
half an hour which is maybe about the time that a person would spend inside of
a a small restaurant inside of a place like this.
Like this Cracker Barrel in in, in Nashville.
Though I have seen some in other places as well.
And a Walmart, I've seen charges in places where people would go, and spend
some time. And also where the infrastructure is
accessible. So again, this car would be very
difficult to bring out if it weren't for the infrastructure.
Consider also, this was very similar to the digital camera.
The digital camera was Sony focused on the camera, whereas the infrastructure
was also being done by others. So the printing was being done by HP.
The hard drive was being done by Conner. The CPU was being done by Intel.
And so as those things were done that they became the infrastructure for, to
allow the digital camera to exist. And so again, this is sort of
understanding what's out there, right, as a way of being able to leverage, being
able to use to help our innovation move forward.
Knowledge and practices in the world where the skills and practices that
people have and how they have that. I don't know if you ever had the
experience where you walk up to a door and you're pushing on it and pushing on
it and it won't, it won't open. It's like, you're trying to push it.
And then someone says, hey, wait a minute.
That's a pulling door, not a pushing door.
They say, why? Looks like it should be a pushing door.
I don't understand this. A friend and colleague, Donald Norman
wrote a great book called The Design of Everyday Things.
It's about design and how we design things that are actually not intuitive.
People know a lot of things. But there is knowledge in the world, and
so why don't we use that? If people know things like how to hold
something or how to operate something, why not use that in the innovation?
Because if people had to learn new things, they're much more likely to not
adapt because the things that we don't understand are much more likely to reject
than things that we do understand. So there is this knowledge in the world
that comes from history. That comes from people's past
experiences. So we use that.
We should definitely be using that knowledge in the world.
Then there's this thing of understanding cultural practices in the world.
That there are open standards. A soda it is a, a, a soft drink.
You know, they generally come in 12 ounce sizes.
Right, and that's a standard. And so unless you have a really good
reason for not using a 12 ounce cup or a televised drank.
And your making a drink. use 12 ounces.
Because the machines will hold that. Everything's about that.
If your trying to make some change around that then that's fine.
But don't make arbitrary changes, just to make changes.
JPEG standard. You know, JPEG, the photographic
standard. You know, if your doing something
photographic, use the standard. Unless you have a really good reason not
to then you should use it. People will complain about it.
Say oh, it's terrible, it's blocky, it has, you know, it's not as good as it
could be. Well if you change it just to change it,
it's very unlikely that people are going to adopt that.
Because cameras don't work on it and there's all the software that works on
it. And people understand JPEG and want to
use it, so allow them to use it unless you have a very, very good reason not to
and then you need to explain to people why this is not JPEG.
Why do you want to use something else? So these three ways of history, things in
the world, knowledge in the world and understanding in the world, are things we
can leverage, that we can use, that's not about overcoming an option, we can
potentially use them to help us drive an option of, of our innovations in the end.
So how do we overcome these societal constraints, you know?
Is that, is that really the goal here? So again I've been saying all along, that
it's really not about subverting society, that the societal constraints have a
role. They have something important in them.
It's about protecting society. You know, it could be that society's
right, that your proposition for change is you know, it's not going to work, that
it's going to be harmful to you, it's going to be harmful to society.
And so again, you want to consider these things worth of values and their values
any of that drives. How our social control.
Like living asserted around our innovation.
And also whats the role of history in terms of what our proposition for change
is. How are we changing in, or is there any
obligation that we have to the past in the direction that we change.
So with that that closes out our discussion of societal constraint.
And next up is the segway case. What I need you to do is read the segway
case before you actually go to the video, and then watch the video and we'll talk
about and debrief the segway case.
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