Kevin McDermott

Coronavirus revealed that we are more vulnerable than we knew. Even in a national emergency the America we believed in has not been delivering.

In highly charged moments like the one we’re living through, the profound usefulness of an alternative futures approach to scenario planning is in the way it gets us thinking beyond our present.

Some days it feels like we’re living through an era in which every problem is a problem from hell — unprecedented, monstrously large, ramifying wildly, with no obvious solution. For such an age our ideals of leadership are a bad fit.

If we didn’t get emotional we wouldn’t be human. In all of our decisions emotion is among our inputs. That needn’t be a problem if we don’t forget our strategic intent.

In 1848 Karl Marx remarked of his time “all that is solid melts into air”. 2019 is hardly 1848. But when we read Marx muttering about “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty” the mood can seem awfully familiar.

If it’s true that markets work and buyers eventually get what they want then by now Little Brothers should be proliferating in response to our well-documented concern about what's been called “surveillance capitalism”. But they’re not, are they?

“Thought leadership” is on the precipice of becoming an empty phrase. There, I said it.

It’s no stretch at all to think about AI futures in which the pervasiveness of intelligent technology—and the phenomenon of its invisibility—accelerates. Unintended consequences will accelerate as well. Among those could be a liability-insurance crisis like that in the United States in the mid-1980s.

You may not be CEO but you always have power and agency.

On your last day of work would you rather hear yourself praised as a leader or a great team player? The latter sounds so sort of weak by comparison. We all know leaders get more stuff in life than team players.

Why do some continue to grow even as they age? The answer is a wide-awake business model.

What do you predict will be the defining change of the next 25 years? Deep learning is Kevin McDermott's nominee—not the singularity, maybe, but transforming everything about the way we work and the way we imagine ourselves as human, for good and ill. Deep learning will be more transformative of our life on earth than climate change. Which is saying something.

Editing the data need not always be a bad thing, as long it is conscious. And as long as we understand that data isn’t truth. It’s signal.

Market capitalism is all about choice, and choice is all about me me me. That has to feel really great--right?

It is hard to measure diversity when you can’t use demographic categories for proxies. It is harder still when by “diversity” you mean heterogeneous approaches to problem solving.

The highest barrier to managing strategic change is the very success of today’s business model. The reason is that the model is engineered to control the operating environment the organization thinks it has, not the one that’s about to arrive.

We take for granted now that technologies will get better after we buy them. We spend our money in the expectation that the experience of others will make a product steadily better. And we don’t view this as a repair. We view it as an evolution in quality.

Marketers have pared away copy and now look to images to carry most of the burden of their messages How ironic that this move toward text nakedness is happening just at a moment when it's harder than ever to control the message embedded in an image.

Living in the information age is amazing. The difficulty is that we can't always know what actually counts as information.

Contingent employment is (A) a boon offering flexibility and autonomy; or (B) a trap for desperate people offering a bare-bones existence and relieving employers of any obligation for the well-being of the people working for them. It's sort of the way we talk about flipping burgers.

When an animal eats a vegetable it transfers the latter's power to itself though they occupy different categories. That's what good acquisitions do. It's what conventional mergers don't.

Most of us are now accustomed to an idea of ourselves as collections of digital data that are tracked, packaged and turned into money by someone else. We are beginning to view our private behaviors and transactions as goods we can exchange--but for what?

There is no fixed innovation metric suited to all companies, all industries and all audiences. What is universal is that the test of a good metric begins with the same question: What business problem are you trying to solve?

Design thinking is one of those ideas so good and so compelling that it has rapidly advanced to the status of fad. This is too bad because thinking like a designer can be an illuminating way of framing possibilities you never knew were out there.

S. Donald Stookey will be remembered for his invention of a new category of materials called synthetic glass ceramics. Stookey will also be remembered as an exemplar of the everyday hard work and collaboration from which great innovations come.

It is a challenge to think about the next act in the middle of a great success. Simply keeping the machinery humming in support of the current business can feel like more than enough to do. But without a continuous flow of new commercial ideas the good times will end—maybe gradually, maybe all at once.

People are motivated to support a new idea for their own cluster of reasons. They're looking for what's in it for them, of course. But they also want to be inspired to join the next big thing.

Arguments about whether a new product or a new service or a new business model are "disruptive" or "sustaining" innovations are usually premature. Whether a new idea fits in one category or another is usually obvious only in retrospect.

What sort of person is it who can shape new ideas and bring them to life as businesses? Put another way, is an innovator's temperament born or is it built? We say it's built.

Are some people just born curious? Or can curiosity be cultivated? The answer matters because curiosity is a necessity for innovation. If curiosity isn't instinctive among your collaborators then you need to bring it to life.

Why do some make a leap of faith based on preliminary indicators of market success while others want multilayered spreadsheets of evidence that purport to take all the risk out of a new idea?

In an era when every company declares that the answer to the problem of profitable growth is innovation McDermott and his co-authors map a path to making the innovative organization more than just an aspiration.

Daily Innovators have a career stake in beating back fear and feeding optimism, both for their own sake and as a means of enlisting colleagues in the cause of an idea. Here are 10 concrete steps for doing that.

How does the daily innovator manage the tension between imaginative, diverse thinking and an organization's natural aspiration to control?

http://www.atkearney.co.jp/strategy-and-top-line-transformation/article?/a/winning-in-a-turbulent-world

How is the business case built for an idea with no obvious precedents, competitors or reference points? There are ways to answer these questions with directional accuracy that can win support, time and budget for a new idea. Here are the basics.

The ability to describe the value constellation helps an innovator's potential allies understand how an idea might work as a sustainable business. It allows innovators to stress test the idea, develop a commercial strategy for it and build the investment case for its launch.

The selling of a new idea is, at bottom, a story told to customers. A persuasive story is built on insight into who customers are and how they behave. Orientation to that behavior produces clarity about what the organization wishes to be.

There's no doubt that proximity supports the kind of "randomness in the network" essential to breakthrough thinking. The problem for the Daily Innovator is that the convention of a team of people working in a building together has been blown apart for some time now. And there's no going back.

Big thinker Malcolm Gladwell once remarked that "innovation -- the heart of the knowledge economy -- is fundamentally social." Whatever else you may feel about Gladwell's pronouncements he got that one right.

We live in an age of scarcity. But even in this era of scarce resources managers at every level of an organization can still be innovators. Here's how.

Every network produces some purpose beyond the obvious. The conventional way of looking at a network is through the direct-value lens: How much does it cost to run? Networks are a great deal more complicated than that, and managing them—or, more fittingly, optimizing them—requires an expansive strategic imagination.

A.T. Kearney has developed a measure of volatility—a Turbulence Index—that quantifies just how unpredictable our age has become. In an essay with Kevin McDermott of Collective Intelligence, Kearney partners Daniel Mahler and Martin Walker describe the application of the index to the sustained management of volatility.

Big ideas must often wait their moment. For many ideas bubbling just under the surface in Japan their moment was 11 March, 2011. Out of that awful catastrophe may come a new birth for Fukushima and Japan in such 21st century industries as food security and elder care.

Dynamic natural ecosystems are subtly complex and responsive to shock. That’s true of innovation ecosystems too. In such systems the job of the multifunctional project team is to arbitrage complexity in all its elements while sustaining the focus on transformation. Easier said than done.

In the age of permanent uncertainty there is a resurgent interest in scenario planning. Kevin McDermott & Peter Kennedy argue that scenario planning can be lifted out of its conventional uses in strategy development and risk management and used instead to avoid “opportunity blindness”.

Using real-life examples Kevin McDermott argues that involving senior staff in the communications function deepens the invention process. If he’s right that could alter our expectation of what senior managers do in the 21st Century corporation.