Customer Reviews

The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization

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With Jonathan Littman, Kelley provides in this volume a wealth of information and counsel which can help any decision-maker to "drive creativity" through her or his organization but only if initiatives are (a) a collaboration which receives the support and encouragement of senior management (especially of the CEO) and (b) sufficient time is allowed for those initiatives to have a measurable impact. There is a distressing tendency throughout most organizations to rip out "seedlings" to see how well they are "growing." Six Sigma programs offer a compelling example. Most are abandoned within a month or two. Why? Unrealistic expectations, cultural barriers (what Jim O'Toole characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom"), internal politics, and especially impatience are among the usual suspects. That said, I agree with countless others (notably Amabile, Christensen, Claxton, de Bono, Drucker, Kelley, Kim and Mauborgne, Michalko, Ray, and von Oech) that innovation is now the single most decisive competitive advantage. How to establish and then sustain that advantage?

In an earlier work, The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm, Kelley shares IDEO's five-step methodology: Understand the market, the client, the technology, and the perceived constraints on the given problem; observe real people in real-life situations; literally visualize new-to-the-world concepts AND the customers who will use them; evaluate and refine the prototypes in a series of quick iterations; and finally, implement the new concept for commercialization. With regard to the last "step", as Bennis explains in Organizing Genius, Apple executives immediately recognized the commercial opportunities for PARC's technology. Larry Tesler (who later left PARC for Apple) noted that Jobs and colleagues (especially Wozniak) "wanted to get it out to the world." But first, obviously, the challenge was to create that "it" which they then did.

In this volume, as Kelley explains, his book is "about innovation with a human face. [Actually, at least ten...hence its title.] It's about the individuals and teams that fuel innovation inside great organizations. Because all great movements are human-powered." He goes on to suggest that all good working definitions of innovation pair ideas with action, "the spark with fire. Innovators don't just have their heads in the clouds. They also have their feet on the ground." Kelley cites and then examines several exemplary ("great") organizations which include Google, W.L. Gore & Associates, the Gillette Company, and German retailer Tchibo. I especially appreciate the fact that Kelley focuses on the almost unlimited potential for creativity of individuals and the roles which they can play, "the hats they can put on, the personas they can adopt...[albeit] unsung heroes who work on the front lines of entrepreneurship in action, the countless people and teams who make innovation happen day in and day out."

Because organizations need individuals who are savvy about the counterintuitive process of how to move ideas forward, Kelley recommends three "Organizing Personas": The Hurdler, The Collaborator, and The Director.

Because organizations also need individuals and teams who apply insights from the learning roles and channel the empowerment from the organizing roles to make innovation happen, Kelley recommends four "Building personas": The Experience Architect, The Set Designer, The Caregiver, and The Storyteller. Note both the sequence, interrelatedness and, indeed, the interdependence of these ten "personas."

I am reminded of comparable material in A Kick in the Seat of the Pants. Specifically, Roger von Oech's discussion of what he calls "The Four Roles of the Creative Process" (i.e. Explorer, Artist, Judge, and Warrior). Also Six Thinking Hats in which Edward de Bono explains the need for a creativity "wardrobe" comprised of several hats. Specifically, white (rational, logical, and objective), red (emotional), black (negative), yellow (positive, hopeful, optimistic), green (creative and innovative), and blue (ordered, controlled, structured).

What Kelley achieves in this volume is to develop in much greater depth than do von Oech and de Bono what are essentially ten different perspectives. He does so, brilliantly, by focussing the bulk of his attention of those who, for example, seek and explore new opportunities to reveal breakthrough insights...and while doing so wear (at least metaphorically) one of de Bono's hats (probably the green one). Kelley devotes a separate chapter to each of the ten "personas," including real-world examples of various "unsung heroes who work on the front lines of entrepreneurship in action, the countless people and teams who make innovation happen day in and day out."

Two final points. First, most of those who read this book can more easily identify with "unsung heroes" such as those whom Kelley discusses than with luminaries of innovation such as Thomas Edison or with celebrity CEOs such as Andrew Grove, Jeffrey Immelt, Steve Jobs, and Jack Welch, all of whom were staunch advocates of constant innovation in their respective organizations. Also, presumably Kelley agrees with me that those who read and then (hopefully) re-read his book should do so guided by a process which begins with the curiosity of an anthropologist and concludes with the empathy of a caregiver. This is emphatically not an anthology of innovation recipes. Rather, it offers a rigorous intellectual journey whose ultimate value will be determined, entirely, by the nature and extent of innovative thinking which each reader achieves...and who then uses the breakthrough insights to drive creativity throughout her or his own organization.

Outlining ten major roles often played on successful and innovative teams, this book catalogs personas used at IDEO to create new products and services. The book is easy to read and contains powerful, persuasive arguments about some of the activites teams need to participate in to unblock the rut they're in or to combat negative environments. I'd recommend this as a light-hearted read for people who see themselves as an energetic personality and are interested in coming in to work on a Monday and giving their team a kick-start.

However, I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone attempting to build more capacity for innovation into their organization. It doesn't really cover how to hire, use, or retain people in these roles or even how to develop the roles in the people you already have.

Much of the text is also a rolling story - you come away from each of the roles feeling like they must be a critically important part of the team and that the people who have played them are clearly smart people, but unsure of whether it was the role, the person, or both that made the team successful. Or even that the person was more than just a ringside activity on an already creative team.

It seems I've valued my ability to play Devil's Advocate a bit too highly. According to Thomas Kelley, I may have had a hand in quashing new ideas rather than enouraging them.

Not that there's anything wrong with playing Devil's Advocate, but why limit yourself to a single role? You could become typecast as an idea-killer -- a singularly difficult rut to get out of.

Kelley outlines ten other roles -- "Faces" -- that you can adopt when going through the creative process. Anthropologist, Experimenter, Cross-Pollinator, Hurdler, Collaborator, Director, Experience Architect, Set Designer, Storyteller, and Caregiver. Each Face falls into a persona category of Learning, Organizing, or Building.

While no single Face is going to make your ideas any more successful than another, being able to play each role (or assemble a team with a complementary strength in each role) will only increase your chances for success, and make your ideas stronger than ever.

Then Ten Faces also give you an excellent response to that guy (that guy who is no longer me!) who says "Let me play Devil's Advocate a moment..." and proceeeds to rip into your idea and rain on your parade. Simply respond with "Well, let me play Hurdler a moment and tell you how we can get around that problem." or "Let me play Anthropologist a moment and tell you what I've found when observering our customers."

The Ten Faces of Innovation basically gives you the ability to tell the Devil's Advocate to "Go to... Heck."

Kelley takes the reader on tour of the IDEO design studio through his explainations of the ten personas that he believes make innovation happen. I've never really thought of working anyplace else after I joined IBM, but the types of work and the culture he describes in the book make IDEO a real contender if I ever was to leave IBM.

The personas he describes are applicable to any environment, not just IDEO. They are personas, and not job roles. He makes this very clear. Someone can be a software engineer and also manifest a number of the personas described.

The Ten Faces are:

<strong>The Anthropologist</strong> observes the way people behave with a "beginner's mind" to observe nuances that provide a deep understanding of how people interact with their environment.

<strong>The Experimenter</strong> prototypes, and prototypes again. Often in real time drawing on diverse resources to build and test out ideas. This desire to prototype goes as much for objects as it does for services and experiences.

<strong>The Cross-Pollinator</strong> explores other industries and cultures and then translates what they find into the fields they are responsible for. Cross pollinators are also called "t-shaped" people because they have depth in at least one area and breadth of knowledge in many fields.

<strong>The Hurdler</strong> works to overcome obstacles and roadblocks by outsmarting them. Budgets, adversity, bureaucracies and failures are all challenges that The Hurdler may come up with ingenious ways to overcome.

<strong>The Collaborator</strong> "often leads from the middle of the pack" to bring people together and build new solutions. Collaborators work with teammates, colleauges and even competitors. This is similar to Gladwell's Tipping Point notion of a 'connector'

<strong>The Director</strong> brings together talented people and provides an environment and direction fo them to spark their creative talents. They give the spotlight to others and rise to tough challenges, using brainstorming as a way to let talented people shine.

<strong>The Experience Architect</strong> looks to appeal to people's deep needs by developing compelling experiences. The focus on key elements of an experience that are crucial to its succes.These trigger points can be as simple as the alarm clock and bed in a hotel room.

<strong>The Set Designer</strong> creates environments that allow team members to do their best work. The realize that the work environment is an important element of what makes people productive. They make things like brainstorming lounges and dynamic work environments possible.

<strong>The Caregiver</strong> looks to serve customers in a way that is beyond standard service. They anticipate what customers will need and plan for it in advance.

<strong>The Storyteller</strong> carries on the tradition of sharing narratives that communicate fundemental emotions or values. They eschew the 'fast path' where a story would be more appropriate, avoiding 'cutting to the chase' when they can instead engange people in a dialog that moves them. This crowd is not a big fan of Powerpoint :-)

The book's attention aestetic to detail is refreshing - from the glossy paper and color photos, to the cleaver use of color and pull quotes. The content does not fall short either. Not only is the book a great endorsement for IDEO, but for general innovation techniques that really appear to work. The personas described in the book are bolstered by a number of examples that bring them to life.

A definite recommendation.

My impressions about the book:

Positive :

-The comprehensive listing of 10 factors or "faces" since innovation is about "People creating value through the implementation of new ideas."
-Plenty of examples/cases
-Color pictures for illustration of cases
-Once chapter per "face"

Negative:

-Case studies discussed are superficial in analysis
-Some case studies are "force fits"
-No concrete measure to keep the "devil's advocates" at bay- Only a passive approach of listing past successes.

Powerful topic - Weak presentation.

Scope for innovation !!

Could have been better. Perhaps my expectations are high since this book comes directly from an insider at IDEO. Had it been written by someone else, I would have rated it 5 stars.

A very useful book for anyone interested in bringing, supporting or re-energizing creative, innovative thinking within a company or a project team. It gives you a language for and an understanding of how to replace the often destructive "devil's advocate" within your organization with 10 more productive and positive postures -- personas that are about gathering knowledge, creating forward motion, creating meaningful context -- instead of about shooting down ideas, as the "devil's advocate" often does. It's also organized for quick and easy reading. I've been so impressed with this book that I'm about to dive into Kelley's previous work, The Art of Innovation, which I've not yet read. With today's emphasis on innovation as a key element of business success, I think "10 Faces" is a must read.

The Ten Faces of Innovation will remind many people of earlier works that favor mental diversity such as de Bono's Six Thinking Hats and von Oeck's A Kick in the Seat of the Pants.

What's different about The Ten Faces of Innovation is that it has many examples built around the experiences of one organization, the product design firm IDEO. Mr. Kelley is the general manager of that organization which makes this book into both an insider memoir and a sales brochure. So think of this book as being both a thesis and a case history. Multiple examples from one organization in group creativity and innovation have been hard to find in the business literature.

Like most case histories, this one is full of fun stories and occasional examples that may be new to you.

But you soon get the idea that innovation is all about understanding the market, observation as people use offerings and try to solve problems, brainstorming alternatives, rapid prototyping and quick experimentation -- Themes that are developed in more detail in Mr. Kelley's earlier book, The Art of Innovation.

The ten faces are anthropologist (see what's been going on), experimenter (try something new), cross-pollinator (attach two things together for the first time), hurdler (get past stalls), collaborator (bring people together to cooperate), director (set the action into a coherent whole), experience architect (make it Wow!), set designer (facilitate interaction through the environment), caregiver (nurture those involved) and the story teller (who gets the nub of the truth across in a few words -- with plenty of reference to Stephen Denning's, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling -- a fine book).

In the end, Mr. Kelley points out that not every team will have all ten faces, that some people can put on more than one face and you sometimes just have to do the best you can. Some of these roles are creative while others are more into integration or execution. That part of the taxonomy wasn't as well developed. The book would have been stronger if that line of thought had been spelled out more in the various situations that arise.

By the end, I found myself a little bored and a little disappointed. While Mr. Kelley knows a lot about his own organization and its projects for famous clients, he's on less firm ground when he writes about others . . . often relying on books rather than interviews. I was particularly struck that he entirely missed mentioning P&G's new approach to developing new products through contests among world experts. That method seemingly makes a lot of what Mr. Kelley is saying obsolete. Perhaps it is still relevant if you cannot afford to run such global contests. But most organizations can based on the Goldcorp Challenge model.

You will probably gain more benefit from reading The Art of Innovation than this one. I also recommend Corporate Creativity as a better source of case studies for how companies have accomplished more through their own creative efforts and of course, Professor Amabile's many wonderful studies.

IDEO seems to me like an ideal employer. A lot of firms talk about innovation resulting in nice reports but not in new products or processes. IDEO is working together with a whole range of organizations to shape these new products and learns a lot on innovation processes during the projects. An ultimate win-win!
Tom Kelley collects stories about IDEO client-projects and uses them in his books on innovation. No heavy theories and frameworks in his books, just stories. This book uses ten personas as umbrella, but the content could easily be switched between chapters. The stories give a nice insight into IDEO and different cases, but new insights are rare. You can use the 'personas' to look at your own situation, but since they are rather general don't expect too much of it. The author doesn't bother elaborating on the framework of personas, so why should you?
It's an easy book to read (it took me half a day) and I enjoyed it because we have too little IDEOs in the world and this books shares some of their passion for solutions with you.
One of the personas introduced in the book is the storyteller and that is exactly the value of the author and this book. No more, no less.

There are few companies whose products can remain the same for year after year. The most successful companies have been those who can continue to innovate and replace their own products with better ones before their competitors do it instead. Gillette is a classic example where their new razors replace the razors they sold last year. And of course the new razor blades are dramatically improved, at least in the marketplace and in the profit margin to Gillette.

The first chapter in this book is on the Devil's Advocate who can kill new innovation while seemingly not being negative.

After that, each of ten chapters cover a different approach to encourage innovation that will fit into moving the corporation forward. The author has developed a set of clever names to describe the various types of supporters that they have been able to identify as helpful. By understanding the type of support you are getting from an individual, you'll know what information to give him to help him help you to look good.

This is a great analysis of how to create a culture of innovation in a company.

Tom Kelley's book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, provides strategies for companies of any sort to boost their creative power in the marketplace through reinventing the roles of their employees. This book, through structured lessons filled with relevant case studies, chronicles ten characters that workers can assume to promote new avenues of innovation. These characters/ personalities are: The Anthropologist, The Experimenter, The Cross-Pollinator, The Hurdler, The Collaborator, The Director, The Experience Architect, The Set Designer, The Storyteller, and The Caregiver. Through each of these dynamic personalities, an organization can develop the individual creativity of its employees as well as the innovative techniques of the entire corporation.

I believe that this book is useful for practically any person who believes in the transforming powers of creativity and innovation within a company. Kelley definitely notes time and time again that the idea of the ten faces of innovation does not specifically apply to managers, low-level employees, or people who are working in a `creative' company or industry. I also began to believe, through Kelley's assertions, that his diverse readers could all profit from some bit of information or another that lends itself to their personal type of business. While I think that many of the main readers of the book may be organizational consultants, research and development workers, and upper-level employees, the most effective target of the book is the individual team member at any level of an organization. In fact, I think it is the kind of book that could/ should be handed to a new employee at the signing of their contract to emphasize the company's need for effort in innovation no matter through what department. The new employee entering a company that wants to undergo a rejuvenation in innovation can get a fresh and unusual perspective on their new work environment, and analyze its creative needs immediately.

The only aspect of this book that continually bothered me was the constant list of analogies drawn between creative teamwork efforts and the Olympics. While, yes, this sounds quite strange, Kelley does seem to favor Olympic sports as a way to emphasize a worker overcoming any type of creative obstacle. I found that the use of Olympic sports comparisons were overused, and thus the sharpness of the point the author was trying to make was occasionally lost on me. I felt that there are better comparisons with which to switch up idea explanations that may not necessarily be sports-oriented, which still could emphasize the point Kelley was trying to illustrate.

Overall, this is possibly the best business book I have yet read. The information is as equally informative as it is motivational. This may mainly be because Kelley's aim is to inspire small movements toward major shifts in viewpoint and operation, so his suggestions are never overwhelming and play to almost anyone's individual talents, whether they be scientific in nature or customer-oriented. I would also recommend the book to anyone entering a new corporate profession, as its motivational capacity gets the reader pepped to put their best foot forward, and gives tips that you can work with everyday...even the repetition of the book gets you in the mindset to make a creative environment for yourself.