Innovation: Be Evil to do Good

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 Service Excellence & Methodologies

Dec 14, 2010 | Total views: 42

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This is Google’s informal slogan. We’ll do just the opposite and see if it’s any good! Am I out of my mind? May be a little, but mostly no. This is a continuation of my earlier ramble. Btw, this method, that I describe next is basically Ritual Dissent. So now, we have a concept at hand. The concept now should like:

1. Problem Statement:
2. Concept:
3. Team selection criteria:
4. Success measures: This is what I call a proposal. If you remember the problem I took

Problem Statement:

How do I utilize my commute time effectively?

Concept:
I listen to audio books or musicals, while catching a wink and will later talk to my friends on their views on this

Team selection criteria (who is going to implement this idea?):
My friends and me

Success measures (When do you term that your concept is successful?):
When I rummage through 10 books (measurable goals help big time). Okay, our proposal is ready. Now, next task is to turn the heat on the concept. Find the person or group of people whom you think always puts down good ideas or love to rip apart a good idea aka Evil Scientist.

Now, present your proposal to these people, while asking them to remain in absolute silence. Once you are done explaining your idea, your turn to remain silent. Ask them to beat up the proposal big time. No “Great idea!”, no suspension of judgements, nothing, ask them to unleash pure evil on your proposal.

Since this blog post is a monologue (actually every blog post is… !), I will try to do this on my own concept for a demo

• Audio books are not free, you know
• What about bandwidth? battery – you wont have any charge left to make any phone calls later
• When you are focussed on the audiobooks, where is the question of catching a wink?
• What if nobody picks up the phone when you want to talk to them about the audiobook?
• …

Next step is to include solutions to each of these objections to your proposal

1. There is such a thing as free audiobooks
   (http://www.booksshouldbefree.com,
   http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks)
2. I’ve already subscribed to an internet broadband which is free from 2am to 8am. will set up scheduler on computer to download audiobooks at that time. i don’t care how long it takes, since it is at night. This post was in draft stage for a couple of days, in which time, I actually signed up for unlimited broadband.
3. I will buy spare battery and juggle between the 2
4. Hmm.. Some books does put one to sleep, Jane Austen always does that to me
5. Get on to the next friend or better still blog about the book you just heard.

Add this into your existing proposal and do another round of Ritual Dissent with another set of people, who’ll unleash pure evil for you. One more time, refine the proposal to include this fresh set of evil.

!Santo Vaca¡ I just got myself excellent ideas on how to get boredom out of my 2 hour homeward drive from MTW!! Hurrah!!! If you are still unsatisfied with the results or solutions, you can try one more round of ritual dissent. Next episode: How do all these methods (refer to my earlier blogs) come together? When one runs out of thoughts, one does a recap