dispatches from the new world of work

Cool Friend: Kelley

Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO, is back with his second Cool Friend interview. His new book under discussion is The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization, coauthored with Jonathan Littman. From the following you can see how the roles ("faces") work in real life:

[Someone at a meeting] will say, "Now, Erik, don't take it personally. I was just being devil's advocate." And in fact, nothing could be more personal. They just shot down your favorite idea, right? Anyway, the devil's advocate makes a pretty darn good illustration of how a role works. ... I believe that if we were to catch ourselves about to say, "Let me be devil's advocate," we could turn that around into something more constructive, such as, "What this idea really needs, or "What this lacks," or "The way I would make this better is ..."

You can read the whole interview here. Welcome back, Tom!

Cathy Mosca posted this on 11/02/05.

Comments

I'd really like to learn more about the role of the anthropologist and rapid ethnographic frameworks after digesting this light version of a much more complicated subject. Are there any bloggers out there who can share their experiences?

Posted by Dau at November 2, 2005 2:06 PM

Dau, perhaps not an anthropologist but I am an Innovation Consultant and philosopher, and a Ph.D. candidate in Hermeneutics. I mean it is possible to combine both things.

By the way, IÂ´ve already ordered the book.

Posted by Felix Gerena at November 3, 2005 5:15 AM

Hiï¼ŒDau

Posted by Dai at November 3, 2005 9:25 AM

Yep. If you're going to shoot an idea down, at least bring something of value to the table... like another idea. Or a way to make the original idea work better.

Good post (and link).

Posted by Olivier Blanchard at November 3, 2005 12:45 PM

I couldn't disagree more!!!

The devils advocate (DA) is the most underutilised role in business - we need MORE of this not less.

The problem is not with the "role" of the advocate itself but the values and the direction of the group of people that this person belongs.

Oppositional behaviour can be extremly constructive or destructive depending on the style and, more importantly the intent of the person.

A good DA makes the idea much much stronger by adding rigor to the debate and helping the group to explore the idea in more detail. Seeing problems AND FINDING SOLUTIONS TO THEM is a vital component in transforming any cool idea into reality.

The problem is that supportive and at the same time oppositional behaviour is actually very hard to pull off - it takes real skill and self awareness to do it well - it's no wonder that most people default to blocking this approach.

Some tips from a self confessed D.A.

1) Don't oppose for the sake of it

2) praise the idea and enthuse first - help the emotion to be positive. (i.e. not - "this won't work because" and more "hey neat idea I like a,b,c we will have to watch out for x,y,z though")

3) lead the whole group in looking for issues rather than raising them yourself (e.g. "cool idea - I would love to see this implemented can anyone see anything that would get in the way and maybe we can help overcome that")

Trust me these approaches really work and allow a DA to bring a positive contribution to the table

Posted by PaulH at November 5, 2005 6:49 AM