Makinginnovationmore

In my Twitter stream yesterday I found this nice article by Michael Schrage entitled Embrace your ignorance.  His slightly provocative title is meant to signal that perhaps you live in a self-satisfied bubble of assumed intelligence and knowledge about your customer, when in fact you should be happy to be humble about your ignorance, and act accordingly.

Schrage goes on to extol the values of experimentation and "big data" as methods to discover what customers really want, but here he loses me a bit.  I'd rather go back to an even simpler way of discovering needs, by asking and observing in real time where the real opportunities and pains exist, or where actual solutions fall short or have gaps.  Ethnography, getting close to the customer and their use of a solution or their experience, is what indicates where the opportunities and problems lie.  From those observations we can extrapolate and create potential solutions, which can become the basis for experiments, which will prove or perhaps disprove our hypothesis.  I worry that all the emphasis on "big data" will signal shifts that seem important but aren't, or miss factors that can't be captured in quantitative data.  As Einstein noted, not everything that counts can be counted.

Embracing your Ignorance

Good innovators are humble people.  I don't mean that they are people who grovel, or let others walk all over them.  Certainly Steve Jobs will never be known as a "humble" person in that sense.  What I mean is that they have the scars of experience, of making the wrong assumptions or even having the audacity to suggest they know what customers needed, and failing.  Humility comes when we recognize that customers decide the value and importance of our products and services.  No matter how valuable or important we think they are, customers determine the value.  The faster we understand this and learn to listen and observe, the more likely we are to create innovations that matter.

In our work we've identified a number of attributes that good innovators possess.  One of those we highlight is "beginner's mind" - that is, the ability to examine a problem or opportunity as if for the first time.  Too many times we approach a problem with the full suite of knowledge and experience, never recognizing that all the knowledge and experience narrows the potential scope of outcomes.  Knowledge and experience about candles doesn't open the door to electric light, it merely makes more effective candles.  To think differently and creatively about a problem or opportunity we need to think about it with a beginner's mindset, something that Jobs to his credit did well.  Rather than rush to apply everything we know, instead approach the problem as if for the first time.  In the absence of knowledge or experience, how might you solve the challenge or problem?

Losing your arrogance

Too often corporate innovators are guilty of unintentional arrogance.  They are guilty of assuming that they know what customers want, or worse, of simply creating new technology or new solutions with features that they either think customers want, or features that are simply better than what the competition offers.  This arrogance is often built on past successes that span years, so the arrogance can be earned, and in some cases even justified.  But increasingly the further a person is from a customer and their needs, and the longer it's been since you walked in that customer's shoes, the more likely you are arrogating - the word arrogance derives from - making undue claims in an overbearing manner.  Pride goeth before a fall, but I suspect arrogance goes shortly thereafter.

Ignorance or Apathy?

There's an old joke about education, where the individual in question responds with I don't know and I don't care (Ignorance and/or Apathy).  In the case of a modern day innovator, armed with social media, surveying tools, focus groups, big data, experiments and a host of other methods to gather insight, ignorance simply isn't plausible. There is simply too much data, too much information to plead ignorance about an opportunity.  That suggests apathy, which I'll also reject.  Most innovators I've come in contact with are passionate people, who want to do a good job and deliver value to customers.  What's left after ignorance and apathy?  Well, there are two remaining reasons why innovation discovery fails:  time constraints and arrogance.

The first barrier is a time or resource constraint.  Far too many people recognize the need for more customer interaction, more data analysis, more discovery and experimentation, but they simply cannot find the time.  Highly efficient processes leave little time and room for experimentation or new discoveries.  Thus many innovations are launched on a hope and prayer that the innovator guessed correctly, since they didn't have time to gather needs.  On the other hand is arrogance.  Too many innovators and their companies believe they know what customers need and deliver new technologies or features without ever discovering needs.  They might have the time but don't have the inclination.  This approach happens far more frequently in high tech or software industries, where adding new features is simpler, but it happens in all industries.  Arrogance is a real problem for innovators who assert that they know what customers want, or assert that new products and features are so compelling that they will override customer concerns.

Get rid of your arrogance, get rid of your ignorance


If you are willing to lose a bit of your arrogance, you can easily get rid of your ignorance.  Becoming a bit more humble, interacting with customers, understanding their needs and journeys, will open the door to new discoveries.  With these discoveries you become more knowledgeable about their needs and possible innovation opportunities, which you can test and validate through experiments.  Losing your arrogance helps you lose your ignorance.  Sustaining your arrogance sustains your ignorance and wastes valuable time and resources.

The title of this post is a bit provocative, and that's on purpose.  Every company wants to innovate, and further they desire that the limited innovation they accomplish succeed wildly.  This is of course whistling past the graveyard, as most innovations, like most venture capital investments, won't return the initial investment.  Instead, most companies demand innovation results on par with the iPhone while funding innovation with the equivalent of corporate bake sales.  But this post isn't intended to deride the often inadequate resourcing of innovation, it's meant to point out the reasons behind a rather uncomfortable fact:  even good ideas often fail in the marketplace.  This skips right over the outright failure of bad ideas and bad products, of which there are legion.  Those probably deserve to die an ignominious death.  But why do good ideas and products seem to have such a high failure rate?

There are plenty of reasons for good, innovative products to fail in the marketplace.  Perhaps the customers were too aggressive in their needs statements, or not aggressive enough.  Perhaps the innovator identified the right needs but was too early or too late in the market or technology window.  Perhaps the need exists but the effort for the customer to overcome inertia and actually make the change seems too high (this is my challenge with Slack).  Perhaps the product or service actually fills an important need, but there were other, more important or urgent needs that the innovator ignored.  In other words, there are plenty of reasons why good, well-thought out innovations can fail.  But none of these is as important as what Paul Hobcraft and I have been writing about recently.  One of, if not the most important reason good innovative products fail in the marketplace is because they don't fit within an existing ecosystem or plug into an important platform.  That is, they are independent, discrete products when a customer seeks a comprehensive, seamless solution.

The problem with discrete product innovation

Let's imagine that a company identifies customer needs and does a good job generating ideas to arrive at a new product innovation, which it then launches into the marketplace.  Having done everything correctly from their point of view, the innovation team waits with expectation to see how well the product performs.  The consumer, on the other hand, encounters the product, which has a number of new capabilities, bells and whistles, but doesn't integrate usefully or seamlessly into a set of products, services, business models, channels, data and interactions that the customer has already constructed, or had constructed for them.  While the new product outweighs and outranks the product it was meant to replace, the new product ignores connectivity, seamless integration and a host of other factors that the customer cares about to get their "jobs" done.  Jobs, you see, may be broken into discrete activities, but the customer really cares about the total experience or journey.  Optimizing one step in the process but failing to acknowledge the journey doesn't create value, it creates new work for customers, or forces them to change the work they've done.

Platforms and Ecosystems

The English poet John Donne wrote that "no man is an island".  He meant that we are mutually dependent on each other.  Likewise, in a highly integrated, hyper connected word, no product is an island.  It relies on other products, services, business models, channels, data and standards in order to operate.  There are two key ideas at work here:  platforms and ecosystems, and these must matter and shape innovation.

Platforms are simply agreed connectivity standards that become a backplane or common operating infrastructure to allow disparate products, technologies and services to interact.  Google, Amazon and others are creating these platforms where innovators will be able to plug in, interoperate and gain value from the other goods and services residing on the platform.

Ecosystems are comprised of the other vendors, technologies, data and ancillary products and services that offer the customer the full, integrated, cohesive and seamless experience they want.

Ignore these at your peril

So, back to the lone innovator.  Too often innovators, individual and corporate, are too myopic.  They identify one "job" to be done, and focus narrowly on accomplishing that task with more features, skills or elan.  While doing so the customer plays a role in describing the job or task, but often failing to connect the job to other jobs or tasks that are mutually intertwined or dependent.  Unless the solution sustains the seamless experience or "journey", the customer isn't likely to switch to a new product simply because it is slightly better in the abstract, but deteriorates the rest of the activity, journey or experience.

To be a successful innovator, one must understand the totality of the customers' needs, observe the platforms and ecosystems that provide the comprehensive solution that customers want, which is a total, comprehensive and seamless experience, and then decide what the key needs and features are that the innovator can contribute, and how the idea must be shaped to either fit within an existing ecosystem and platform, or how to radically disrupt the existing ecosystems and platforms and create something new and more compelling for the customer.   Placing a new and interesting discrete product that does not align to the expectations of the customer for a seamless experience or worse interrupts or detracts from an otherwise comprehensive solution is worse than not innovating at all.

Increase experience or reduce friction in the journey
The eventual failure of most good ideas isn't because of market windows or customer needs.  It isn't because the product fails to meet specific targets or price points.  It's because innovators don't open their apertures to understand the totality of customer needs, and in a very connected world don't understand the important platforms and ecosystems that the innovative product will enter.  Once you understand the interconnectedness and create products that sustain or improve that, or reduce friction in a customer experience or journey, your innovations will succeed.  No man, or idea, is an island, and in markets where connectivity and interrelationships are increasing and platforms and ecosystems are ever more tightly woven together, your innovation cannot stand alone.

Paul Hobcraft and I have been writing a series of blog posts about innovation, ecosystems, platforms and what we believe customers will ultimately demand:  seamless experiences.  As products and services proliferate and basic needs are met, customers become more sophisticated and more demanding, desiring products, services and business models that work together and don't require configuration, integration or effort by the consumer to "make them work".  Customers and consumers increasingly expect a seamless experience when using a new product.  If the product or service requires the customer to combine products, read manuals, acquire other products or services to make the solution work, the new product is likely to receive far less acclaim.

Understanding that, we should understand also that the tools that once helped innovators create new products aren't the same tools that we need today when customers demand seamless experiences.  Or, put another way, those original tools are still valuable, but by themselves they solve only a small portion of the overall challenge.  Take, for example, "jobs to be done" methodologies.

Jobs to be done

First developed by Clayton Christensen and expanded on by Tony Ulwick and others, "jobs to be done" is a nice methodology to understand customer needs.  Christensen and Ulwick propose the idea that customers hire products to do jobs for them.  If a product does the job well, it is "hired".  To help customers accomplish tasks, we need to understand the jobs they are doing.  This methodology has worked well for years to help innovators find unmet needs that can be addressed.  However, the focus for today's innovation needs may be too narrow. Traditionally, the "jobs to be done" were relatively discrete and narrowly focused, often leading to product features or benefits.  In a market where seamless experiences become more important, a too narrow application of "jobs to be done" risks solving only a fraction of the total customer need.

Paul and I have suggested that perhaps we should move from "jobs to be done" to "experiences to be had" - that is, widening the aperture of the question to encompass the entire experience, rather than narrowly focusing just on discrete jobs.

Whole Product

This is an "oldy but a goody" as my father likes to say.  Geoffrey Moore developed the concept of the "whole product" in the 1980s and the concepts are still true today, especially in high tech fields.  Whole product refers to the idea that the majority of customers don't want to buy untested, unproven technologies.  Early adopters and tech enthusiasts will buy new technology, but the larger market waits for demonstrated proof of viability, compatibility, product support, complementary products, good support services.  Thus, Moore suggests that a "whole product" is one that combines all of these capabilities and features.

We'd like to adopt this thinking by saying that customers want more than "whole products" they want "whole experiences".  The product focused thinking is valuable, but must be combined with the larger context of what the customer is trying to accomplish, what experiences they want or need from a new product and the ecosystem in which the new product or service must operate.  A fantastic stand alone product that fails to work within the customer's ecosystem of products and services, or one that forces the customer to make compromises or work diligently to integrate to other solutions is not going to be successful.

Customer Experience Journey

This methodology is increasingly gaining popularity because it requires an innovator to think about the entire "life span" of a customer's interaction with his or her products.  The journey considers the awareness, acquisition and use of a product, and done well also considers aspects like omni-channel experience and the eventual disuse and discarding of a product or service.  Customer experience journeys highlight "touchpoints" or moments of truth where the use of the product can be combined with experiential factors like additional material, contact by a support center, access to the product's web site and many other interactions that build the experience of the product.  Those touch points can improve a customer's experience or degrade it.  The customer experience journey is a valuable step toward understanding the experiential aspects of the product in the customer's life.

However, even this isn't enough because the customer experience journey can be a very narrow perspective, taken from the aspect of the product and not fully considering how the customer views the product in relation to its ecosystem and the experiences the customer is hoping to achieve overall.

Design Thinking

Increasingly, design thinking is percolating into the innovator's toolbox.  IDEO and others have been proponents of design thinking for years, and I'm happy to say that design thinking is growing as an innovation input.  The risk with design thinking is again that it becomes "product design" thinking, focused on the design of products, rather than design thinking meant to help innovators and customers design products, services and experiences.

A seamless experience is almost by definition a designed experience.  There are very few accidents that result in a perfectly seamless experience that meet or exceed customer expectations.  To do this effectively, we need to understand the customer's "whole experience" expectations and map customer journeys, and then use design thinking to craft the anticipated experience.

Once we understand the designed experience, we can then begin to understand how, or even if, such expectations can be met by the existing ecosystems and platforms.

Ecosystems/Platforms

Unless your company name is Apple, you are very unlikely to build a completely integrated, designed experience that is a closed ecosystem.  Apple did accomplish this by creating a small range of products (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc) that are basically extensions of the same core product and surrounding them with the same sets of features and services (iTunes as an example).

Without this defined, closed ecosystem, most innovators must rely on third party partners, channels, data streams and other capabilities to provide the aspects of a seamless experience. This means that innovators must 1) understand what the existing ecosystem can offer and 2) reach accommodations and  partnerships with third parties to create more seamless experiences.  Thus, innovation isn't just about a new widget, its also about understanding the role the widget plays in a consumer's life and how to make that role as seamless as possible.

Innovating in the new expectation


All of this explanation ultimately means that any one of these tools simply provides a narrow glimpse into what customers actually want - we need to use them all.  Further, we need to move quickly beyond the narrow focus of product innovation to experience innovation, because that's where customers are moving - if they aren't already there.  The shift in the use of tools and techniques isn't overly difficult.  What will be difficult is the shift in mindsets, as innovators recognize that products play only a small portion in the expected experience.  This will mean that product organizations and budgets may give way to experience organizations, where companies craft experiences that products must fit into, rather than the other way around, which is the norm today.

In an earlier post on the Ecosystems 4 Innovating site I suggested that innovators must understand the expectations of customers.  As such that's not new or especially insightful.  Innovators are supposed to find new and unmet customer needs, and solve them for customers in ways that benefit the customer and create value for the innovator.

What's important about this idea is that innovators must begin to understand the maturity and expectations of their customers.  Henry Ford could offer an exceptionally basic black Model T Ford because there were no other options.  He was fulfilling the most basic sets of needs for his customer - efficient transportation.  When people didn't have cars, they didn't care much about the color or other features.  As other automobile manufacturers entered the market, they realized that the basic needs were met, and began to add features, colors, options and eventually a family of models and styles.  We can look back over 100 years ago and realize that customer expectations and needs morph as basic needs are satisfied.  Ford was overtaken by Billy Durant, who created a range of options and models.  Durant recognized that many consumers wanted more than basic transportation, so he solved those needs.

Over the years, automobile manufacturers created a wide range of different types of cars - convertibles, trucks, vans, SUVs, etc to meet the expanding needs of consumers.  Other factors became important - safety, as seat belts became an option, and then a requirement.  Or gas mileage, as the oil embargo of the 1970s forced customers to care about gas mileage. Or quality, as the Japanese manufacturers demonstrated a much higher quality vehicle in the 80s and 90s.  Today, we have very different expectations about our cars.  They are more customized to our needs, offer a wider range of choice and are more reliable, dependable and predictable than ever before.  What they don't yet do is meet expectations for seamless experiences.

As consumers move from basic product needs to elaborate product needs, they take another step up the needs hierarchy and shift from product needs to service and experience needs. GM, Ford and others are waking up to this now, and in fact have done some service and experience innovating before.  For years GM has made more money from financing and leasing cars than from building and selling cars.  Financing was one of the first and most logical steps the auto manufacturers addressed as the tangible products matured.  Strangely, they haven't gone much further.  Today we see the inklings of the next steps - lifetime maintenance, so the customer doesn't have to worry about servicing the vehicle. Why should a consumer care when the oil is changed?  Why don't the experts at the dealership do that for them? And we can go much further.

A truly seamless experience for a car owner would be to consolidate all of the aspects of car ownership, car financing, car maintenance, even car insurance, into one seamless experience. Why bother to shop for maintenance or insurance?  Why can't the dealers (or another firm) offer these features, along with roadside assistance?  What about parking for city dwellers?  A seamless experience would mean the car finds its own parking nearby.  Eventually, a seamless experience will be a car on demand, ready to take you to where you need to go.  Fractional ownership, billed by the mile or the hour, transportation as a service, with different vehicles available depending on your needs.

A truly seamless experience is increasingly what customers expect and what innovators need to strive for.  Providing a discrete product into a customer's life and asking them to integrate it with their other products and services simply frustrates the consumer, who expects more from product and service developers.  Apple and others have taught them the power of seamless experiences, and they've grown to expect the ability to "plug n play" anywhere and everywhere.  The companies that understand this desire and have the ability to "build, catalyze or join" ecosystems (to quote Stephen Elop) that provide these seamless experiences will be the winners.


Tesla could lead the way to this nirvana of seamless experiences.  Already they are changing the dynamic between company and owner, removing or at least attempting to remove the dealer.  As they experiment with autonomous vehicles one can imagine a day when your car picks you up, takes you to work and then goes for maintenance.  Or perhaps goes to serve someone else as part of fractional ownership, staying productive while you are at work, rather than parked and unused in the company parking garage.  Innovators who aren't tied to the past concepts of product-driven innovation, who understand the consumers' expectations for service and experience, will radically alter the nature of competition, and will do it by innovating services and experiences, leveraging ecosystems.

I'm pleased to announce that Paul Hobcraft and I will be working together on a number of posts that relate to some discussions we've had about innovation, more specifically how innovation must evolve from creating interesting but incomplete solutions to understanding how customers want to have interesting, seamless experiences.  Over the next few weeks we'll be writing posts on a new shared website that examine the state of innovation, and provide a reason we think so many innovation outcomes fail to achieve their goals.

From that assessment we'll look at what customers really want:  solutions and experiences, not discrete products.  People are too busy, too harried, have too little patience and cannot keep up with technology advances.  They don't want to be forced to "stitch" disparate solutions together, and expect products, services, business models, channels and experiences to work together to provide a complete solution.

In the course of several interrelated blog posts Paul and I will be talking about innovation, the necessary "ecosystem" for success, why good innovators won't think about products, services and business models in isolation, and how platforms contribute to greater innovation success.  If you are interested in:

• Disruptive innovation
• Ecosystems
• Platforms
• Seamless experiences
• Open Innovation
• The "whole experience"

This new site and our subsequent posts on the site will be on point.  What's more, we hope you'll contribute your ideas, feedback and suggestions on what we are talking about, what we get right and where you think we've missed a concept or an idea.

In the longer term I hope we'll convince you that interesting innovation relies on ecosystems and platforms, and disruptive innovation creates new ecosystems.  In fact we believe that along with a product manager, a new role or position will emerge that is equally important: the ecosystem manager.


But, one step at a time.  I hope you'll join us on our shared Wordpress site:  Ecosystems 4 Innovators, where we'll be publishing our thinking on these and other topics.  Paul has done a great job of pulling together some of our other joint material, which I hope you'll take the time to review.

OK, I don't have a self-driving car and already I'm sick of hearing about them and their potential.  Just like I don't have a virtual reality headset made out of cardboard and an iPhone, but I'm tired of hearing about virtual reality.  The reason I'm tired about hearing about VR and autonomous vehicles is that they are overhyped technologies that don't yet solve important problems.  And this is one of the biggest challenges that innovation faces:  creating shiny new technologies that are interesting but don't solve society's challenges or problems.

We can ask ourselves a few questions about VR and self-driving cars, as examples of overhyped technologies.  The first one is an old one: quo bene?  Who benefits from the constant stream of hype that emerges around Virtual Reality (which isn't even all that new) or autonomous vehicles?  Why, surprise, the hype is being driven primarily by the manufacturers of these technologies.  VR, which as a technology has been around for at least 20 years, has simply repackaged itself for a new audience unaware that VR wasn't able to solve many problems two decades ago, and has simply repackaged itself as a "new" technology released from the mainframes.  Like Google Glass, the overhyped technology that didn't solve a problem and left the wearer looking like a dork, Virtual Reality so far doesn't solve mainstream needs.  Of course there are niche applications for VR, but right now the backers are making a much bigger play - trying to bring VR into the mainstream markets, tying it to iPhones and Androids.  Noticed many people out in the street with the gizmo fixed to their faces?  Even an application like Pokemon Go, which might benefit from this kind of technology, relied on the basic handset, and even it's flash in the pan moment seems to be ending.

This is a big problem for innovation, and why so many corporations distrust innovation as an approach to create new products and services.  Far too often innovation is led astray, to create shiny new technologies or promote technologies that have been on the shelf for a while.  Rather than do the real work of identifying needs and building solutions that solve real world challenges, innovators and technologists often build what they want or desire and try to sell it as a cure-all, a modern snake oil salesman.  This discredits real innovation, which has its basis in needs identification and validation, building solutions that matter and create value for people.  Right now these innovations, like VR and autonomous cars, are packaging technology and a lot of marketing to convince you that you NEED these capabilities.  Will the masses come?  For VR the marketing spend is past and it looks like the answer is: no.  VR has real applications in niche needs and industries, but so far we haven't seen a broad societal need that VR fills effectively. That's also because VR is a technology and not a solution.  We innovators must remember that the availability or discovery of a capability or technology is not an end to itself.  Good innovations must "cross the chasm" in order to get to the larger and more valuable markets.  Google Glass is a great example of a product that caused the early adopters to swoon, and left the early majority cold.

For innovation to add value, you've got to start with customer needs and expectations, what others call the "job to be done".  Then, create new technologies or repackage and repurpose older technologies to provide the benefits, and finally create a solution that provides value, don't simply offer a technology.


There's an adage that marketing and advertising the price you pay for being unremarkable.  I'd say aggressive advertising is the cost you bear for promoting a technology, rather than addressing a problem or need.  What if only a fraction of the money spend on advertising these technologies was spent on need identification and good innovation practice?  The outcomes would be incredible.

I love innovation.  I love all facets of it: the discovery of new needs, the creativity to discover new solutions, the realization of those new ideas as new products and services.  What concerns me sometimes is the way in which we attempt to implement innovation, because we are likely to constraint it at just the time we need the most innovation.

You'll see a lot of talk about "innovation management".  This is not necessarily a wrong idea, but in the wrong hands will severely limit innovation activities and outcomes.  We managers and executives, trained in the school of efficiency and with our MBAs in tow believe we can "manage" anything.  In to some degree that is correct.  We can manage and improve things that are well defined and understood.  To some degree we can even put guardrails around things we cannot fully understand or define.  But the risk we run when we talk about managing innovation, is that we become entranced with the idea of "managing" and not with the idea of "innovation".

In many corporate settings where we've done innovation consulting we see this play out over and over.  Managers and executives want and need stability, repeatability, predictability.  They want the outcomes of exciting, disruptive innovation without the variability and costs associated with what happens in the wild.  As experts in managing things, their first habit is to codify, define, and provide governance and structure to an activity that most don't fully grasp or understand.  Rather than attempt to fully explore the innovation possibilities, managers first attempt to get a handle on what they believe innovation is, and how it should be conducted, managed and governed.

As I've said, this is a very fine knife edge to walk.  Large corporations cannot survive with wild hare ideas sprouting everywhere and little definitive structure or guidance.  They simply don't work that way, and funds and resources don't flow to exercises that reflect those attributes.  But on the other hand, focusing too much on the managing aspect leads to constraints, rules and bureaucracy that will close the aperture for innovation and result in a well-governed, well-defined process that cranks out predictable ideas.  Which sounds something like your product development process, and that's a problem.  Most firms can't get well defined solutions out of their product development process fast enough, much less generate new and interesting ideas quickly enough, yet their first notion is to place the same "management" and overhead on innovation as they do on product development.

Now, this diatribe may sound interesting from a person and team that has argued for years about defining an innovation process.  And that's the other side of the coin.  You need to have just enough defined process in order for people to innovate effectively without creating bureaucracy and limiting exploration and risk.  Since there's exceptionally little commonality about how people generate ideas or shepherd them into new product development cycles, some definition is needed, some skills and tools are required.  Perhaps we should call this "enablement" - we are enabling people to learn new skills, define new processes, explore new needs - rather than "management", which seems like adding overhead without adding benefits.


It's in our nature as managers, executives, experienced in the ways of business and pounded into our heads as MBAs that we need structure, process, governance, details.  These management attributes limit variability and exploration, and constrain innovation.  While we need just enough of these to be - wait for it - minimally viable for innovation, we also need enough enablement, expansion, divergence to allow people to come up with and explore great ideas.  There's more than enough management attitude in our genes and experiences, and not nearly enough enablement.