Postcards from the Future

Tara Lemmey, is CEO of LENSVentures, a San Franciso company that helps businesses, government and organizations  focus on the future by helping to manage the innovation strategies necessary in the present.  In an interview with (Pop City), Lemmey highlights keys to success.

Why is innovation such a hot concept these days?

If we want to live in the world most possible while we’re alive, we have to keep innovating the possibilities--pushing them forward and experimenting with them. So we’re challenged to do that.

The other reason is because things that used to be only possible if you were in an academic environment or large company are now much more accessible-- access to the Net, technology, ideas, leadership—in ways we’ve never had before. So we have a much broader base of people participating in innovation and creating the most possible.

So it’s a leveling of the playing field.

Yeah, way more than at any other time in history.

Define the approach of innovating in small steps in relation to the concept of “vast innovation.”

In order to get to vast innovation you need to take a small bets approach. I chaired the technology committee for the Markle task force on national security after 9/11—addressing how the Federal government was using technology and why we had failures prior to 9/11 in sharing some information. What was required was vast innovation. There needed to be a large scale overhaul of how the government approached some of the problems.

In order to do that, we had to set up a number of very small steps, pilots and initiatives to test how to move into the connected age. So the first thing we had to do was question some of the underlying beliefs to see if they held true or not. Their notion was: you limit your distribution of information on a need- to- know basis. What we found out, in the new connected world, is that’s not an appropriate policy. If you have innovation you should share it because you’re not going to know who needs to know it and neither will they.

What you find in vast innovation is that there are some underlying beliefs that are keeping people back. It’s important to explore and say, do those really hold true? Should we keep in that direction? If we don’t think they do, what can we do? How do we make the small changes in order to move in that direction?

How can cities use a different model to achieve innovation?

Cities tend to run up against problems and then there’s a lot of debate about what the large solution should be. It’s very hard to get all the constituents to agree on this overarching solution. That’s also true in the private sector or the federal government.

It’s better to say what are the areas where we can do better or take a more entrepreneurial approach?  How can we do some testing of these premises prior to doing a large-scale initiative? That way you can get some successes and you can see what does and doesn’t work.

I think that creates some challenges for cities. In order to do a lot of small steps what you have to do is anticipate failure.

Is anticipating failure a way of managing expectations or the nature of innovation or both?

The nature of innovation. You’re going to have a number of false starts and trial and error. The real question is, how do you keep trying? How do you learn from it? So you have to design the experiments, the pilots, as a learning process. It’s important to make sure the stakeholders are involved, that you don’t treat failure as an overarching failure but as part of the process. 

I know it’s a challenge for cities to say we’re going to try some things and expect them not to work but that’s really the nature of innovation.

So in trying things that fail we can pull out valuable lessons that work in the next attempt?

Yes, instead of a return on investment we say “return on learning”—what are we trying to learn here in our early experiments. Give yourself some “space and grace,” some running room to try things and then take that learning and apply it to the next one and consider it a forward-running model.

For a city to say we want to increase the quality of life or deal with traffic congestion, they have to say our best outcome is going to be steps in solving the problems. You can’t get wedded to a particular form of solution. That’s where people get stuck. They try something and they say, boy we expect some success from this project!  From the innovation side, it’s important to say ‘we expect to learn a lot and keep it moving forward in the direction of success.’

You have said that you expect to fail often.

I fail hourly! (laughs) Part of the question is, are you trying hard enough? What kind of failures do you have? But if you limit your failures to be small ones then you’re not going to have the collapse of the overarching solution that everyone bet on. Because when that doesn’t work, then they say, I don’t know where to go next.

Can you explain the concept of Postcards from the Future and how they work to envision success?

A lot of time people don’t know what they don’t know. In any innovation, technology or social or business, if you say, for instance, how would you reinvent the phone or the typewriter? No one would have said PC or mobile phone because it wouldn’t have occurred to them.

Part of what we find useful is to project out three, five, seven years and sit around thinking-- not in a current time frame—but where the world might be and design postcards to send back to our current time. That helps people not think about current barriers or blocks but beyond it. It breaks up that  ‘it’s not possible, we can’t do it’ thinking.

Once you have the postcards you can say, ok what are the small bets or small steps we can do to head in that direction?

It’s really important to have those postcards so you know where to go—to educate all the constituents about what direction you’re headed in so you give them a bigger picture. They are much more comfortable with saying we’re going to try some things. We’re not sure this is going to work but this is where we’re headed.

You have said that bio and nanotechnology is changing the world…

Green energy and clean tech are fascinating. The solutions that innovators and entrepreneurs are coming up with are going to change our everyday lives and these solutions are absolutely applicable to cities. Likewise the biotech solutions for the healthcare crisis should have a huge effect on the way both city and national governments approach the problem. This is, of course, why being connected to innovation is so important for city officials!