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Report on the iCafe from Ana NevesWednesday 20th September 2005, Royal Society of Arts |
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This week I had the chance to attend an event, organised and hosted by Victor Newman and David Gurteen. The event was about iCafes and engaged 20 people who have been chosen amongst the 100 who were interested to attend. An invitation I could not refuse, could I? Well, but what are iCafes? iCafes stand for Innovation Cafes, and are a new “product” that combines the concept of Knowledge Cafes, so frequently and successfully used by David Gurteen, with the work on innovation that Victor Newman has been carrying out for the last few years. The keys to innovation is asking the right questions and daring to challenge the existing rules. iCafes are an opportunity to do that: ask new questions to build conversations that deliver documented, usable tactics in authentic language, and build new knowledge and a genuine intention to act. iCafes also allow you to work on emergent knowledge, the stuff that does not exist until you ask the right question at the right time. iCafes may be open or focused. Open iCafes are designed for mixed audiences (such as yesterday’s), whilst focused iCafes are delivered to dedicated groups, teams or organisations. The latter are the most frequent and are intended to help teams or organisations develop their own innovation strategy. iCafes may be run in a sequence of five:
Victor Newman offered us a piece of advice, given to him by a previous manager, that goes like this: “These people are smart: don’t give them 100% of the solution.” This is the basis for the second iCafe which gives people an opportunity to develop tactics to overcome NIH and engage the organisation effectively. This may be done using the Reversal exercise. This exercise invites participants to focus on the opposite of what they want to achieve (e.g. failure). What would it be like? What would be a possible antidote? The IBP iCafe is about understanding the Innovating Behaviour Profile of the organisation at an individual, team and organisational level to work out how to balance the three complementary behaviours of Creator, Implementer and Stabiliser, to develop tactics at all three levels (individual, team and organisation). Using the metaphor of the organisation as an innovation machine, the Innovation Machine iCafe unpacks the mechanism, components, capabilities and behaviours needed. Finally, the Freedom to Innovate is all about constructing new freedoms to think and operate outside the present limited strategic box. This iCafe takes two forms: the first involves building a Predator to attack the organisation in order to discover the emergent value within the organisation; the second is the Box Logic technique that articulates that organisation’s tacit success formula, tests the assumption behind it and then remodels it to populate a new innovation portfolio within a zone of new freedoms and new capabilities. Each of the iCafes are a maximum of 2-hour long and are usually run for groups of 20 people (although Victor Newman has already tried with a group of 200). Ideally, the sequence of iCafes is delivered over a period of no longer than a month. Ana Neves
You may also learn more from this interview  with Victor by Ana.
Some additional comments from people who attended the ICafe on the night:
 
are bringing iCafes to life.
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08:43 AM GDT |
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