How do we get more of THIS?

As a result of all this activity, we find ourselves squeezing important decisions into 30 minute meetings. Unable to bear entire days spent in conference rooms, we cheat and schedule quick half hours. But this is not working.

As proof, a 60-minute brainstorm last week on a proposed design for the new Kindling. After spending several weeks picking at it when we had five minutes here, twenty minutes there, we got in a room and projected the design on the wall. With the luxury of 60 full minutes, we allowed ourselves to circle the design and some fundamental issues for the first half. And then, incredibly, the knot came undone when we passed the 30 minute mark. Sufficiently warmed up, great ideas were flying until finally, exhausted, we leaned back in our chairs to admire our work.

It was so good.

This theme, that of allowing time to push past pleasantries during a brainstorm, continues to appear on a daily basis. The easy part is identifying the solution: dedicating more time to the creating process. The hard part comes in finding and making the time to do so.

As a democratic application, Kindling is well-versed in providing an even playing field. Every user, from the intern to the CEO, has the same amount of votes to spend. In this way, Kindling believes that anyone can have a good idea – and that no one gets more influence than anyone else.

So if all things are equal, how do leaders emerge?

Try volunteering. When ideas are approved in Kindling, they move to a section called “Brilliance in Action.” Decision-makers can either immediately assign the idea to an employee or leave it open to volunteers. The “I’ll do it!” button appears for unassigned ideas, providing the opportunity for officemates to demonstrate their ambition and willingness to pitch in.

Those who volunteer to make an idea happen show initiative and interest in going above and beyond their daily responsibilities. Promoting the volunteer functionality within Kindling could help identify your next crop of leaders… not to mention get ideas moving towards completion!

I suppose once Julia Roberts plays you in a film, some are less inclined to take you seriously.

That's where your idea came from... and where it could return to if you don't do something with it. (via Mike Cattell)

Regardless, Gilbert is a very bright woman, talented writer and enthralling speaker. I had the opportunity to hear her speak at the New York Public Library several months ago and she shared her take on where ideas come from. Sit tight: it’s a little looney.

As she highlights in her TED talk, Gilbert believes that ideas are flashes of inspiration that visit us somewhat randomly. Our job, as thinkers (or artists), is to keep showing up to receive said flashes… and when inspiration strikes us in a traffic jam or when we’re plain old busy, the ideas seek another (less busy) home. Sound a little strange?

She went on to provide supporting evidence in the form of a recent situation between Gilbert and her friend, fiction writer, Ann Patchett.

Before she wrote Committed, Gilbert said she was writing a novel based on a middle-aged woman in love with her boss in Minnesota who was working in the Amazon on some sort of medical research. Gilbert had to put aside this novel, as various life obstacles got in her way. She switched gears and wrote Committed. A year or so later, she’s having coffee with Patchett and begs her friend to share the details of her new novel. To both their surprise, Patchett relates a novel with eerily similar details: middle-aged Minnesotan, researching in the Amazon, in love with her older boss.

Amazing! And a perfect confirmation that ideas, when you are not ready for them, seek out new owners.

Patchett’s latest novel, State of Wonder, is this exact book. I heard her give a reading last month and asked for her point of view on the story Gilbert had told. Patchett, the more logical of the two, said that she couldn’t necessarily agree that the ideas were seeking owners, but admitted that it had been very strange indeed.

Seriously though, users gain reputation by interacting with Kindling. Your reputation score is a reflection of your activity in the system. High-value activities are most rewarded, including:

• submitting ideas
• commenting on ideas
• volunteering for ideas
• having an idea approved

Other than that, we can’t tell you much more. Our reputation algorithm is a secret sauce and we don’t want to let that cat out of the bag!

Unsure where to find your reputation? It’s listed next to your name in Kindling’s header and on your profile. Viewing another user’s profile or checking the latest standings on the Leaderboard can give you a good sense of where you fit among the rest of your company. Are you on the low end? Sounds like it’s time to add some fresh ideas to the mix!

No one likes a conglomerate product. (via njorthr)

This isn’t a problem for Kindling, the product, but it occurred to me this morning that this is a problem for me, the product manager.

After a great meeting reviewing our next six months with a colleague, I came back to my desk and thought “wow, what’s going to be next?” I allowed myself to imagine a bit into the future and then I slammed the door on that. “The LAST thing we need are more ideas!” I thought. Because to me, the person who serves as the traffic cop, ideas for Kindling overwhelm me on an everyday basis!

I bet a lot of people managing products feel similarly out there. There can be so many dreamers for your product that you spend your time giving priority to other people’s visions and put yours by the wayside.

On one hand, you need this role on every team, just like you need someone in every family who can put the brakes on spending every last dime in the savings account.  Someone has to protect the long-term future of the project (be it family or product) while the rest of the crew bubbles with innovation.

But on the other hand, I think the exercise of dreaming big, giant dreams for a product is necessary for short- and long-term motivation. Regardless of your role, you can give yourself five minutes to ignore the endless line of requests and imagine the next generation of what you’re building. More than anything, you must remember that your product is more than a globby mess of features requested from the highest bidder.

So ignore requests for pagination and a fancier button. Think bigger. Who is your product in the world? Who loves it? Who needs it? And what will their love and needs require two, three, five years from now?

Those are the ideas that thrive in Kindling, the ideas that invite discussion and create voting frenzies. The big ideas. The ones that need you to think of them early on, that require a little time in your schedule to dream them up.

What I want to write about here is not what makes an idea good, but what makes an idea better. Because even though you can never collect 100% good ideas, you can rely on the fact that Kindling makes 100% of ideas better.

I took a fiction writing class this summer and the teacher suggested reading our piece out loud to someone. I must have spent 12 hours in front of my computer, writing and re-writing that story. But it wasn’t until I called a friend and read it over the phone that gaping holes and awkward phrases made themselves known.

Ideas are a lot like stories; you can only get so far on your own. At a certain point, it’s the sharing and the telling of the idea that allows you a different perspective. So my first point about how to make an idea better is pretty simple:

Share it.

This is the most basic functionality of Kindling, so there’s no surprise there. By the simple action of typing out an idea, tagging it with a couple of relevant words and attaching something to demonstrate your point, the idea is already better… because it’s OUT THERE! And the mere fact that you wondered what Suzy in Accounting or John in R&D might think made your idea better because you accounted for their perspectives. Which brings me to…

Throw it to the lions.

Imagine that your idea for a new product is approved. It’s built and is soon sold in stores across the country. But when it comes out, the reviewers come out of the woodwork and rip it apart. How are you going to prepare yourself for that kind of external critique (not to mention business disaster) if you haven’t gone through a trial run first?

Soliciting criticism helps your idea grow a tougher shell. Criticism can be useful, especially if it suggests a nuance that you never thought of or a marketing strategy that you wouldn’t have produced yourself. Use this internal challenge  to chip off the rough edges and give your initial thought some polish. And though others are important to the growth of the idea, you’re not so replaceable either…

Fuel it yourself.

An idea by itself loses steam, but an idea with an advocate rolls on. Some ideas simply seem more compelling because the person behind them is a force to be reckoned with. Call it charisma, call it passion, call it what you will; enthusiasm is not an insignificant factor when it comes to good ideas.

Is it such a novel thought that you make your idea better? Everything that inspired the initial seed and the eventual public idea came from your nourishment. The tenacity with which you defend it shines through when competing against the other ideas out there.

So what makes an idea better? How about collaboration, a healthy dose of criticism and a strong advocate. You might not belong to an organization of perfect people who always produce perfect ideas, but it’s nice to know there’s a back-up plan.

I played the violin for 10 years while I was growing up. I wasn’t very good; I never aspired to be the next soloist or Julliard applicant. But I often think about the things we learned in that class, life lessons that have stuck with me. For example, our Hungarian director once told us about the phenomenon of the perfect note. “If all of the instruments in the room are tuned and you strike a perfect note, they will all vibrate that note in agreement,” he said.

It was just creepy enough to fascinate me.

I had a similar moment during my first week at Muhlenberg when I was sitting in my Freshman seminar discussing the ethics of cloning. Suddenly something I’d learned in Philosophy class that morning came to mind, as did a conversation I’d had with my French professor, as did a late night talk with a friend down the hall about literature. “I just feel like everything is coming together,” I told my adviser after class. “It’s as if the college has crafted a curriculum specifically for me and I keep tripping over the same ideas in such different contexts.” I spent the next four years amazed by this string phenomenon of education.

Several years later, I now find myself reading a book about the scientist Joseph Priestley, called The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson. I read a passage this morning in the subway that struck me as relevant to this blog. Johnson writes about Priestley’s innumerable inventions and successes:

Intellectual historians have long wrestled with the strangeness of this kind of streak. The thinker plods along… and then, suddenly- the floodgates open and a thousand interesting ideas seem to pour out. It’s no mystery that there are geniuses in the world, who come into life with innate cognitive skills that are nurtured and provoked by cultural environments over time… the mystery is why, every now and again, one of these people seems to get a hot hand.

When something big happens in the culture… that event is rarely the exclusive result of a single layer: one man’s genius, say, or the rise of a new economic class. Epic breakthroughs happen when the layers align: when energy flows and settlement patterns and scientific paradigms and individual human lives come into some kind of mutually reinforcing synchrony that helps the new ideas both emerge and circulate through the wider society.

Bingo! Breakthrough inventions not only thrive in a crossroads of media, disciplines and perspectives, but are born of them.

What better argument could there be for hiring a diverse group, people who come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences? The energy that comes from finding similarities across disciplines is like fuel for the fire. Whether it’s discovering that designers and writers tackle similar challenges or deriving metaphors from a developer’s journey writing code, working with people who are different provides a constant source of inspiration and perspective.

The thing is, you’ve got to actually start that fire though for things to get good, don’t you? It seems like getting messy and inviting conversation is the only way to break open the innovating. Johnson mentions a group of thinkers in his book that called themselves the Honest Whigs. The group included a certain Benjamin Franklin and met in London coffeehouses to share ideas and debate theories. Sounds like idea collaboration systems happened live and in person back in the mid-1700′s.

Can you imagine? Shooting the breeze with Ben Franklin, coming up with theories about religion and science and math at a time when the world was ripe for discovery? It struck me this morning that the world today seems so figured out, so explored, so… solved.

What’s inspiring to me is imagining that the world is just as fertile for discovery today as it was back then. And if it is, how can you organize your company to achieve “mutually reinforcable synchrony”? Who should be involved? And what can you do to sound that perfect, vibrating note?

When Rich presented Kindling to about 700 people at the NY Tech Meet-up on Monday evening, we had a group of about 10 Arc-ers representing a cheering section. Seeing our app on the big screen (aside several other talented technologists’ work) was as exciting and nerve-wracking as one might expect. Perhaps the best thing about these opportunities is the ability to tell audiences directly about our product, to show the features we think are useful and important. After the presentation we hung around the lobby where we chatted about Kindling with other members of the Meet-up crowd. Honestly, these are some of my favorite moments along the journey of marketing a product. The verbiage we carefully craft, the perfect icons that we carefully design, the interactions that we develop: they are all tucked away along with the workday. Finally, it’s the time for storytelling.

I get such a kick out of telling the story of Kindling to someone in person.

Maybe what I like the most is the luxury of sharing some of the ideas that Arc has adopted from our own instance and the freedom to talk about those that we’ve flat-out rejected. “Here’s why it’s useful for us,” I can say. “Here’s why we made it like this and not like that.” The conversation, the back-and-forth: it’s a welcome moment of connection with the people I spend my days thinking about and for.

It’s not like I never have the chance to speak with Kindling customers. In fact, a large part of my job is answering emails and speaking with potential customers on the phone. But there’s something to be said for face-to-face interaction, particularly one that’s as open-ended as networking.

This process of sharing stories and gathering feedback, however, also happens to reside near a slippery slope. One of the most difficult aspects of working with a product like Kindling is maintaining a balance between two extremes: what do YOU want for your product and what does THE MARKET want for your product? Are we shaping the market or living within it? And how is the strategy affected when others apply their own labels and qualifications?

I doubt anyone can escape a healthy dose of both perspectives, but as the Client Relations guru for Kindling, I particularly find myself square in the crossroads. On the one hand, I’m the person on the phone with the users, answering questions about Central Authentication, storytelling in the lobby outside the auditorium at F.I.T. On the other hand, I’m aware of the various business and developmental road maps we’ve planned and our need to capitalize on clear direction.

In truth, none of these questions are particularly shocking for a company exploring product development. Building and marketing a product is a lot like forming a personality; some people and experiences form you along the way, despite the fact that you have natural tendencies at the core. Staying flexible enough to respond to things we don’t yet know about seems to be a requirement for our process.  In a recent meeting, Rich lobbied for keeping the next release minimalist.

“We don’t know enough about this feature yet,” he said. “Let’s let them tell us what else they need because we won’t be able to nail it on our own.”

He was right. And so we inch along, making instinctual guesses but also relying on a variety of sources to show us how Kindling acts and reacts in the Real World. We’ll present Kindling again at the Web2NY Meetup in April and hopefully have some more storytelling opportunities. In the meantime, stop me on the street, at the grocery store, on the subway. HAVE I GOT A STORY FOR YOU…

Kindling is about innovation. We here at Arc90 have been using Kindling for over a year and recently released it to the wild scene that is The Public.  As a result, we’re pretty jazzed about ideas and we wanted to share that. This is our space to talk about ideas and all that surround them.

I’m Jen; I handle Kindling’s client relations and I’ll be orchestrating things over here on The Kindling Blog.  We hope to get at a lot of the questions in modern innovation management.  How can you tap into the insight of everyone in your group?  Will people share their best ideas without incentives?  And how can you organize and manage a modern-day suggestion box? These are the sorts of questions that we think about over lunch, over beers, over email.

We’ll be sharing our thoughts about innovation, ideas within groups, what inspires us, and, of course, the process of creating and maintaining Kindling itself.

Stop by often to join the conversation… consider this flame lit.