Leading with ideas
STAGECRAFT: THE FUTURE OF INNOVATION
By Andy Boynton, John and Linda Powers Family Dean
This fall has brought scenes of airboat water rescues and pop-up hospitals—illustrating not only the suffering caused by this season's hurricanes but also the pivotal roles played by first responders. Their work will be evolving rapidly as new technologies—for example, driverless ambulances—surface in the coming decade. What does all that have to do with management in general, not to mention higher education? A lot, as I suggested recently in an article for Harvard Business Review.
Like many other lines of work, emergency response is ripe for innovation. And real innovation doesn’t happen without plenty of experimentation—or stagecraft, as I like to describe a particular way of experimenting. It’s an elaborate way that has all the bells and whistles of the product or service you’re trying to develop—or appears to.
I’ve learned about the future of EMT work from a project undertaken by Continuum Innovation, a design firm that I’ve collaborated with for some years. The firm practices “deep learning”—observing customers in action to identify unmet needs. Continuum famously used the concept to learn things about floor care that led to the Swiffer mop for Procter & Gamble. Fun fact: in recent years, Continuum also played an important role in revitalizing Boston College’s Core Curriculum. The consultants helped our Core Renewal Team use design principles such as empathetic listening, attention to narrative, and prototyping.
The EMT project was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate. Two years ago, the agency was looking ahead to technologies that might alter emergency response work 10 years down the road—innovations such as driverless ambulances. Officials needed to begin designing gear and devices (such as data screens on the windows of those driverless vehicles) in anticipation of the future.
That’s a job for stagecraft—faking a new product or service to get real-life reactions from users early in the development process. Designers used stagecraft to gather very early learning about how new technologies could be used in equipment for first responders. You can’t do that kind of staging in an actual emergency like a Category 4 storm or a 10-alarm fire. But you can ride around with EMTs to see things from their vantage point and then test new ideas in a staged emergency.
At its Boston headquarters, Continuum brought together real ambulance technicians who replicated a fake emergency—with a self-driving ambulance, data displays on a portion of the windshield, vital signs flashed on a cuff wrapped around an EMT’s wrist, and other simulations. The driverless van was a mockup with a foam-core dashboard. The crash victim was a dummy. And behind a two-way mirror, a software engineer pounded furiously on a keyboard, entering blood pressure and other vitals displayed on the EMT’s wrist cuff.
The purpose of stagecraft is to yield critical insights you might not otherwise discover until late in the process of developing a complex product or service. It keeps you from going too far down a wrong path. And that helped Homeland Security.
Among many other things, the designers learned that paramedics usually do not wear the bulky bulletproof vests they are given to protect against attacks on them. That’s because there’s no time to put them on in an emergency, and they don’t like wearing the awkward gear during their non-emergency hours.
So the EMTs were asked to try on ordinary paintball vests—a crude prototype ordered through Amazon via two-day mail—which they were able to picture wearing all day. That simple exercise made it possible for the design team to envision a vest made of extremely lightweight fabric strong enough to repel bullets (material on the horizon). It was but one insight in a much larger project.
You could draw links between that project and the way we, at the University, went about renewing our Core Curriculum.
Continuum helped choreograph much-needed conversations among faculty, students, and administrators; these included a yearlong series of town-hall-style meetings on the future of Boston College’s Core. Then came the pilots—new courses, collaboratively taught with an interdisciplinary focus on either urgent problems in the world or perennial questions about the human condition. We saw what worked and what didn’t, and we kept bringing in new pilot courses. In short, we created a stage for our innovation, testing our ideas with a view to learning more about them and continuing this experiment in contemporary liberal arts learning.
At the Carroll School, we draw on these and other elements of stagecraft all the time. In this fashion, we’ve developed all of the signature Carroll School offerings introduced in the past decade. Among these: the required multidisciplinary Portico course for first-year students; our expanding focus on business analytics; the Summer Catalyst program for non-management liberal arts majors; and an interdisciplinary program sponsored jointly by us and Boston College’s Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences—Social Impact.
With stagecraft, failure has to be an option. It’s not much of an experiment if you can’t fail. I think of Jeff Bezos’s comment that Amazon is “the best place in the world to fail,” which I wrote about last year in one of our alumni e-letters. In that spirit, I like to think of the Carroll School as a great place to fail early so as to succeed sooner through experimentation.
Stagecraft makes it possible to test the entire customer experience, without pouring too many resources into an unproven idea. It allows managers and executives to think more ambitiously about major innovations. One day soon, that will undoubtedly include driverless hover ambulances that swoop in on flooded neighborhoods—and other innovations courtesy of stagecraft.