Day 1
Become lighter
Lose the fear of trying. Find out what you can do when the goal is to learn, not to perform.
EnCube Labs
Innovation Intervention
A practice, and a platform, for people who are close enough to the work to notice a change while there is still time to understand it.
Look before it becomes a crisis
The program asks professionals to look at their own industry and their own operation. The aim is to find missing opportunities, inefficiencies, and threats, and to address them before they harden into a loss of customers, time, or revenue.
Organizations already have two kinds of attention. People at the top set strategy and make decisions. People in the work are given a process and asked to carry it out. Commands travel down. Reports of what the day actually felt like rarely travel back up with the same force.
The people in the work are often the ones who meet customers. They hear the hesitation, see the workaround, and notice when a familiar routine starts to fail. If that signal is never written down, the organization learns about it later, sometimes from an outside study of something its own staff could have described a year earlier.
Ask like someone who is allowed not to know
Adults learn to stay inside a comfortable circle. It feels risky to say “I don’t know,” to try something that might fail, or to name a truth that might inconvenience someone else. A child does not carry that caution in the same way. A child looks, and asks why.
That is the starting posture. Question what everyone treats as normal. The useful part of a situation is often underneath the first thing you notice. What you see is a symptom. Below that is the problem. Below that is the cause. Repairing the symptom, while leaving the cause alone, does not help.
The first day is deliberately light. People make things, try, fail, and discover that a skill they had ruled out is still available to them. The point is to loosen the need to prove something before they go out to look.
Three days
Day 2
Leave the familiar
Observe and talk with a subculture you do not already belong to. Taxi drivers in different cities share situations. So do people who live in high-rise buildings. A familiar place invites a familiar answer, and often a solution you arrived with.
Day 3
Return to your own work
Use those same eyes inside your organization. Fresh observations are the point. A preconceived fix is how the real problem gets skipped.
What the platform keeps
Each person has one account. A team is a shared notebook for a project. People can join another team later without losing who they are. Observations go into that shared space so a paper note is not the only copy.
From the notes, a team makes inferences. One, two, three. An inference may be wrong. That is allowed. The skill is to draw it from what was actually seen, then check it, and try the next one if it does not hold.
A problem definition states an unmet human need. A useful shape is “I wish we could…” It can begin from a person you met, something uneven in the conversation, and what they may be facing, fearing, or carrying. Several definitions can sit side by side.
Before ideas, ask whether the problem is real and what it would be worth to address it, in time, effort, and money. There is no prize for fixing a non-problem. Other people on the team, and later their managers, can read the record and say whether the hunch holds.
Ideas come after that. Many of them, including strange ones. Connect them, stretch them, then converge on one or two to try. A test has a small budget and a defined group of people. The result is measured before anyone is asked to spread it. The same team can repeat the cycle. Another company can use the same platform. Their notes stay inside their own company.
The person behind the practice
Rajesh Nair
Rajesh Nair designed Innovation Intervention so the people closest to customers could become the eyes and ears of the organization, not only the hands that carry out a process.
He separates the thinking class, who set direction, from the doing class, who live inside the day. His argument is that the second group already sees the early signs. The program exists so they will not ignore those signs merely because they do not yet have the authority to act. They capture the raw signal. Others can confirm it, value it, and decide.
He starts the work by making people think with less fear: ask the unreasonable question, try, fail, and notice that a limit was smaller than it felt. He then sends them into an unfamiliar subculture, so they cannot lean on an answer they brought from the office. Only after that do they look at their own company.
The platform follows that order. Observation first. Inference next. A problem stated as a human need. A check on whether the problem is worth solving. Ideas after the problem is understood. A small test, then the result. Managers can return to the same record. The company can keep using it as the place where new observations are placed, built on, and tried.