CHAPTER 11

The Adam Hansen Personal Transformation Story

Adam Hansen and I met a couple of years ago on Twitter and LinkedIn. I started following him because he was an out-of-the-box thinker. Adam has an MBA from Indiana University and was a new product development manager and a director of new brands at Mars. After working as an innovation consultant for 10 years, he became a principal and vice-president of innovation at Ideas To Go, Inc. He is the co-author of Outsmart Your Instincts: How the Behavioral Innovation™ Approach Drives Your Company Forward.

Adam is a master innovator. He thrives on going into the unknown. His story has a lot of learning for all of us regarding how to seek the new and the different and explore the unknown.

Here is Adam’s story in his own words.

My Journey to Ikigai

Why don’t we spend more time doing what we love, focusing our energies on that and becoming better, and in the process being compensated fairly for our expanding capabilities, and find more and more ways to solve issues that the world clearly needs to be solved?

What’s stopping us?

Here’s what I love: I am a professional innovator. I love discovery, exploration, and creating novelty. I love going into the unknown, into the mystery. It’s fascinating to start pulling together vague forms out of the chaos and seeing where something unique might go.

Here’s what I’ve become better at: I’ve worked and learned how to discover insights that others miss and see opportunities that others might not see. Over the years I have had the honor of honing my craft and developing the skills to do that well.

I get paid fairly for creating new forms of value that my clients hadn’t pulled together before. This work often gives them an important beachhead for further exploration and refinement, changing not just the line of products or services they offer but also their capacity to create new, unique, and relevant offerings again and again.

What’s become clearer to me is that our world can be better to the extent that everyone learns and applies a simple innovation toolkit to their work and to their life. Personal innovation is a natural part of Hyper-Learning.

Ed asked me to share my personal journey to being an innovator. For me that was a Journey to Ikigai, or the four domains discussed above—I Love Doing It, I’m Good at It, I Can Be Paid Fairly for It, and The World Needs It. In this case, certainly, the journey itself is the reward. Sure, it takes some work, but clarity and focus on this journey are endurably satisfying, and put us on a trajectory of continuous learning and doing more and better.

To do this, I had to adopt a mindset and behave in ways that optimized my ability to go beyond the obvious and discover and create meaningful novelty. That required me to overcome fear and my ego in order to open myself up to the different, the new, and the maybe. Along the way, I had to learn how to optimize sensing and hearing others and listening to the creative intuitive part of me. I had to learn to behave in many of the ways that Ed writes about in this book.

When you have some clarity on your Ikigai, or life purpose, you also get clarity on what you need to learn, unlearn, and relearn. My story has been a ceaseless, iterative, and satisfying learning story—I continue to learn and improve along the way as you will do. You do not need to be perfect to begin your journey because none of us will reach that stage. And the reality is that “done” or “enough for now” is better than “perfect.” “Done” or “enough” will help you move out into the world, while “perfect” can easily keep you caught up in its own endless loop.

Life’s too short not to love what we do, not to work on interesting topics that matter, with great people alongside us. I’ve been fortunate in this regard; I have always loved my work, and I don’t believe that my experience should be the exception. I want to help everyone to have love as the animating force in all facets of their life, including work.

The concept of Ikigai gives us an important way to tie love to all you’re doing in your career. When I first saw Ikigai (see figure 11) through some post on LinkedIn or Facebook sometime around 2013, it resonated nuclearly with me, as in the nucleus of every cell in my body began buzzing.

It hit me because, without having that precise framework in mind beforehand, I knew it’s what I’d been working on for about 25 years. I got it immediately, began telling everyone I could about it, etc. I had all the evangelizing zeal of the new convert.

In pulling together the four domains and being thoughtful about their various intersections (e.g., how might we think about Passion, or the intersection of I Love Doing It and I’m Good at It) we can assess where we’re growing and what might need some more loving effort. Each domain affects the other three, and having this simple framework gives us an ongoing way to get better at what we’re already good at and love doing.

Ikigai shows how Passion, Profession, Vocation (or Calling) and Mission interconnect, why they’re not merely broad synonyms, and how their important intersections can inform ongoing action for you.

Figure 11: Ikigai

My Good Fortune

I have been fortunate several times in my life to be at the right place, at the right time, to hear the right thing and/or to have an important experience that reframed my thinking and moved me forward. I believe getting on the Journey to Ikigai increases these beneficial moments, as the focus it provides is narrow enough to make our exposure to new ideas and people relevant, while having four domains to nurture gives us ample variety and no shortage of productive pursuits.

One of these critical times was in grad school. I went to Indiana University for my MBA, in the marketing/product management track. Having my interest in innovation piqued during my undergrad work, I really looked forward to the New Product Development class I’d take during my studies. Little did I know what that class would mean to me, or how my professor would come to be such an important mentor and friend over the succeeding 30 years.

The professor, Tom Hustad, happened to be one of the seminal figures in innovation within academia and in the efforts of innovation academics to connect with practitioners in the marketplace. Tom was both the founding editor of the academic journal The Journal of Product Innovation Management and one of the founders of the Product Development and Management Association. He clearly loved innovation and didn’t see it merely as an interesting topic for intellectual inquiry. Tom continues to see innovation as a noble effort in its practical advancement of serving people better and better. I was thrilled to have him as a professor.

It started to dawn on me that innovation could be more than part of my career, that it could be the career.

That came as amazing news to me. I remembered thinking with unusual clarity, “If I could do that for my whole career, why wouldn’t I?”

How did that clarity come to me? A couple of thoughts:

Experience had already taught me that my subconscious is smarter than the strictly rational, calculating me. That makes sense—we’ve learned that a healthy subconscious is in part pattern recognition at the sub-attentional level—we know some things without being able to figure out why we know what we know. This innovation thing seemed like the obvious thing to occupy my attentions. I knew that without knowing entirely why. It was important that I was listening to my subconscious at this time.

Experience also hit me repeatedly with the insight that I wasn’t going to get good at something without starting off being pretty bad at it. This seems self-evident, but we repeatedly ignore or forget it. I learned to relish the feeling of being inept in an interesting creative area for a while in service of learning and getting to where I could start creating decent work. For example, I started playing keys in a rock band when I was 13, being content to be bad at it for a while, along with my bandmates who were somewhere with me in the Bad Ballpark, getting just better enough over time to recognize and enjoy the progress. Our lack of proficiency was beside the point; being able to do the meager bit we could was tapping into the heedless thrill of rock! There was so much satisfaction in the effort itself, particularly when I realized that I was getting just enough better over time and could take on bigger and bigger challenges as I moved forward.

So, coming out of MBA school, I really wanted to work in an innovative, entrepreneurial atmosphere, and got my first paid gig as innovation manager at a great, aggressive, creative, small-kitchen-electrics manufacturer and marketer, where I would have all the responsibility a green kid could ever ask for. I was on my way. I got to see how early, half-baked (quarter-baked?) ideas could be iterated, built upon, and set the stage to drive uniqueness and new forms of relevance for our customers.

Four jobs after this first one in innovation and almost 30 years later, I have had great experiences I couldn’t have hoped for, even with an active imagination. I’ve traveled the world for business (with my wife too infrequently, but sometimes), met so many people, and enjoyed the deep satisfaction of collaborating with other impassioned innovation geeks as clients and colleagues. I’ve had the experience and perspective from both the client side and the consultant side, and have been an important part of bringing 15 products from concept to market in a hands-on way, and midwifing several hundred early prototypes that led to over 200 launched products or services.

I didn’t know enough 30 years ago to understand fully how satisfying this journey would be, but I had high hopes and didn’t know enough to be jaded.

I still don’t know enough to be jaded!

How Did I Get Here?

What mindset and behaviors help us move beyond the obvious and explore broadly, discover, and create meaningful novelty?

How can we navigate inevitable fear and ego demands in order to open ourselves up to the different, the new, and the maybe?

How might we learn to sense and hear others while listening to the creative intuitive part inside each of us?

What approach can we take to innovate innovatively, not resting on best practices from years before, but incorporating the increasing bounty of insights from the human sciences?

Throughout my journey, I’ve picked up some more tips that may help you with these questions. Each one alone is a helpful part of the puzzle; together they increase your odds of making progress on your Journey to Ikigai.

• The idea of “enough.” You don’t need all the answers. You don’t need perfect clarity before taking action. “Enough” clarity, coupled with thoughtful action, will help you move forward and gain the additional clarity and momentum you will need. A fixation on perfection too early can paralyze you. It’s often a very smart-sounding dodge that prevents you from acting. You simply cannot anticipate all the helpful questions or the insights that will come to you until you get moving and having the experiences necessary to formulate those great questions. The most important questions I’ve had within my journey are the ones I have now—I couldn’t think of them earlier because I didn’t know enough.

• Simple prototypes. Prototypes are only as good as the conversations they engender. They’re a helpful shared space that converts the “adjacent possible” into the “tangible right in front of you.” Thinking and talking in bigger abstractions is helpful very early on, but you have to start playing with actual possibilities and forms to reveal important considerations that don’t come to you otherwise. And it’s never been easier to assemble and test prototypes across the spectrum from early written product concepts through clunky “looks like” and “works like” prototypes to beta products and services for more hands-on testing with your target audience.
       One thing you can do very early on is to assemble a free, simple Google Forms survey to get input. Write up a concept statement and ask even 50 people three to five questions about it. Your cost here? The time to write up your concept, the survey, and getting it through 50 completions. You might have to ask 100 people to get 50 to complete it, but, hey, with this Internet thing I keep hearing about, it seems pretty easy to start going after it.

• Rich conversations. Using prototypes is a great way to pull together questions and have conversations that move you forward. Another way to have really rich conversations is to pay attention to people you’ve connected with who have the magical combination of (a) enough in common with you and (b) enough difference from you to increase the likelihood of productive exchange.
       Use social media to be, y’know, social! In my experience, people love engagement and thoughtful questions. Try more to be interested, and not too concerned about being interesting. Build out the kind of social scene for yourself (be that via social media or in flesh-and-blood life) where such conversations are more likely. Find conversation partners you can trust, which I define as people who are curious, open, and intrigued by differences between you, and see these differences as great places to explore, not to argue about. Being curious and effective beats being “right,” except perhaps in dire medical emergencies, where a premium on the right intervention is appropriate. I do hope that’s a rare occurrence for you!

• Innovation for all. “Innovation” doesn’t have to be in your job title for you to use the tools of innovation or to think like an innovator. In the incipient Age of Smart Machines, we’ll all need to get better at innovation for our work and ourselves. Personal innovation must become the concern and practice of all of us. Innovation makes the school teacher, the small bakery owner-operator, the construction-company manager, and the city planner better. Through the rest of this century, the more we can democratize the tools of innovation, the healthier our society will be.

• The self-sustaining nature of questions. Questions are one of the most amazing phenomena we have. Answering one can easily turn into having three or four new ones that keep you curious and moving forward. Talk about a renewable resource! Later questions simply aren’t available at the start. The new targets of your curiosity and attention aren’t visible or even thinkable earlier. You need to advance so you can have new perspectives that your curiosity can play with and stoke the furnace of wonder.

• Be at least as concerned about the risks of omission as the risks of commission. Research shows that the regrets expressed near the end of life aren’t nearly so much about “What I did” but “What I thought about, but didn’t do.” It’s easy to understand why we focus too much on the risks of what we do versus what we don’t do—it’s easier to think through the tangible and actual, and difficult to think about the abstraction of what we don’t do. But today, it’s never been easier to pull together resources to give your ideas a shot. It’s almost as easy to try it as it is to wonder about it. What’s stopping you? What bets are you making about how long life is and vague notions about being able to try things later, in some unreal future?

• Don’t just be tolerant of ambiguity, actively seek it out. Love the mystery and pulling together vague forms out of it, getting into some rough prototyping, and then learning, learning, learning. Anything meaningfully new was earlier a bunch of “uns”—unknowable, unthinkable, unimaginable, uncomfortable. It’s enjoyable turning these “uns” into the knowable, thinkable, imaginable, and more comfortable.

• Balance your concerns between validity (are we doing the right thing?) and reliability (are we doing things right?). Validity often has a shorter shelf life than reliability, so I believe we need to think about it more than we commonly do. We can keep cranking out the consistent, but increasingly irrelevant, product far past its usefulness. Humans will still be better at judging validity than smart machines for a very long time. And it would be fascinating to watch the machines catch up.

• Learn to love learning. Once you find your Ikigai, you will want to keep learning, because you’ll continue to see the difference between where you are and where you could be in terms of effectiveness in helping others. You’ll want to test and expose your ideas to more people, understanding that they might make a difference for the right audience.

Where I’m Heading Now

A new area that has captured my imagination is at the intersection of behavioral science and innovation, which we call the Behavioral Innovation™ approach. Behavioral Innovation is based on the idea that the better understanding of how humans actually think and behave can lead to lessening the effects of resisting forces to innovation and increasing the power of those forces that help us move forward.

Within this important, generative intersection, we started out analyzing cognitive biases—nonconscious cognitive shortcuts that served our ancestors really well, but that often are a mismatch for the conditions we face now, especially when we’re trying to do innovation right. We teach our clients how those cognitive biases tend to show up and how they can use some simple tools to lessen their effects, freeing up energy to move innovation forward more effectively and quickly. We wrote a book, Outsmart Your Instincts: How the Behavioral Innovation™ Approach Drives Your Company Forward, to help our clients and anyone interested in doing innovation to gain more awareness and practical experience in doing innovation better.

Within my work at ITG and Behavioral Innovation, I am confident that I have enough interesting questions to keep me occupied for another 15 to 20 years. Ikigai can be a rich, satisfying journey that doesn’t end, because you get better and better at it and find more to pursue.

My Wish for You

Today, Ikigai is my primary mindset. It is the framework that helps me continue to be passionate about innovation. It is the way I make meaning of my life.

Innovation is what I love, innovation is what I am good at, innovation is what the world needs, and I can earn a good living by doing innovation.

My wish for all is that you find what your Journey to Ikigai looks like and realize that it’s an ongoing, iterative process. What lights you up as innovation does me? You should keep learning more about your life purpose throughout your life. Wouldn’t it be great to do something meaningful about your life’s purpose even during your final month alive? Why wouldn’t you? I can imagine how vital and thriving our society would be if more of us were moving, still being generative, today, this month, this year, this decade, through the end of our lives.

Gratitude for this entire experience is the only rational response. There’s enough wonder here to keep a person occupied for a lifetime. I love being with others who feel a responsibility not to squander the profound gift that we have of life, consciousness, loving relationships, and meaningful work. The net of our life’s experience should be some tangible form of expressing “thank you.” I believe that finding and staying on your Journey to Ikigai makes life as gratitude not merely a possibility but an eventuality.

Admittedly, pulling this all together is a bit like threading a needle while wing-walking across two Blue Angels aircrafts flying wingtip to wingtip, simultaneously attempting to translate Proust into Esperanto. There’s every reason to believe the task is not doable.

Yet . . . why not try? What better use of our love and time could we imagine?

I sometimes get into a conversation with strangers while flying. I’ve learned to be respectful (meaning not nosy and not a conversation hijacker), and have noticed that most people are interested when they hear that I’m this thing called an innovation consultant. It regularly moves into a conversation about how much I love my work and how Ikigai has come together for me. As they express interest (did I mention that I truly do try to avoid foisting this line of thought onto them?), it’s easy for me to start asking them Ikigai-related questions.

So, with that, my seatmate on the journey through this chapter:

• What part of your career do you enjoy/have you enjoyed the most? Why?

• Describe what it looks like when you’re really immersed in something positive at work, please.

• How might you increase the amount of time you spend doing that or things just like that?

• What beliefs do you hold that tell you that you can’t enjoy it more?

• What part of what you do in your work could be applied to great causes to help them move forward?

I’d love you to join the army of Ikigai Instigators, Imaginators, and Innovators.

What could you create with this amazing gift of life, love, and learning?

What could our world look like if 75 million more of us understood the concept and were actively pursuing their Journey to Ikigai?

I want to live in that world!

Onward and upward!

Adam’s story is the perfect way to end the book.

Adam, with a big HUG, thank you.