The Ten Faces of Innovation

Tom Kelley, Jonathan Littman

6 ideas

1. The Ten Innovation Personas as Team Roles

   Innovation fails when teams hire for credentials instead of behavioral roles, so organizations should staff for ten distinct personas grouped as learning roles (Anthropologist, Experimenter, Cross-Pollinator), organizing roles (Hurdler, Collaborator, Director), and building roles (Experience Architect, Set Designer, Caregiver, Storyteller). Each persona is a posture a person can adopt rather than a fixed identity, meaning one individual can play multiple faces depending on the project's stage.

2. The Anthropologist Watches Behavior Not Surveys

   The most reliable source of innovation insight is direct observation of people using products in their real environments, because what people say they do diverges sharply from what they actually do. The Anthropologist suspends their own expertise to notice the workarounds, frustrations, and improvised hacks that users themselves have stopped noticing.

3. The Devil's Advocate as Innovation Killer

   The phrase 'let me play devil's advocate' grants a person license to attack an idea without owning responsibility for the negativity, making it the single most destructive role in any organization. Because the critique is framed as a hypothetical service to the group, no one challenges it, and promising ideas die under the guise of rigor.

4. Cross-Pollination Imports Solutions Across Domains

   Breakthrough ideas often come from taking a solution that works in one industry or context and transplanting it into an unrelated field where the same problem exists unsolved. The Cross-Pollinator deliberately exposes themselves to disparate fields and translates patterns across boundaries that domain specialists never cross.

5. Prototyping Faster Beats Planning Longer

   The Experimenter advances ideas by building rough, cheap prototypes and testing them quickly rather than perfecting plans on paper, because tangible artifacts surface problems and reactions that no amount of analysis predicts. Treating failed prototypes as data rather than defeat compresses the path to a working solution.

6. Experiences Are Staged Not Delivered

   The Experience Architect treats customer interactions as choreographed sequences with emotional arcs, deliberately designing trigger points that turn ordinary transactions into memorable moments. Viewing service through this lens shifts attention from product features to the orchestrated journey a person moves through.

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