The value of a validation network

Shortly after the Haiti earthquake in 2010, I created a charitable venture called Business Heroes with my friend Simon. Our plan was to get university students to use their business skills to raise money to support Save the Children's disaster relief work in Haiti. We would create a charity-related business game that would inspire massive interest and exposure on social networking sites, capturing the attention of the digital generation Save the Children were so keen to reach. We invested a huge amount of personal time, and money, in getting the idea off the ground with corporate sponsorship in a very short period of time.

The net result: £5,000 invested, plus corporate sponsorship, to raise only around £1,000 for Save the Children.

Looking back, the biggest reason that Business Heroes failed was because we did not involve other people in validating it. We were wowed by our idea and believed others would be too. We were successful in recruiting people in our personal networks to help develop and deliver the solution. But at no time during that process did we ask people to question the idea, to challenge us on how it would work or to argue with us about whether it would capture the attention of the very students it was supposed to inspire.

This experience has shaped my thinking about creative networks. Our networks - both online and offline - are great resource for creativity, making it possible to combine our own knowledge with the ideas, insights and inspiration of others in pursuit of novelty and innovation. But we tend to think more about the ideation role of our networks than we do about their role in validating and testing ideas. We need what Randall Collins refers to as an argumentative community in which we create opportunities for rivalrous ideas to compete. By pitching our own ideas in opposition to others, we can see their strengths and weaknesses. Academic communities are naturally organised to do this. Some businesses are better at it than others.

There is another role of networks that is also overlooked. Although we are not always aware of it, when we talk about ideas the people around us reframe what we are talking about by reinforcing and developing some aspects of the idea and downplaying others. The more the people around us are part of a cohesive group who all know each other, the more likely it is that they will reframe the idea in similar and consistent ways. The more different they are in terms of cognitive structure and context, the more likely it is that they will reframe the idea in different ways. Thus, conversations with diverse, unconnected others are more likely to generate competing solutions and rivalrous ideas. That can be good for ideation and clarification. But for development and implementation, better to talk to people who know and understand the context in which are the ideas are to be implemented.

What can we take from this for everyday life? That different parts of our network are important for the various stages of the creative process. A bit like parts of the brain being activated for different activities.

The ideation parts of your network might involve all sorts of creative inputs, including the blogs, social networking sites, books, videos etc. that you tune into, as well as people you know who pass on ideas to you and people who are good to generate ideas with.

Here are some ways to think about the validation areas of your creative network.

Think about your argumentative connections - people who present opposing solutions or conflicting ideas

1. Who in your network do you go to test ideas, to put the opposite point of view to your own, to argue about your solution? Do you have people in your network who do this for you? 
2. Next time you have a solution or idea that you believe in, explain it to someone and ask them for three challenging questions about it. 
3. Who might you ask to act as an argumentative connection? The answer to that question depend on the nature of ideas you currently working with. Useful argumentative connections might be experts in the particular field, or people who could bring a naive perspective to the problem. 
4. Ask an argumentative connection for one alternative solution. Look for insights in their answers that could strengthen your solution. 
5. A high turnover and variety of argumentative connections should be a natural part of your network. They may be relatively unaware of the work setting or community in which you operate, or the expectations of your stakeholders.

Think about your reframing connections - people who help interpret your solution and apply it in a particular context 

1. Who are the people you commonly refer to for implementing ideas or for developing solutions? How knowledgeable are they about the setting you operate in? 
2. Next time you put an idea to them, think about how they reframe it. What aspects do they reinforce, and what do they downplay? Does their reframing reflect an understanding of the context that is important to you, and the setting in which you need to implement your idea?
3. Do your reframing connections impose too much of their own context, and not enough of yours? Could someone else reframe it differently? 
4. A high turnover and variety of reframing connections might in some cases be appropriate, but it is often the case that to be effective in implementing our ideas, we need a stable group - including our boss, our peers, relevant clients or suppliers etc - who understand our setting. 
5. However, when applying a solution into a context we are unfamiliar with, it may be necessary to find new connections - immersed in that context - to help with reframing. 

If we had applied these principles to our Business Heroes idea, would the outcome have been different? We spent plenty of time talking to corporate stakeholders about our idea, and to Save the Children, but not much time talking to students, despite the fact that Simon and I both knew students we could easily have asked. By asking them to contest and challenge the idea in an argumentative way, we would have learned why it was not likely to have a widespread appeal. If we had asked them to reframe the idea, and listened to the aspects they liked, and reinforced, we might have been able to develop a different proposition that delivered more effectively on Save the Children's desire to engage student fundraisers.  

(For the record, although the initial Business Heroes initiative was not successful, after a good deal of follow-up and validation, Save the Children took forward the idea; see Business Heroes)