Become A Better Decision Maker with STIR | A. Professor Dr. Erik Fisher
Whether a project, business, career or life, the key to success is about making the best decisions we can over time. In this episode of Future Up Close, Associate Professor Dr Erik Fisher walks us through "STIR" (Socio-Technical Integration Research), a practical, effective and adaptive process he helped develop to boost our human capacity to make better decisions while we work.
Watch Full Episode
Erik Fisher is an Associate Professor at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society within the College of Global Futures. He directs the Center for Responsible Innovation (USA) and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Responsible Innovation. Fisher has held visiting appointments at Delft Technical University (The Netherlands), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway), and the University of Twente (The Netherlands). Fisher studies the multi-level governance of emerging science and technology from the lab to the legislature. He developed the interdisciplinary, collaborative approach of Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR), which has been applied in dozens of organizations around the world to build human capacity and creatively address socio-technical problems at an early stage. STIR has been supported and recognized by numerous bodies including the U.S. National Science Foundation, the European Commission, and the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Fisher’s research has appeared in various outlets including Research Policy; Science, Technology and Human Values; and Science and Public Policy.
Topics covered:
What is responsible innovation? Why is it important for business leaders to do RI?
Impact of culture on STIR effectiveness
Industries most set to benefit from STIR
Who in business should connect with STIR Experts?
“People have to understand that the right decision isn’t “Oh! I chose door number one and that’s the prize!”. It’s not what decision you make, it’s how you make that decision, why you make that decision and to some extent when you make the decision.”
What is Responsible Innovation? Why is it important for business leaders to do RI?
For Erik Fisher, responsible innovation is the final step required in the innovation process, whereby businesses leaders enact duel diligence to ensure innovation products and services align with both business vision as well as social values.
This extra layer of reflection is increasingly important in realising innovation targets due to reasons including:
1) today’s consumers can easily discover and are increasingly inclined to “vote with their feet” based on corporate (mis)conduct;
2) retaining innovation talents is increasingly difficult but can be improved by giving staff more ownership in determining innovation directions that are good for business and align with personal values, which have proven to help boost staff engagement and sense of fulfilment
The Biggest Challenge For Responsible Innovation Is An Issue of Trust:
“I think the biggest barriers are really that people just don't trust it. If you and I are business owners we've never heard about this and somebody comes knocking on our doors saying would you please…try to practice Responsible Innovation, the first thing we're going to think of is: is this going to slow down our innovation? Is this going to interfere with our management structures? Is this going to disrupt our strategic goals? Is this going to cut into our profits? We can't risk that…But if I’m a business owner at some point I need to realise that I’ve only gotten to where I am by taking risks”
To build trust, responsible innovation practitioners should work with business leaders to understand and customise responsible innovation programs in a way that makes sense for the company’s daily practices and culture. Another consideration is to design your programme in a way that reduces the upfront risk for businesses such as instituting activities that can generate quick wins to demonstrate your programme’s value and usefulness.
What is Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR)?
STIR is a lean, 12-week capacity building training programme designed to help business leaders improve day-to-day decisions as they work. The programme uses a Decision Protocol that cycles through four steps:
Opportunity
Considerations
Alternatives
Outcomes
STIR (Socio-Technical Integration Research) Protocol
Strengths of STIR include:
1) it is low-risk and yields rapid, practical results: companies can experience incremental results and innovation improvements as a project progresses, as opposed to the need to make a large up-front commitment that is usually required when commissioning an e.g. RI report;
2) it produces long-tail advantages: STIR increases the overall decision-making capacity of your innovation team. This skill, once developed, is everlasting and can go on to improve business performance beyond current innovation projects
STIR vs. Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
In Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Kahneman describes the brain as having two systems for information processing and decision making. One is fast information processing and decisions making and the other slow and deliberate. Erik explains STIR in terms of these two systems - how STIR specifically works to improve our fast thinking process so that we can make better decisions under pressure.
“…when they hear about STIR and they hear about Responsible Innovation they're going to think “Oh, well, that's ethics and isn't ethics just kind of sitting back and thinking about, do I want to be principle based or consequence based and…am I following the checklist of how to think about an ethical issue. Now I’ve done that, now I can go back to work. And why did I do that anyway?” So that's a classic example of slow thinking that's divorced from practice...Fast thinking is the type of thinking that we do by habit and behaviour and routine and it's often tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge which isn't written down it's not formalized it's just what we know how to do, it's one of the things that makes us experts….STIR works with fast thinking, we don't ask people to stop what they're doing…”
Daniel Kahneman's Two Systems of Thinking
Instead of carrying out a post-project evaluation, STIR experts work onsite alongside innovation staff and ask tasks-specific questions to broaden the information consideration set and expose possible biases and blindspots. Questions may include e.g. “ What are you doing right now? Why are you doing that? How would you do it differently?". These questions are specifically designed to allow staff to stay in their fast thinking and to course-correct without downtime.
What should business leaders keep in mind when doing STIR?
Erik has lead STIR projects in laboratories, corporations and start-ups across Europe, Asia and North America. Key lessons for business leaders wanting to use STIR and drive responsible innovation include:
1) Understanding the importance of treating human discretion as a resource - as an asset - for improving business performance.
“…they should realise that all of their employees have what we call discretion they have the ability to make decisions and only they have to answer to this… And discretion is a resource. It's not a liability…the more your employees feel like their discretion matters they will take pride in that discretion and they will build up.”
2) Understand how innovation culture can impact STIR & Responsible Innovation:
“It's fair to say that the more innovative a culture is, the more likely they are to be able to be responsibly innovative. So innovation and Responsible Innovation kind of go hand in hand.”
For more information on Erik Fisher and STIR, you can go to http://cns.asu.edu/research/stir. To watch this full interview, you can head to “Become A Better Decision Maker with STIR”.
