Report 103
A weekly newsletter on creativity, ideas, innovation and invention.
Tuesday, 22 June 2004
Issue 22
Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your weekly newsletter on Creativity, ideas, innovation and invention.
As always, if you have news about creativity, idea innovation or invention please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103. Your comments and feedback are also always welcome.
IDEA FLOW
In medium to large organisations, idea flow is critical to innovation. Every firm has a number of highly creative individuals and many more moderately creative individuals. With optimal idea flow, their good ideas will be recognised and implemented relatively quickly and cost efficiently. With lousy idea flow, those ideas will mostly be lost. The quality of idea flow in most companies, of course, falls somewhere in the middle.
In order to best envision idea flow, it is useful to think about motion in dimensional space.
Zero dimensional idea flow is the worst kind of idea flow. Zero dimensions, as you will recall, is a single point from which there can be no motion. Likewise, in highly hierarchical companies that are not open to receiving ideas from staff, ideas do not go anywhere. If one of the staff has an idea, she might discuss it with her colleagues in a “Wouldn't it be great if our company were to...” sort of way. But the idea goes no further. Only when a decision maker – usually the CEO - has an idea is it implemented.
One dimensional idea flow is better. One dimensional space is linear and comprises points along a line. In firms which have begun to respect ideas, idea flow becomes linear. When an employee has an idea, she is invited to share it with someone responsible for ideas, such as her superior or an innovation manager. If the idea seems promising, the innovation manager may discuss it with the originator, send it to an expert for evaluation or send it to her superior for approval. Each of these people can be seen as points on the line of idea flow.
The more easily ideas move back and forth along the line; and the more lines of idea flow there are, the more innovative a company is likely to be.
Surprisingly, a number of companies providing idea management solutions, base their solutions on one dimensional idea flow. This is a pity, because once a company gets locked into a tool that pushes them into one dimensional idea flow, it is hard to expand into two or three dimensions.
Two dimensions define a plane or flat surface. Two dimensional idea flow means that ideas flow in all directions across the organisation. Anyone can see what ideas other people are proposing, propose their own ideas and collaborate on other people's ideas.
Likewise, when ideas are implemented, they are done so transparently, for the entire enterprise to monitor.
Two dimensional idea flow is clearly a big step up from one dimensional idea flow. Everyone participates at every level; collaboration builds upon good ideas, turning them into great ideas and transparent communication from management shows support for innovation which encourages further innovation.
Indeed, you may be forgiven for wondering what three dimensional innovation might look like and how it could improve upon two dimensional innovation.
Three dimensions define a cube or space as we know it. Three dimensional idea flow goes beyond the firm and brings in your customers, suppliers, consultants and business partners; perhaps even the general public in some instances. These people all have ideas about how an organisation can improve their products, services and image.
In particular, products for which customers have strong emotional attachments will certainly attract well thought out ideas from customers.
By bringing everyone from employees to suppliers to customers into the idea flow, an organisation is truly maximising its potential to innovate as well as demonstrating to everyone in the supply, production and distribution chains the value the organisation places in innovation.
Of course bringing outsiders into the idea flow is trickier than bringing employees in. For competitive reasons, most companies need to keep information, particularly about innovative new products and services, confidential during the development phase. Moreover, unscrupulous people (such as angry customers or nasty competitors) could attempt to sabotage the idea flow by introducing bad ideas into the system. Hence structures need to be built to allow different levels of idea flow between different parts of the three dimensional space.
I am proud to say (and I am sure you will not be surprised to learn) that our idea management tool, Jenni, permits three-dimensional idea flow by allowing anyone you permit to participate in proposing, collaborating on and evaluating ideas. Moreover, Jenni allows multiple access levels, so you can give trusted employees the highest level of access, while giving suppliers and customers a lower level of access, preventing them from accessing confidential or highly sensitive information. Take a look at http://www.creativejeffrey.com/jenni/ or e-mail me for more information.
LET'S TALK CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION
If you want to share ideas about creativity and innovation, if you want to debate issues you have read about in Report 103 or if you just want to meet a global group of people with an interest in creativity and innovation, join ValpoCella a moderated (by me) e-mail based discussion forum on applied creativity and innovation in business. ValpoCella is also the communication centre of the informal creative network. Like Report 103, there is no cost to join.
You can find more information at http://www.creativejeffrey.com/valpocella/ or join immediately by sending a blank e-mail to valpocella-subscribe@topica.com.
TASKS AND PROJECTS
If you want your staff to be creative in their day to day activities, it is essential that you assign and monitor tasks the right way.
Let's look at the wrong way first. To minimise innovation, define tasks explicitly. Detail the results you expect as well as the steps necessary to achieving those results. If you have good employees, you can expect to achieve the demanded results, but nothing more or less. This should not be surprising. Without room to be creative, most people will not be creative.
If want to make matters worse, monitor staff's progress of tasks closely to ensure that employees are following the given steps, have not deviated from the task instructions and will finish to schedule. This not only actively discourages creativity, but it creates an atmosphere of distrust. Such close monitoring tells your employees, more than anything else, that you do not trust them and need to watch over them closely like unruly children. And trust, according to a PWC survey on innovation, is an essential virtue of any innovative company.
On the other hand, if you want your staff to work creatively, you should define tasks in terms of the results you expect, a deadline and any necessary deliverables. In this case, you are giving employees the opportunity to discover their best methods of accomplishing tasks. You are allowing them to experiment with different approaches; you are letting them be creative.
Better still: if, rather than monitor staff's progress on tasks closely, you check up on them from time to time to ask how they are doing, indicate your willingness to provide support and discuss how their approach is working, you are indicating an appreciation of their creative skills and that you trust them. Clearly, you will not only get more creative approaches that lead to more innovative results, but you will also get more enthusiastic employees.
Best of all: if you really want to push employees to be creative in their approach and innovative in their results, explain how their task fits into the big picture – or, at least, a bigger picture – of overall operations.
Of course the creative approach of staff is not entirely the responsibility of management. Management can provide an atmosphere that invites and encourages taking a creative approach to tasks. Management can further facilitate creative thinking by providing good communication channels, three dimensional idea flow across the enterprise and more. However management can not force individuals to be more creative. That is up to the individual.
If you are on the receiving end of tasks – and most of us are, at least sometimes – it is you who must take a creative approach to tasks unless your firm actively discourages it (and, believe it or not, some do).
If you are given goal-driven tasks (ie. The goals are defined, but the method is largely up to you), take advantage of it. Look at new ways of approaching the task, discuss your ideas with colleagues (if it is a team based task) and the task giver and aim to provide more than requested. Not only will this go down well with superiors, but for any creative person, such an approach will be far more interesting, if not downright fun.
If you are unfortunate enough to work in a company where tasks are method-driven, or if your immediate superior is the kind of person who assigns such tasks, it will be harder.
In many organisations, devising an alternative approach and presenting it to your superiors – together with an explanation of the advantages of your approach - may lead to your being permitted to ahead with your method.
If, on the other hand, you are dealing with an insecure superior who sits between you and top management, things can be harder. Insecure superiors typically do not want their underlings to shine unless they can shine too. In my experience, the best approach is to discuss your ideas informally with the insecure superior, giving her the impression that she is involved in the new ideas and partially responsible for devising those ideas. If she feels she will get part of the credit for the results, she is likely to be more open about allowing you creative leeway in your approach. And do not worry, it will soon become clear to top management who is really coming up with the ideas.
Of course these efforts take time and are not practical with minor tasks.
If you work in a company where all tasks are method-driven and top management frowns upon lower levels having ideas, you would do best to look for a new job.
FRIDAY IS IDEAS DAY
Back when I ran a couple of companies in Bangkok, we used to have “Friday is English Day”. Every Friday staff were supposed to speak English to me and to each other (everyone in the company, aside from myself was Thai – although we did have a Burmese woman with us for a while – and I am fluent in Thai). The aim was to help the staff improve their English, but also to get them to relax and be a little silly. It is often easier to be silly in a language other than your first, I have found.
Remembering that, I had an idea: adopt a “Friday is ideas day” policy. Every Friday afternoon staff should be actively encouraged to think about their work, their projects and their company and come up with creative ideas for improving everything. It should be a day when staff should think about crazy ideas for new products, outrageous organisational possibilities and unique services. And staff should be encouraged to share those ideas – perhaps via a “Fridays” category on their idea management tool (if the company has one) or on an intranet web page or on a bulletin board.
Friday would be a day when people would be encouraged to spend a little time staring out the window thinking, reading journals related to their profession and talking about crazy ideas with colleagues.
I think it could be a terrific idea. Especially for a company wanting to become more innovative.
Happy thinking!
Jeffrey Baumgartner
