Report 103
A weekly newsletter on creativity, ideas, innovation and invention.
Tuesday, 12 October 2004
Issue 38
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.
TWIST THE ISSUE
If you are looking for ideas for a specific issue or problem, try twisting the issue in a fundamental way. This will force you to look at the issue from a different perspective and, as a result, will have you devising solutions that might not otherwise have come to mind.
For example, if your company is brainstorming ideas on...
“How to serve our customers better”
Instead, try looking for ideas on...
“How our customers can serve us better”
This may seem counter-intuitive, but give it a go and you might come up with an idea like:
“Our customers can solve their own technical problems and so reduce our call centre costs”
This could lead you to develop a more user friendly product and user documentation that reduces the need for customers to contact your call centre for support. Not only does this reduce call centre costs, but it leads to happier customers. Most customers do not like calling for support.
Likewise, an idea like...
“Let customers prepare their own orders so our salespeople can spend more time at the pub.”
...may seem a less than clever idea until you think about it. Creating on-line tools that allow customers to prepare their own orders can reduce the amount of time salespeople spend on maintaining existing customer accounts and allow them to spend more time on building new business.
Sometimes, when you twist the issue about which you are brainstorming, you also need to twist the results in order to achieve your goals. For example, if your company is brainstorming ideas on how to improve operational efficiency by 10%, try brainstorming ideas on how to reduce operational efficiency by 10%. In this scenario, someone in accounts might come up with an idea like...
“encourage salespeople to write orders even more illegibly than they do now. Then we can waste even more time trying to decipher hand writing and calling salespeople in order to prepare invoices.”
Such an idea immediately suggests that finding a means of improving the way in which salespeople's orders are prepared could improve the efficiency of processing orders and thus improve operational efficiency.
Someone else might suggest an idea like...
“Require that all meetings begin half an hour late and comprise at least 50% irrelevant small talk.”
This immediately suggests that encouraging more focused meetings which start on time would waste less staff time and improve operational efficiency.
Twisting a brainstorming issue is extremely useful for companies facing a threat. In particular, the issue should be twisted from “how can we fight this threat” to “how can we work with this threat to increase business.”
For example, some years ago I participated in a small business forum where a consultant complained that unscrupulous people were plagiarising material from her web site and either selling it as their own or giving it away as their own in order to increase their business. Other members of the forum suggested she send the plagiarists threats or take legal action. I looked that the problem differently and suggested she contact the plagiarists and tell them “You have taken material from my web site without my permission. You can either remove the material completely or you can put my name back on the material, become a reseller of my material and earn a commission on every sale you bring to my consultancy.” In this way, she uses the plagiarists to bring in new business and, by giving the plagiarists a cut in that new business, she encourages them to work with her rather than against her. I like to think the plagiarists also learn that it is to their benefit to co-operate rather than steal intellectual property. But I may be overly idealistic in this respect.
If you would like help in twisted issue brainstorming sessions, please contact me for more information. (or telephone +32 2 305 6591)
OPEN OFFICE SPACES – CLOSED MINDS
Talking to middle managers recently, I have discovered a tremendous problem which affects almost every medium to large business: the need to look busy prevents middle managers from focusing on major issues or spending enough time on problem solving.
Today's offices are often open and crowded. At best, workers have a cubicle which provides only the barest hint of privacy. Such environments are supposed to provide collaborative spaces and encourage employees to communicate with each other.
Unfortunately, such office spaces also allow employees to watch each other and make everyone feel they must look busy.
Creative thinking, on the other hand, tends to give the impression of laziness. It often involves staring off into space, looking out windows for long periods of time or going for walks. To co-workers, such activities look like goofing off. And managers, who must set good examples for their team, feel unable to do anything which suggests they are goofing off.
As a result, managers are more likely to implement the first idea that pops into their minds – probably the tried and tested solution that people have been using for years – rather than spend time thinking the problem through and dreaming up alternative, more innovative solutions.
As a public service to such creatively inhibited managers (and I know there are a lot of you out there!), here are three approaches to being creative and looking busy
1) Take copious notes while thinking. Notes not only help you document your thoughts, but also make you look very busy. Try mind mapping – diagramming your thoughts on paper by putting the key issue in the centre of the page and linking key words to the issue. Add lots of images, arrows and lines to express your ideas. (James Cook University offers a detailed on-line tutorial on mind mapping at http://www.jcu.edu.au/studying/services/studyskills/mindmap/index.html).
2) Explain to your staff the importance of creative thinking and creative problem solving. Discuss approaches and encourage members of your team to spend time on creative thinking as well. When you see members of your team thinking, ask them what they are thinking about and feed them questions to help them push their minds further. Encourage them to do the same with you.
3) If you have the space, create a thinking room or corner where people can go to think. The thinking room should have places to sit and lots of note pads or writing paper. Ideally, it should be near the coffee machine. Make it clear that people can go to this room to think either singly or in groups in order to brainstorm problems.
As a result, you will find that not only do you have a chance to think more about problems and spend more time developing solutions, but your staff also take a more creative approach to their work.
INTERNAL IDEA MARKET PLACE
I've been toying with a new approach to idea management modelled on marketplaces. (In fact, I probably should not share this idea here – I know at least two of our idea management competitors read Report 103. But I can never resist sharing ideas.)
The idea is relatively simple. Give everyone in a medium to large company an innovation budget. Each person's budget would be based on their position in the company. Regular staff might get 2000 Euro/year; middle managers 5000; senior managers 10,000; and so on). Innovation budgets are to be used exclusively for developing ideas.
If an idea results in an RoI (return on idea), the idea owner receives an increased innovation budget based on a percentage of the RoI. Thus, innovative people get an ever larger pool with which to innovate.
Moreover, staff can form teams with each person contributing a part of their innovation budget towards implementing an idea. If the result is a positive RoI, each contributor receives an innovation budget increase based on the percentage of their budgetary contribution.
Finally, people can buy and sell ideas with their innovation budgets. If you have a great idea which you do not or cannot implement, you can sell the idea to a colleague who is interested in implementing it. The colleague then transfers part of her innovation budget to you.
Alternatively, if you have a great idea, but insufficient budget to implement it, you can sell stakes in your idea to colleagues.
Over time, the company's most innovative people will amass substantial innovation budgets. These people can then become idea investors, providing innovation-budget-equity based investments in employees' ideas; particularly big ideas which an individual employee would not have the budget to implement.
The beauty of the system is that it allows people to grow based upon their innovative strengths. People who are strong on creativity and ideas but weak on implementation, can sell their ideas in order to amass an increasing innovation budget.
People who are stronger on implementation, on the other hand, can buy ideas or co-operate on ideas in order to amass increasing innovation budgets.
Only those people who want nothing to do with innovation will see their budgets stagnate. But such people are usually rather boring. So we need not worry about them, need we?
Want to discuss internal idea market places with a group of innovation experts? Join ValpoCella – our forum for discussing all aspects of applied creativity and innovation in business. Go to http://www.creativejeffrey.com/valpocella/ or send an empty e-mail to valpocella-subscribe@topica.com to join.
NIFTY WEB RESOURCE
Nifty Web Resource is a new column in Report 103. It introduces you to a web resource that I find particularly useful for researching innovation and creativity or for inspiration.
Innovation Tools, maintained by Chuck Frey, is a rich resource for information and links to products relating to innovation. Innovation tools includes articles on creativity and innovation from a wide variety of authors, reviews of software products and more. One of the nice things about innovation tools is that it is not selling a product, hence there is not the bias you would find from an innovation resource that is also selling one or more products.
Certainly worth a visit. Probably worth a bookmark: http://www.innovationtools.com/.
THE REPORT 103 CRANIAL EXERCISE
Subscriptions to Report 103 have increased rapidly over the past few months. So it is time to reintroduce the Report 103 cranial exercise – which I initially introduced in the early days of this newsletter.
The cranial exercise is simple: why have I named this newsletter Report 103? The clues you need are in the header of every issue. .
Happy thinking
Jeffrey Baumgartner
