Report 103

A fortnightly newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

Tuesday, 18 January 2005
Issue 49

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your weekly newsletter on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

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.

Information on unsubscribing, archives, reprinting articles, etc can be found at the end of this newsletter.


PRESERVING YOUTHFUL ENTHUSIASM

Has this ever happened to you? You start a promising job in a new company. You are full of enthusiasm and dripping with ideas. Keen to make your job exciting and to demonstrate the thought you have put into your new position, you explain your ideas to your superior. You share your ideas at meetings. You discuss how to develop ideas with your new colleagues.

Sometimes your colleagues get excited about your ideas as well. Often, however, they shake their heads and say something along the lines of (and I really and truly hate this phrase) “We don't do things that way here.” or “you'll never get the budget for THAT.” At other times, you may be asked to write up a business case for your ideas or at least do a Powerpoint presentation. But, you soon notice that such ideas rarely go further than the presentation or paper you prepared.

In time, you adapt to the company's ways and probably feel that you were a little naïve in the early days there. You learn what is likely to work and what will not work. Likewise, you modify your creativity accordingly, suggesting only ideas which you know will fit in with corporate policy. The crazier, more exciting ideas you try to avoid. But if they do appear in your mind, you shake them away.

Then, one day, a new person joins your division. You see in her the naïve enthusiasm you once had – but which has since evaporated. Very likely, you try to encourage her. If she reports to you, you may well ask her to do a powerpoint presentation or write a business case; knowing in your heart of hearts that the concept will never develop beyond the document you have asked her to write. Nevertheless, you hate to spoil her enthusiasm.

Of course not all companies have such an environment. Some welcome that youthful enthusiasm and implement enough ideas to keep the energy flowing. Others seem to stamp out youthful enthusiasm in its earliest stages – as if it were some kind of cancer that could destroy the corporate culture.

But even in the most innovative of firms, new staff soon learn the ways of the company and adopt their creative thinking accordingly. This is a shame, because in that youthful enthusiasm and corporate naivety exists a pure creativity unprejudiced by corporate thinking and free of institutional prejudice.

Companies should go out of their way to encourage that naïve, youthful enthusiasm. There are two ways to do it:

1) Capture the ideas of each new employee before she adopts to the corporate culture and limits herself to the corporate way of thinking. This can be done via the idea management system (if one exists in the company). Otherwise, the new employee's ideas should be reviewed – seriously – by the company's innovation team. If ideas do not seem relevant to the company's way of doing things, the reasons why this is so must be ascertained. It is not enough to say “we do not do things that way here.” It is, on the other hand, acceptable to say: “building such a product would require revamping one of our factories at great expense – and it is not clear that the return on investment would be sufficient.” Where possible, get the new employee to participate in the evaluations. This shows her you take her ideas seriously and gives her a chance to argue her case. She might well say: “Of course it would be too expensive to revamp one of our existing factories. But I know of three factories in China that already produce such things. We could source from them.”

2) The second way is rather trickier. Try to retain that youthful enthusiasm with all your employees while still providing them with the experience and understanding of your corporate culture that leads to their growing into efficient, productive employees who understand the workings of your company and help it to grow.

The best ways to maintain enthusiasm are to encourage creative thinking even when it seems to conflict with the corporate way of doing things; and to give employees new tasks and move them to other divisions with enough frequency to stimulate them with new environments and new responsibilities.

In short, rather than forcing your employees to adopt their creativity to follow the firm's corporate way of thinking, your firm should adopt its corporate way of thinking to follow employees' creativity.


AVOIDING “FAILURES OF IMAGINATION”

Ever since the 9/11 Report (http://www.9-11commission.gov/) on the US Government's response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 cited a “Failure of imagination” as a major factor that allowed the tragedy to happen; my imagination has been captured. It struck me that organisational risk analysis can be very similar to organisational innovation. And this suggests that tools and techniques used in innovation management might also be used in risk analysis management.

Consider the 9/11 attack. It has become clear that there were people in the US intelligence agencies and government who had clues about the imminent threat. And the concept of crashing an aeroplane into a building in a suicide attack is not entirely new. Tom Clancy wrote about such an attack in “Debt of Honor” (1994). And, I understand that Mr. Clancy's books are popular with the US intelligence agencies. However, the government apparently had no way to put together these notions in order to create a big picture of the possibility of multiple aeroplanes being flown into key targets in the USA.

Likewise, in any large organisation, that has no idea management process, many people will have ideas. But, there is no easy way for these people to communicate their ideas to the decision makers who can act upon them. Moreover, it is not easy for the people with ideas to collaborate with others having similar ideas in order to build up more sophisticated and innovative concepts. With idea management, on the other hand, ideas can be captured by management and – on better systems – there are tools that allow cross-enterprise collaboration between people with similar ideas.

Thus, it should be possible to use modified idea management tools as risk analysis management tools. Instead of people using their imaginations to devise ideas which could be implemented in order to help the company grow; people would use their imaginations in order to envision all the potential risks their firms might face.

Then, rather than evaluating ideas based on how well they meet a criteria set, we would evaluate risks on likelihood and consequences. The next step is even more like innovation: we would need to devise methods of preventing the risks from occurring as well as develop plans of action to minimise damage should they occur.

In fact, we are looking at building a modified version of Jenni idea management virtual software. The modified version would allow you to capture risks dreamed up by a risk analysis team, evaluate those risks and create plans for dealing with those risks. The tool would be available for short term rental to allow organisations to do a risk analysis exercise without having to buy software.

At this stage, the concept is very experimental. But, if you are interested in exploring it with us, contact me..


BREAKING PROBLEMS DOWN INTO COMPONENTS

When we have a problem or an issue for which we are looking for ideas, we often look at an overly big problem. As a result, we seek overly big solutions which may not even solve the problem properly.

It is often useful to break a problem down into components and look at each component separately. In some cases, it may turn out that we only need to solve a single component of the problem. In other cases, several small solutions, each dealing with a different component of the problem, provide a better overall solution.

In order to provide you with an example of this process, I took a look at recent Sylvia Web BrainStorming sessions (http://www.creativejeffrey.com/sylvia/) and found numerous examples of brainstorming for overly broad problems or issues. Here's one example that could belong to any company:

“How can we make cold calls more effectively and generate more interest in our products and processes?” There are a number of components in this problem. Which do you see?

I see several:

  • Identifying what is interesting in your products and processes.

  • Who are you calling? Obviously some prospects are better than others. Focusing on better prospects will lead to better results.

  • Who is doing the cold calling? Can they be improved, perhaps through training?

  • How are you communicating? Are you reciting a script? Are you smiling? (research shows that when people smile while talking on the telephone, they sound friendlier)

  • What are you asking the customers to do? Order something directly? Make an appointment to meet a salesperson?

  • What follow up are you doing to help make the sale? Are you calling the customers again in a week or two?

I am probably the world's worst salesman. A professional could surely break the problem into further components.

Once we have broken down the problem, it may become clear that the problem is with a single component. In the above example, it is possible that the company has never really analysed their products and processes in order to determine what makes them attractive to their existing customers. Clearly this information would be extremely helpful in selling to new customers.

Alternatively, the company above might realise that they are doing no follow up on their cold calls. As a result, people who would buy their products are not being offered an easy chance to do just that.

When breaking problems into components, it is useful to establish several small creative teams – each of which is briefed on the overall problem and assigned a component for which they should brainstorm solutions. Give them time to work on solutions (this could be a half hour or it could be a week depending on the nature of the problem) and then bring the teams together to report on their results.

Those results can be impressive, often groups will have complementary ideas that fit together like puzzle pieces, thus providing a big solution which can be applied to the problem. At other times, one team will come up with a solution that can be applied to all of the components of the problem.

So, the next time you are facing a problem. Break it into pieces. Not only will doing so make problem solving easier, but it should result in better solutions.


THE MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANY?

Fast Company magazine went on a mission to find the most innovative company in America. They say the winner is W.L. Gore & Associates. The article is at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/open_gore.html and is most instructive.


THE LEAST INNOVATIVE COMPANY

The other day, at an Innovation Breakfast where I was speaking, I ran into someone who had consulted at Company X when I had consulted at company X. We both had a good laugh at finding each other at the innovation event and agreed that Company X was probably the least innovative company we had every worked with. At the time, I was doing e-business consulting. A firm like Company X would never hire an innovation expert.

Among Company X's policies which prevented creative thinking and innovative behaviour are:

  • In spite of only having 30 people at its Benelux office (it is a small multinational company), that office is highly hierarchical. If someone at a lower level wants to communicate to the boss, she needs to talk to her manager, who talks to her manager, who talks to the boss. Low level people may not communicate directly to high level people.

  • There was absolutely no trust between top management and the rest of the company. Without trust, people do not take risks. Being creative is taking a social risk.

  • Staff were given no freedom to develop or work on their own ideas. I saw a couple of people being severely criticised for developing ideas on their own.

  • Management openly laughed at some ideas presented by staff.

  • In the sales division (where I was working), account executives were pressured to increase their sales immediately. Thus providing them with no time to work on innovative long term strategies.

  • While I was there, several outspoken people were dismissed with no reasons initially being given for this dismissal. Because they were outspoken, it gave the impression that being outspoken or deviating from corporate culture would lead to dismissal.

I hope your company is not like that!


Happy thinking

Jeffrey Baumgartner

 

 


 

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Jeffrey Baumgartner
Bwiti bvba

Erps-Kwerps (near Leuven & Brussels) Belgium

 

 


 

My other web projects

My other web projects

CreativeJeffrey.com: 100s of articles, videos and cartoons on creativity   Jeffosophy.com - possibly useful things I have learned over the years.   Kwerps.com: reflections on international living and travel.   Ungodly.com - paintings, drawings, photographs and cartoons by Jeffrey