Report 103

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

Wednesday 16 May 2012
Issue 209

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your twice-monthly (or thereabouts) newsletter on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

As always, if you have news about creativity, imagination, ideas, or innovation 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.

Note

Most articles in this issue of Report 103 can also be found in the archives together with dozens more articles, papers and thoughts.

In this issue of Report 103

How Will You Change Your World?
The Seven Core Tenets of Anticonventional Thinking
Anticonventional Thinking Training and Facilitation
Interesting Links
Read my Book and Save a Fortune on Consultants

INTERACT WITH JEFFREY

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How Will You Change Your World

I am rethinking innovation from the business-like perspective I have followed and promoted over the years to a grander vision. In so doing, I believe innovation needs to be redefined.

Innovation = changing your world for the better

Now, let me explain this definition. Let’s start with “your world”. Your world could be the entire planet and everyone on it. But it could also be more localised. Your world might be your family or your business (including everyone affected by it, such as customers, suppliers and shareholders) or your community or your country or any world that is meaningful to you.

Broader Concept of Innovation

Thus, innovation could be changing the way you raise your children in order to encourage them to think more creatively and seek knowledge better. That would be a truly noble innovation and one that would profoundly change the world of your family, your children and their future. Frankly, to my mind, it is also a far greater innovation than 99% of the corporate innovation I read about.

Innovation could also be developing a mechanism that allows a small charity to deliver food aid more efficiently so that the same budget can feed more people in need. It’s no iPhone, but there can be no doubt that this innovation would profoundly change the world of a group of people – very possibly saving lives. It is an innovation whose change for the better might well last generations.

Innovation could be eradicating corruption in the education ministry in an emerging economy, ensuring that education budget goes to schools, teachers and supplies rather than corrupt politicians. Such a change would surely positively affect the entire population of the country and make a huge difference to future generations and the country’s resulting economy and global standing.

And, of course, innovation could be improving the packaging of your food product, so that it stays fresh longer and can stay on supermarket shelves longer before going bad. Such a change would result in less wastage from expired products being thrown away and increase income to your company. It would enrich shareholders slightly and might lead to additional jobs, thus providing incomes to people and likely supporting families. Moreover, with more income, those people can purchase more from other businesses in the local community and thus even this business innovation would have a small but notable knock-on effect locally.

How About You?

Enough of my examples. If you are working on innovation in your company, ask yourself and your team: how will our innovation change your world? If you cannot answer that, even for a very small, local world, the chances are that your idea does not have the potential to become an innovation.

And what about you, as a person, an employee, a part of a family and a member of your community: how will you change your world?

Do tell me, I really want to know!

The Seven Core Tenets of Anticonventional Thinking

Anticonventional thinking (ACT) is a new approach to creativity designed to address the weaknesses of brainstorming and creative problem solving (CPS) by implementing the latest research and observation into how individuals and groups solve problems through creativity. (You can download and my original paper on ACT here.)

Meanwhile, the seven key tenets of ACT are....

Purposefully reject conventional thinking in favour of the unconventional thinking throughout the creative process and not just in idea generation. This is the key to ACT. Most people’s minds are programmed to do the opposite: reject unconventional thinking in favour of conventional thinking. After all, conventional approaches tend to be safe, socially acceptable and well tested. However, by definition, they are not creative. Hence, the secret to ACT is to trick the mind into doing the opposite of what it normally does. ACT is about training your mind to learn to reject the conventional in favour of the unconventional.

Moreover, ACT is not just about trying to have unconventional ideas. Rather it is about seeking the unconventional at every step of the process of solving problems or achieving goals through creativity. Learn to look at the problems and goals, for which you seek ideas, in new, unconventional ways. Look for unconventional insights and inspirations that can spark new thinking. When generating ideas reject conventional ideas for unconventional solutions. Rejecting the conventional in favour of the unconventional is the core concept behind ACT.
Focus your creative energy on understanding the issue, problem or goal and not on generating ideas. When faced with a problem, most people look only at the surface of the problem and immediately try to find ideas. Do not do this. Rather, spend time deconstructing the problem in order to understand better the core issues behind it. Look at the problem from different perspectives. Try to see the problem from other people’s perspectives or even imagine you are the problem. Likewise, ask yourself how the unconventional insights that you have gathered might change the nature or interpretation of the problem.

Spend a lot of time on this step. Once you really understand the problem and can look at it from various perspectives, generating creative solutions is remarkably easy.
Formulate a challenge or call to action that is provocative and encourages unconventional solutions. Rather than ask, “What new features might we add to this product?”, ask “How can we make holding our product as sensuous as holding your lover’s hand?” Rather than ask “How can I get a good job in this economy?” ask “How can I make myself irresistible to my dream employer?” Do you see how more provocative challenges such as these inspire more creativity?

When possible, rather than posing a challenge, make a call to action. Instead of asking “In what ways might we improve the shopping experience for our customers?”, demand “Design the most exciting shopping experience on the planet! Something so exciting even men will never want to leave our shops!”

Using superlatives (best, most, biggest, etc), unconventional metaphors and extreme language (sensual, incredible, legendary, etc) are great ways to make challenges and calls to action more provocative

If you are comfortable doing so, go ahead and change the formulation of the challenge or call to action while solutions are being generated. This can inspire new thinking and ideas.
Disagreement, debate and defence, the three Ds are all good for creativity. Really! In spite of what you have learned in brainstorming sessions, arguing about the viability of ideas during the idea generation phase makes people think more about the ideas, enables you to reject non-viable ideas immediately and allows people to defend and develop ideas that may initially seem weak but which have great potential. This last point is important. If in a brainstorm, an apparently weak idea is generated, it will inevitably be disposed of during evaluation.

In ACT, if the same weak idea is suggested others are likely to criticise it. If they do, the person responsible or anyone else can defend the idea and develop it in more detail. As a result, a seeming ‘loser’ idea becomes a very creative one. This does not happen when there is no debate about ideas.

However, debate in the creative process needs to be respectful. Hence, I offer three rules:

1. Always criticise boring ideas. You don’t want any of them slowing you down.

2. Criticism must be respectful and address the idea and not the person suggesting it. An idea may be called ‘daft’ a person may not be!

3. When an idea has been criticised, the person suggesting it or anyone else must be permitted to defend the idea.

In addition, if a participant in an ACT group is senior to others (for example, a manager in a company or a professor among students), she should make it clear from the beginning that she expects to hear criticism of her ideas and will be very disappointed if she does not. Otherwise, people may be reluctant to criticise her ideas.
Work on generating a small number of developed solutions or concepts rather than long lists (or stacks of sticky-notes) of ideas. Long lists of ideas typically generated during brainstorms inevitably include way too many boring ideas, are an administrative hassle to deal with and very often the most unconventional and provocative idea are lost among the mediocre suggestions of incremental improvement. The only value a long list of ideas provides is a metric that people can get excited about: “Golly! We generated 7,432 and a half ideas!” This ignores the fact that boring ideas, duplicate ideas and boring duplicates comprise 7,362 of those ideas and the remaining 70 are incremental improvements. Worse, some unlucky person will have to look at all those ideas when she could be doing something far more productive!

Instead, ACT aims to develop a very few – perhaps just one – creative solutions in some detail. As an alternative to describing the solutions in words, participants could be asked to weave stories (describe a girl who has just opened the packaging of our new cellphone. What does she hold in her hands? How does she feel about it?). They can be given materials such as Lego, building blocks Styrofoam, paper and tape, and be asked to build a solution. They can be given large sheets of paper or whiteboards and be invited to draw solutions. All of these approaches push people to develop ideas into coherent concepts rather than a list ideas.
Reject boring, conventional ideas. Don’t even bother writing them down.

They are boring. Work only with unconventional, exciting, outrageous ideas. If an idea makes you yawn, dump it. If it makes you laugh, develop it!

One of the classic rules of brainstorming is to include every idea that comes to mind. The theory behind this is that once brainstormers divest themselves of boring ideas, they will come up with creative ones. The truth is, your mind has a censor which sits in the the dorsolateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions of your brain. When most people start trying to generate creative ideas, this part of the brain actually becomes more active than usual. Why? Because it is rejecting ideas!

The best way to deal with your brain’s censor is to trick it! Convince it to reject boring conventional ideas in favour of outrageous, unconventional ones.
Your creative solutions must be evaluated by strict criteria and not by the vague notion of “the best idea”. And there must absolutely and positively be no voting for the best idea! To do so would ensure that the most outrageous, unconventional and creative ideas are rejected in favour or boring, conventional ideas! Why does this happen? Because, the most popular ideas in a large group are seldom the most creative or relevant.

So, unless your company CEO puts every business decision to vote as a matter of company policy, do not even think about voting on which solutions are best! Evaluate the solutions according to predefined criteria.

References and Further Reading

This list includes my initial paper on ACT as well as some of the papers that inspired it, usually by questioning an assumption about creative thinking and then testing it in a clinical setting.

Baumgartner, Jeffrey (2011) “Anticonventional Thinking”, http://www.creativejeffrey.com/act/ACTinaNutshell.pdf
CJ Limb, AR Braun (2008) “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation.” PLoS ONE 3(2): e1679.
Kenneth M. Heilman, Stephen E. Nadeau and David O. Beversdorf “Creative Innovation: Possible Brain Mechanisms”, Neurocase 2003, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 369–379
William W. Maddux and Adam D. Galinsky;; “Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity”; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2009, Vol 96, No 5, pp 1047- 1061).
Matthew Feinberg, Charlan Nemeth (2008) “The ‘Rules’ of Brainstorming: An Impediment to Creativity?”, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Working Paper Series (University of California, Berkeley) Paper iirwps-167-086.
Matthew J. Salganik,1,2* Peter Sheridan Dodds,2* Duncan J. Watts (2006) “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market”; Science 311, 854 ; DOI: 10.1126/science.1121066 (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/311/5762/854.pdf -- PDF document)
Nicholas W. Kohn and Steven M. Smith (2010) “Collaborative Fixation: Effects of Others’ Ideas on Brainstorming” by; Applied Cognitive Psychology; 29 March 2010 (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123329584/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0)

Anticonventional Thinking Training and Facilitation

Would you like me to give a workshop on anticonventional thinking (ACT) in your company? Over the next few months, I am already booked to do ACT workshops in the UK, the USA and Belgium. But I can manage a few more.

In an ACT workshop, I teach you and your colleagues how ACT works in an interactive way that combines a lecture, discussion and a lot of group exercises that enable you to put ACT to practice immediately! Better still, we can apply ACT to actual problems you are facing and goals you are working towards in your company, making the workshop even more relevant! Learn more about my ACT workshops here or contact me here. I'd really enjoy working with you!

Interesting Innovation Links

Pretty profitable parrots
The Schumpeter column of The Economist argues that "for businesses, being good at copying is at least as important as being innovative". And, indeed, the samples they cite suggest that copying an innovation can often be far more profitable than developing one! http://www.economist.com/node/21554500

How to Make a Region Innovative
Strategy+Business has an interesting article on how to make a region innovative. In fact, I've been involved in such a project in the Algarve and feel that it is a far more complicated thing than making a business innovative, but also more rewarding. http://www.strategy-business.com/article/12103?gko=ee74a

Thinking Creatively: Just Add Milk
You have surely read that shaking up your daily routines is a good way to boost creative thinking. I've certainly read it often enough. According to Pacific Standard magazine, it seems there is some proof that this assumption is valid. http://www.psmag.com/culture-society/thinking-creatively-just-add-milk-39972/

Read My Book and Save a Fortune on Consultants!

If you are setting up an innovation initiative in your company, take a look at my book, The Way of the Innovation Master, it will not only provide you with the information you need, but it will entertain you as well! Better still, with my knowledge in your hands, you won't need to hire expensive innovation consultants to help you get your innovation initiative up and running!