Report 103

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

Wednesday 3 April 2013
Issue 225

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

Creative Ideas Event Generates THREE Ideas!
The Agony of Defeat (By Tim Sutton)
Don't Forget Strategy
Support Report 103 - Hire Me! (self-promotion)

Creative Event Generates THREE Ideas!

Jeffrey Baumgartner

Last week, I facilitated an anticonventional thinking (ACT) workshop and ideation event with a Fortune 100 Company. All together, we generated a grand total of three ideas! Yes, three!!!

Why am I so excited when brainstorms, crowdsourcing campaigns and creativity events so often boast generating 100s or even 1000s of ideas? Because the aim of ACT is not to generate an over-abundance of ideas. Rather it is to generate a big idea together with the initial steps of an implementation plan. At the workshop in question, I divided the participants into three groups. Each group developed one big idea and an action plan.

We followed the usual ACT structure. Each group deconstructed their goal in order to understand it better and see it from various perspectives. From there, they formulated a sexy goal (I provided a meter to judge whether or not the goal was sufficiently sexy). Through experimentation, debate and discussion each group then developed a big idea that would enable them to achieve their sexy goal.

This, of course, is where ACT differs from many other collaborative creativity methods. Most such methods are a variation of brainstorming or creative problem solving (CPS), in which the aim is to generate a huge number of ideas. Moreover, there must be no criticism or questioning of ideas during the ideation phase; all ideas are welcome. The assumption of CPS is that if there is criticism of ideas, people will feel inhibited and not share ideas which, in turn, will reduce the level of creativity during ideation.

Researchand my own experience suggest that this is not true. Prohibiting all criticism and questioning of ideas actually reduces the level of creativity. So, criticising and questioning ideas is not only welcome in ACT, it is encouraged! However, there are four rules to criticism.

Always criticise boring, conventional ideas. These are simply not allowed in ACT.
When you criticise an idea, you must then shut up and allow others to defend the idea if they wish to do so.
Criticise the idea, not the person.
If you criticise an idea, try to improve upon it or suggest a better idea.

Thanks to this approach, boring, conventional and non-viable ideas are weeded out right away and the group can focus on the more interesting ideas. Most importantly, participants in ACT events often say that they find it very refreshing to be allowed to criticise ideas. As one man commented at the three idea workshop, "when we can criticise ideas, we can really discuss them in detail, understand them better and really develop them. You can't do this when criticism is not allowed." Numerous participants in other ACT workshops and sessions have also remarked that they find it refreshing and invigorating to be able to criticise, question and discuss ideas.

As a result, ACT is not a process of divergence and convergence as is the case with CPS based ideation events such as brainstorming. Rather it is a process of intellectual experimentation of ideas including: testing ideas, rejecting ones that are boring and developing the most exciting ideas.

Moreover, once the idea development phase is complete, groups immediately move on to the action planning step of ACT, in which they develop a step-by-step action plan. This is something the managers who hire me really like. At the end of our session they are not left with a bag full of post-it notes or a long list of ideas. They are left with motivated teams, each with a single, well-developed creative idea and an action plan. Needless-to-say, when you have an idea and an action plan, that idea is far more likely to be realised than is one of 100 ideas on a list.

Another piece of feedback I hear after every ACT session is that the method is very easy to follow. So, if you have your doubts about ACT, read the paper and give it a try. Or get in touch with me! I am sure you will be impressed with the results.

The Agony of Defeat

By Tim Sutton

Inevitable Companions

Most of us don’t think of Vinko Bogataj when we ponder over important business lessons. In fact, most of us don’t even know his name. But, if you ever watched ABC’s Wide World of Sports, you’ll never forget his image accompanied by Jim McKay’s narration contrasting “The Thrill of Victory” with “The Agony of Defeat”; which McKay offered as “it’s inevitable companion”. The footage was from the 1970 Ski-flying World Championship Oberstdorf, Germany. Unfortunately, on that now famous run, “flying” was replaced by a horrific sequence of bounding head over heels off the side of the ramp as the Slovenian ski jumper became the anonymous icon for agony.

The good news was that Vinko suffered only minor injuries. The bad news was that he became the poster child for spectacular disaster.

You might think this is an interesting sports story. It’s actually a story about innovation.

Zero Sum Games

Jim McKay’s thrills and agonies describing the sports world could equally apply to the world of business where there are also dramatic and uncertain outcomes, although usually not in such a swift (and visual) fashion.

The reason is simple: almost every successful business has a growth imperative. For example, your company may need to grow by 10% next year. But, in the short term, populations usually don’t grow by 10%. In the short term, incomes don’t t generally rise by 10%. In most cases, if you are going to grow by 10%, somebody else has to shrink. If you taste the thrill of victory, somebody, somewhere feels the agony of defeat.

Like it or not, those are the stakes. Given that, it’s easy to see how fear of failure creeps into the picture.

Innovation as the Answer

Innovation is a hot topic. It’s often and accurately seen as an answer to long-term growth.

Bold innovation is one of those things most of us enjoy dabbling in and dreaming about. But, in practice, we may not like the realities of what it entails. Lives get changed, markets get disrupted, our sense of security goes out the door, and people get hurt. And, all those things can happen when we’re successful. It’s much worse when we try bold innovation and fail (cue Wide World of Sports video).

We can pretty much sum it up this way: We need the thrill of victory (from innovation and other growth drivers). But, we never want to experience that agony of defeat (from failing).

Paradoxically, how we cope with failure – both the fear of it and the reality of it – often determines how successful we will be at innovating.

Dealing with Failure

The traditional approach to dealing with failure in most companies owes a debt of gratitude to Pavlov: Failure is bad. Do something bad, get punished. Don’t do something bad again. There are very real situations where this makes sense. But innovation is not one of them.

From an innovation perspective, punishing failure leads to a really bad thing: Failure Avoidance -- with nasty side effects like paralysis, blame, and playing too safe.

There’s a temptation to solve this by over-correcting and declaring “Failure is OK”. This leads to an equally crippling condition: Failure Acceptance. While well meaning, in practice failure acceptance often allows quitting as an option. When you have to solve a problem, you usually do. When given the option to not solve a problem, you often do not.

Try to think of a successful innovation project that didn’t go through a dark period where everything looked like a hot mess. During the course of any significant innovation project, there will always, always, always be logical, rational, compelling reasons to quit. The companies that win more often have the will to persevere and adapt their way to success.

So, failure avoidance leads to inaction, and failure acceptance leads to a higher likelihood of failing. What do the world’s leading innovators do?

I offer these rules gathered over the last decade of working directly with them.

#1 Understand that Failure Is Not OK.

Show me a company where failure is truly OK and I'll show you a company that fails a lot (or did). Failures cost money. Banks keep score.

#2 Wrong Is Not the Same as Fail

Many companies equate “wrong” with “fail”. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, being wrong is a vital part of the innovation process. If you pursue bold innovation, you will almost certainly be wrong some of the time (maybe a little, maybe a lot). Designing businesses that will work in the future is very unpredictable with complex factors, many outside of our control.

#3 Failure is Innovation’s “Inevitable Companion”.

Apple made the Newton. Coors launched spring water. Life Savers made soda. They were all bold. They didn’t work out so well, did they?

If you play it safe, you’ll never do anything fundamentally better. Bold leaps require commitment and investment based on imperfect information. Despite your best efforts to minimize risk, some percent of the time you will miss the mark. Failure is part of the game. Apple, Coors, and Life Savors are all highly successful. None of them win every time; they just win more than they lose.

#4 Over-Invest in Making Smarter Bets

It is much better to invest generously in an exceptional process to gather facts, analyze risks, and create viable plans based on the information available than it is to write off expensive failures.

There are many good references on how to build processes that work. I don’t need to dwell on this. But I can’t stress enough how important it is to over-invest here. Over invest in prototypes. Over invest in research. Do your homework and trust your process. If you do this well, more times than not you will be in a position to make smart bets.

#5 Think of Launch Commitment Like a Ski Jump

Remember Vinko Bogataj? Ski jumpers like Vinko never know for sure if they’ll land on their skis each time they jump. But, they are extremely motivated because once they take their butt off the seat, there is no other option but to see it through. They don’t think about the “what ifs.” They only think about how to adjust and succeed.

I’d urge you to think of outcome commitment like a ski jump with a similar “Butt out of the Seat” moment. You wouldn’t strap on skis and hurl yourself down an icy ramp without a serious amount of homework, would you? Do not commit to any innovation project lightly. But once you do, see it through. After commitment, either you make choices that let you win, or you've lost.

Closing

What most of us never saw was that earlier on his fateful day, Vinko Bogataj made the jump of his life. He flew 410 feet down a German mountain to experience the true thrill of victory.

"I'd love to say "ski jumpers and innovators have a lot in common", but I can't do that with a straight face. But, there is an important lesson about dealing with failure that we can learn: you can't avoid failure or you'll never fly, but you also can't embrace it or you won't persevere. In the middle is a balanced, if highly uncomfortable space dominated by the inevitable duality most athletes have come to live with - where failure is not OK but losing is inevitable."

For those new to innovation, it’s easy to believe that success somehow occurs overnight and without having to fight for it. To be successful you’re going to have to fight for it. Once you commit, don’t lose without a good fight.

By the way, you’ll never guess what Vinko said to the medical crew loading him into the ambulance 10 minutes after his fall. “Can I jump again?”

About Tim Sutton

Tim Sutton is as an Engagement Director at Fahrenheit 212, an innovation consultancy in New York. He thrives on the challenge of creating and launching amazing products, businesses and strategic partnerships around the globe. In F212, Tim has found the ultimate playground and platform to practice innovation with an obsession for commercial success.

Don't Forget Strategy

In their enthusiasm to innovate, many managers lose sight of corporate strategy. Suggestion scheme software fills up with ideas that are irrelevant to the business's strategy, brainstorms generate ideas that have little to do with strategic requirements. Crowdsourcing events, in particular, are notorious for generating ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with corporate strategy. As a consequence, these events often generate highly creative ideas cannot be acted upon because they are useless to the company in question. Coming up with a highly innovative new concept for a tractor -- a concept that will revolutionise farming -- is useless if your company manufactures frozen pizzas!

This is why it is important, when organising any ideation activity, to brief participants thoroughly not only on the goal (or problem statement), but how the goal aligns with strategy. In anticonventional thinking (ACT), this is done when deconstructing the goal in order to see it from varied perspectives as well as in the formulation of a sexy goal. By ensuring the sexy goal, (such as: "Design a frozen pizza recipe that is so healthy doctors will enthusiastically recommend it to all their patients") is in line with strategy, you make it more likely that the idea developed by the ideation team (or teams) is in line with strategy.

Moreover, ACT encourages criticism, questioning and debate during the ideation phase. Hence. the ideation team or teams can be reminded to ensure that their ideas must remain in line with strategy; and if an idea veers away from strategy, team members should criticise this. The team can then either modify the idea to bring it back in line with strategy or reject the idea and pursue another line of thought.

Irrespective of what ideation approach you use, if you want to increase the likelihood that ideas will be implemented, you should spend time prior to the event briefing participants on background, strategy and even what kind of ideas will not be approved -- most experienced managers will be familiar with ideas that are often suggested, but never approved.

Support Report 103 - Hire Me!

The cost of writing, editing and managing Report 103 is subsidised by my paid writing work and my workshops, particularly on anticonventional thinking (ACT). If you find the articles in Report 103 provide value to you, imagine the value one of my workshops or a talk could provide to your colleagues! My workshops are fun, highly interactive and to the point. My talks are entertaining as well as informative. If you like Report 103, you'll love my talks and workshops. Moreover, if you hire me, you'll know you are supporting the continuation of this newsletter. Contact me to discuss your needs!

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