Report 103

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

Wednesday 5 June 2013
Issue 229

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 Do You Get Creative at the Office?
Every Company Is Innovative
Video: Creativity & Beer: Innovation vs. Vision
Every Company is Innovative
Too Much Talk -- Insufficient Action

How Do You Get Creative at the Office?

Surveys have shown that one of the worst places to have ideas is at your desk. But you probably don't need the surveys to tell you that!

But I am curious. What do you do when you need ideas at work? Where do you go? What tools or tricks do you use?

And what about in teams? Do you use formal brainstorming? Informal brainstorming? Other structured approaches?

I have the good fortune of working out of a homeoffice in a pleasant village with lots of great walks nearby. I almost always go for a walk in the countryside, bringing my handy notebook, of course.

But what about you? I really want to know what you do to get ideas at work! -- click on the link or email jeffreyb@jpb.com to share with me, please.

Thanks!

Every Company Is Innovative

Jeffrey Baumgartner

Every company, including yours, is innovative. This is why Ford's current cars are rather more sophisticated than its Model T. It's why you no longer have to hand crank your washing machine. It's the reason a visit to the dentist is less painful than it was a generation ago. Every business makes changes for the better, such as improving:

Products
Product styling
Services
The way products are manufactured
Facilities
Marketing techniques
Sales methods
Delivery methods
Hiring
Employee health and safety
And on and on and on

Compare any business of today -- and look at the entire business -- with itself or its counterpart of a or generation or two ago. You will inevitably see changes -- mostly for the better (or at least intended to have been for the better). This is the result of innovation -- not breakthrough innovation. But innovation nonetheless.

And let us be honest here. Many businesses have done very well with their slow, steady pace of innovation -- at least until a disruptive innovation comes along and makes their products or way of doing business obsolete. However, if you want to grow your business, if you want the prestige of being a leader in the field or if you are threatened by a disruptive innovation (or simply want to prepare yourself for the eventuality of a disruptive innovation), then you need to boost your company's innovativeness. Fortunately, there is almost unlimited scope to do so. Here are the first steps you need to take.

Make a Decision

The very first thing you need to do is to make a decision as to whether or not you really want your company to be more innovative. It will require making changes in operations. You will probably not like a lot of those changes. Your employees will dislike them even more, because they will have less control over those changes. In general, people do not like creativity and change. People who work in conservative companies are likely to be there, at least in part, because they like the stability and lack of change in their work activities. Do you really want to wreck all that disruption upon you and your employees? If not, be comfortable in your moderate level of innovation. In spite of what innovation consultants will tell you, there's nothing wrong with maintaining a low level of innovation providing your business is financially viable and achieving the aims you have set for it.

Strategy Definition and Action

Assuming you've decided to boost your competitiveness, then dust off your strategy and take a look at it. As I have written in the past, leaders in innovation do not focus on innovation. Rather they relentlessly strive to achieve and surpass their strategic vision. If your strategy definition is generic or boring, you need to redefine it into something unique for your market. Once you've done that, you need to communicate the new strategy and align your company's innovative actions towards achieving or surpassing that strategy.

Culture

Lastly, you will doubtless have to change your corporate culture into one that is open to a higher level of innovation. This is no simple task. It involves:

Communicating why you are changing your approach to innovation, how it benefits the company and how it benefits each employee.
Changing the way ideas are reviewed.
Changing the way you work with business partners.
Creating processes for testing and implementing risky ideas.
Training middle managers to support the creativity and ideas of their subordinates.
Changing attitudes and responses to failure.
Motivating people to be more creative in their thinking at work as well as embracing the ideas of others.

This is something I will write about in the future in the context of anticonventional thinking. However, I have touched upon it in past issues of Report 103 (click to browse the archives).

Don't Worry About Ideas Just Yet

You may be wondering why I have not stressed the importance of ideas in enhanced innovation. The truth is, your employees have lots of ideas. They have creative minds. You can also hire creative people in the future. But there is no point in wasting time on ideas until you have the mechanisms in place to accept, test and implement creative ideas. If you start by running brainstorms and suggestion schemes that collect 100s of ideas, you will end up with 100s ideas and no action. If you focus your innovation on a unique strategy and adopt your corporate culture to be more open to creativity and innovation, then ideas will come easily. Moreover, you will not need a database full of ideas. Most of them will not be relevant to your strategy in any event. You will simply need big, creative ideas that help you achieve strategic goals.

Easier Said than Done

As we say in English, this is easier said than done. I've only covered the surface of some radical actions you would need to take if you want you company to be significantly more innovative than it is today. Moreover, these changes would be disruptive for your business and, that would almost certainly result in employees resisting the change.

This means that you need to decide whether or not you really want your business to be more innovative and whether that boost in innovation would result in a sufficient boost in your company's bottom line. If you are not ready to make those changes or they are unlikely to pay off, then be happy that you are still an innovative company providing quality products and services to your customers. You can even call yourself innovative on your company web site and brochures. You'll simply have to accept that your company is not a leading innovator. But there's nothing wrong with that. Really.

Need a Hand?

Do you want to improve your company's innovativeness? Maybe I can help. Get in touch with me to find out.

I'd love to help!

New Creativity & Beer Video: Innovation vs. Vision

I have made a second video in my Creativity & Beer series. This one is on Innovation vs. Vision and looks at why companies that are innovative leaders focus more on pursuing a strategic vision than on being innovative. You can also read about this issue here and here.

Too Much Talk. Insufficient Action.

Give a group of young kids a big box and what do they do? They most certainly do not hold multiple meetings discussing innovative uses for the box. They do not run a formal brainstorming session. They do not try to understand the box better. They do not research boxes or what the kids down the road are doing with their box. They do not launch open innovation initiatives in order tap into the wisdom of the crowds to work out what to do with the box.

Of course not! The kids jump into the box and play with it. For a while it might be a transmogrifier. Then, with a few markers swiped from someone's parents, it could become a spaceship or a house. If one game gets boring. No worries, the kids will try something else out and the box will become something else. If they hit upon a great game, they might play it in the box again tomorrow.

In the world of business innovation, it is too easy to get caught up in talking and writing. Imagery is limited to PowerPoint slides with automatically generated bar graphs. Meetings are held to discuss ideas in endless verbal detail. Once an idea is agreed upon, it is presented verbally to the next in command -- which typically results in more meetings and more talking. All this time, of course, nothing is happening with those ideas.

Shut Up and Play

Sometimes, everyone just needs to shut up and play like kids. Stop talking about how you should improve a product. Get a box, draw on it, cut it up, pretend it's your product and play with it! How does it feel. How do you want it to feel? Invite your buddies -- sorry, I mean "your colleagues" -- to play with it too. Share your experiences.

Stop talking about how you are going to promote your government initiative. Turn your promotion into a performance and play it out. Or divide yourselves into two groups. One group pretends -- sorry, I mean "role-plays" -- that they are government officials explaining the initiative and the other role-plays they are members of the disinterested public.

Want to serve your customers better? Invite a few of them around to play -- sorry, I mean "explore ideas" -- with you. Then perform role-plays of interactions between you and your customers. But let the customers play you and you can play your customers.

Need to improve a system? Get a bunch of wooden building blocks, or Lego building bricks or paper and string and build representations of systems. Then play with the construction. Make it prettier, stronger, more fun.

When to Play

Playing like this is a great way to explore ideas, unshackle inhibitions and use different parts of your brain -- all of which boost creative thinking. In my experience, playing works best at two points in the creative cycle. It's great at the very beginning. It helps you see your goal in new ways and that inspires new thinking about how to achieve your goal. It is also great as a preliminary method of testing a developed idea before taking it to the next step. Consider it a kind of pre-prototyping phase that includes playing with the prototype, sharing it with playmates -- sorry, I mean "colleagues, suppliers and customers" -- and getting feedback for further tweaking before building the formal prototype.

Best of all, playing is jolly good fun. And far too few people are having fun at work these days -- at least from what I am hearing. But fun is good. We all should do more of it.

Go on, give it a try. What have you got to lose?

Help Is at Hand!

Want someone to help you organise play sessions for playing -- sorry, I mean "developing and testing ideas"? Get in touch with me!

I'd love to help!

News About My Workshops and Speaking Gigs

With growing interest in my workshops and talks on creativity and, especially, anticonventional thinking, I have decided to hand management of these to The GreenHouse Group. This will allow me to focus more on the content of the workshops and talks, while the professionals at The Greenhouse Group oversee the administration and management of each gig.

The GreenHouse Group bvba is a Brussels based HR consultancy, training and coaching company. We support organizations achieve their strategy through a focus on people. We do this by creating training, coaching and working environments where people can learn fast, innovate and get results. The company focuses on the development of blended learning programmes that are designed to meet specific organizational needs and has proven its ability to manage complex, multi-million euro development programmes. The GreenHouse Group's customers include public sector organisations such as the Belgian Banque Nationale, the European Commission, European Parliament, Eurocontrol and NATO, while private sector customers include Bridgestone, Electrolux, FedEx, GlaxoSmithKline and Renault.

We will be updating the contact information on to reflect this on jpb.com. Meanwhile, if you'd like me to do a workshop for your team or speak at one of your events, get in touch with Rob Bigge at The Greenhouse Group. Incidentally, they also have a great team of international coaches and trainers on their staff. Check them out!