Report 103

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

Wednesday 24 July 2013
Issue 233

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

Prejudgment
The Insane Journey
Does Your Company's Innovation Initiative Deliver the Expected Results?

Prejudgment
By Jeffrey Baumgartner

One reason why many people have trouble coming up with truly creative ideas is because they want their ideas to be liked and they want to be admired for good suggestions. This may seem a good motivator for being creative, but it's actually a motivator to come up with conventional ideas. If you want to have creative ideas, you need to drop this notion of your ideas being likeable and you need to be willing to accept criticisms of your ideas and, by extension, yourself. Worse, you have to accept that the more creative your ideas are, the more likely they are to be rejected. None of this is easy for most people.

As I have written in the past, we humans tend to want to maintain the status quo. We don't want to rock the boat. We don't want to change things. But, highly creative ideas threaten to cause big changes.They can result in the destruction of processes, products and actions that work just fine in order to replace them with unproven processes, products and actions that are different, unknown and a bit scary. People don't like that.

To make matters worse, creative ideas are initially hard to judge. They may be brilliantly creative or they may be stupid. Back when I was an employee in one or another company, I often had to ask managers whether a crazy notion I had was stupid or worth pursuing. I found asking that question difficult -- and I've been branded a rebel time and time again. I also have an overactive imagination that fires my creativity. In other words, I am more open than most to propose crazy ideas. So, I can imagine for someone less inclined than me to rock the boat, proposing a possibly stupid idea would be even harder.

As a result, the typical person's brain -- and particularly her dorsolateral prefrontal cortex -- tends to reject more outrageous ideas as she formulates them. Most people don't want to be laughed at in front of colleagues. No one wants to lose the respect of her managers. So, the typical person kills the most unconventional creative ideas before they get a chance to materialise in her mind's eye. Less radical ideas, however, are safer. This is why most people are good at coming up with conventional and moderately creative ideas, but find it hard to have super creative ideas.

What Can You Do?

What can you do about this? You need to teach your brain to behave differently when judging ideas.

Many creative thinking techniques instruct you to generate as many ideas as possible and to reject no ideas no matter how crazy -- or conventional or boring or predictable they may be. However, I've seen no evidence this actually works. Asking for lots of ideas does not address status quo bias. It does not stop us from thinking that some of our ideas are stupid and dismissing them. It does not address the fact that most people's minds are programmed to reject outrageous ideas and embrace conventional, safe ideas (highly creative people are different in this respect -- indeed, it's the key factor that makes them more creative than others).

A far better approach is to acknowledge in advance that your brain normally rejects crazy ideas; that you do not really want to present to your boss, client or business partner an idea that may appall them; that conventional ideas are easier to sell and less likely to be criticised. Acknowledge and accept these facts. Then, when you really need to be creative, don't try to be creative. Rather, purposely try to come up with stupid ideas. Intentionally generate ideas that will cause others to laugh at you. Aspire to dream up ideas that will appall your boss, customer or business partner.

As you generate ideas, immediately reject ideas that are conventional. Such ideas will be too seductive; like seeing a deliciously sweet and rich cake when you are on a diet. If that cake is in front of you, you won't be able to ignore it. So, you need to remove it. Likewise, immediately remove from your mind conventional ideas. Instead, focus on the outlandish, the crazy, the possibly-if-not-probably-stupid ideas. Develop those ideas further. Make them more appalling, more ridiculous, more absurd.

When you do this, then your brain will be truly free to be creative.

Teams

If you are working with teams, you should do two things. Firstly, you should brief your team about our tendency to stick to the status quo, how highly creative ideas can also seem highly stupid (at least at first) and how difficult it can be to sell unconventional ideas to conventional managers, customers and business partners. Then tell the team that for your current project you want to come up with stupid ideas that will achieve your goals. Tell them that crazy, insane and outlandish ideas will be rewarded and conventional ideas will be grounds for ridicule, condescension and possible disciplinary action!

Encourage team members to criticise each other's ideas that are conventional or, worse, boring. On the other hand, when an idea is a little bit crazy, encourage the team to make it even crazier!

Doing all of this will reprogramme their brains from the usual rejection of unconventional thinking in favour of safe, conventional ideas to embracing the unconventional.

The result, will almost certainly be a much higher level of creativity than you have attained in the past.

The Downside

The downside to being super creative is that it will still be hard to sell these wildly creative ideas to conventional managers, customers and business partners. So, only follow this approach if you really want to be creative. I

Incidentally, this purposeful rejection of conventional thinking in favour of unconventional thinking is a core component of anticonventional thinking.

The Insane Journey

Funnier than King Lear, more thought-provoking than The Little Engine That Could and shorter than War and Peace, my new novel The Insane Jouney is available in bookshops, on Amazon and as an ebook.

After focusing on writing and speaking about creativity for years now, I decided to return to my roots of being creative and fulfilling a long time desire: to write a novel that would make readers laugh. Have I succeeded? You tell me! You can read the first three chapters on-line or in your eReader free of charge. Or you can spend a paltry US$2.99 or so (depending on where you live) for the complete ebook. The paperback version is a bit more expensive -- and available from your favourite bookstore.

The Insane Journey is light summer reading. However, it does include some sex scenes, rude language and makes fun of fundamental religious nuts. If any of these things might offend you, then please do not bother to read the novel.

Look for The Insane Journey in your favourite bookshop, download the ebook (epub format) or buy it from your Amazon:

Paperback

Kindle

Does your innovation initiative deliver the results you expect?

By Jeffrey Baumgartner

More and more companies are devising and implementing serious innovation initiatives designed to capture ideas and drive their development. Moreover, thanks to a growing body of knowledge about how innnovation works, these plans are more likely than not to be well thought out, well structured and include tried and tested innovation tools. Nevertheless, most innovation initiatives fail to achieve the expected results. In my experience, this is because medium to large organisations are making at least one of these three mistakes. Many companies are making all of them.

Mistake no. 1: Innovation is not aligned with strategy and values

Have you announced to employees and other stakeholders that innovation is a priority to your company? Have you asked employees to share ideas? Have you assigned staff to innovation management positions? Have you installed idea management software? If these are the actions you are taking to promote innovation in your company, you are unlikely to see impressive results.

Innovation needs to be aligned with your company's strategic vision and corporate values -- and your employees need to know this so that they can develop suitable ideas that they know are relevant to business needs. Simply asking for ideas and hoping for the best is asking for trouble!

Asking for ideas that are in line with strategy and values is asking for innovation -- with useful instructions.

Learn more about innovation and strategic vision here.

Mistake no 2: Too much emphasis on ideas

Ideas are not innovation. They are simply ideas until you implement them and they generate value for the company.

Unfortunately, too many innovation initiatives focus on brainstorming, idea management software, crowdsourcing and other idea collection activities that lead to 100s and 1000s of ideas -- but no implementation and, hence, no innovation.

One implemented idea that is benefiting your bottom line is worth far more than 1000s of ideas sitting in a database.

If you are suffering from idea overload, you need to focus less on ideas and more on building idea implementation processes that work -- so that ideas generate income rather than waste database space.

You might also be interested in anticonventional thinking, the only collaborative creative thinking process that focuses on building a big idea and an action plan rather than generating lots and lots of mediocre ideas and no action.

Mistake no 3: Not acknowledging that your people don't like creative ideas

Most people do not like creative ideas. Really! Even though everyone says they love creative ideas and admire creative thinkers, the truth is the opposite. By and large, people hate creative ideas and dislike creative thinkers. In practice, this translates into problems such as:

Managers selecting incremental improvement ideas over more creative ideas in brainstorms and other ideation events.
People giving unnecessarily negative feedback on ideas in order to prevent their implementation.
People, often subconsciously, obstructing the implementation of innovative new ideas that might affect their work.
Managers being overly critical of their subordinates' suggestions and creative thinking.
Human resources and division heads choosing moderately creative job candidates over highly creative job candidates.

Needless-to-say, none of these actions will do your innovation initiative any good.

In order to overcome this issue, you need to:

Acknowledge that people do not like creative ideas, sometimes they vehemently dislike creative ideas.
Use evaluation methods that measure an idea's innovation potential rather than its likeability.
Give employees a sense of control over the changes brought about by the implementation of a highly creative idea.

Learn more about why people dislike ideas here.

Need Help?

If you want to restructure your innovation initiative to make it more effective, feel free to get in touch with me for some initial, complimentary and confidential advice. Just reply to this newsletter or contact me here. Want to share your experiences? I'd love to know more about them. Get in touch!