Report 103
Your newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.
Wednesday 14 May 2014
Issue 258
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.
A Word from Jeffrey
Hi,
As always, thanks for reading Report 103!
As you have probably noticed, I have started putting a cartoon at the top of every issue in Report 103. (If your email blocks such images, you can also look at the articles on the web. What do you think? Do you enjoy the cartoons? Are they a distraction?
For the past couple of months, I have been publishing and distributing Report 103 weekly, usually with just a single article. Prior to that, I published and distributed Report 103 every first and third Wednesday of the month, but with more articles. How do you feel about the new approach?
Starting with this issue, I will include a brief "Dubious Words of Wisdom" article. This will be a short word of advice, sometimes rather anticonventional in nature. For the most part, it will be work and business oriented.
I will soon close down the Report 103 archives. Most articles published in this journal are also archived in the Creativity pages of the web site. Also having them archived is redundant.
Report 103 is supported by my work running workshops; giving motivational, inspirational, thought-provoking talks; and consulting in organisations like yours. If you want to support the continuation or Report 103, hire me!
Jeffrey Baumgartner
Creative Risk
How crazy can you and your colleagues safely go before you run the risk of being thought crazy, unbusinesslike or worse? This is not a crazy question! The answer is critical to your organisation's innovation potential. If people cannot get crazy in their thinking, no one will ever suggest a really outlandish idea that seems daft at first, but eventually becomes the spark of a great innovation.
If you are an innovation manager in a medium to large organisation, the chances are high that your colleagues are not regularly coming up with crazy ideas with potential. If they were, your CEO would not have felt compelled to create an innovation manager position and put you into it! But do not feel put out! Your CEO put you in the innovation management position because she believes in you and I do too!
So, what can you do to encourage people to play with crazy ideas? There are a handful of actions you can take.
- Acknowledge that a lot of crazy ideas will not be viable.
- Provide a safe place for people to be crazy.
- Respect the people who are being crazy.
- Intelligently criticise ideas from the beginning.
- Have a process for developing creative ideas that includes the realistic possibility of implementation.
Acknowledge that Many Crazy Ideas Will Not Be Viable
The thing about crazy ideas is that most of them will come to nothing.
That's okay. But a few of them will have potential to become sexy innovations.
Encourage people to dream up crazy ideas, play with them and share them. It
is through sharing that the gems with potential will eventually shine.
But before people can do share ideas with colleagues and especially
their managers, they need to feel they are in a safe place to be crazy.
A Safe Place to Be Crazy
Very likely, most of your colleagues will not feel safe proposing crazy
ideas during regular staff meetings. These meetings are probably perceived either
as a time to discuss serious business or a pointless waste of time. Neither
is particularly conducive to craziness. Ironically, brainstorm sessions, particularly
if they are not professionally facilitated, are often unwelcoming to crazy ideas.
No matter how much the facilitator might claim, "all ideas are welcome",
if you are sitting in a brainstorm, listening to your colleagues shout out buzzword
ideas and uninspiring suggestions, you are unlikely to propose anything particularly
outrageous, are you? In spite of the brainstorm title of the event, the ideas
are clearly business-as-usual and that does not include craziness.
Instead, the usual meetings and internal brainstorms, get teams out of the office and into unbusinesslike places to build crazy ideas into crazy visions. You can use methodologies like anticonventional thinking (ACT) which actively encourage people to reject conventional thinking in favour of crazy thinking. You can also do preliminary exercises and activities to make people feel comfortable about being crazy. Lastly, you can hire facilitators who are a bit crazy to run creativity events.
Better still, get your CEO to establish a skunkworks which is a business unit that is encouraged to experiment with crazy ideas, is allowed to have lots of failures and is empowered to develop ideas without going through the typical approval processes that tend to reject crazy ideas.
On a smaller level, teach people to say things like "Just thinking out loud here", "I have a crazy idea", "I have not had a chance to think this through yet, but what if..." Simple phrases like these enable people to feel more comfortable suggesting crazy ideas, because they acknowledge that the idea might be crazy.
Respect the People
Although I have not seen any research on the topic, I believe it is safe to
assume that the primary reason people do not want to share crazy ideas at work
is the fear that they might be ridiculed and perceived as crazy. Past experience
being ridiculed or seeing colleagues being ridiculed will only reinforce this
feeling. Your colleagues want to be respected, trusted and given autonomy.
This means that it is critical to respect and trust your colleagues and to do so visibly. If they feel respected and trusted, they will be comfortable sharing crazy ideas without fear of being labelled crazy people. Needless-to-say, you must always differentiate between the person and her idea -- and you must ensure your colleagues do this too. When commenting on or criticising an idea, always compliment the person behind the idea, recognise the fact that she contributed an idea and encourage similar thinking even if you think her idea is absolutely bonkers.
Intelligently Criticise Ideas from the Beginning
Thanks to brainstorming and creative problem solving, we have this
twisted notion that you should not criticise ideas -- or at least reserve judgment
on ideas -- because criticising ideas will damage the ideas and cause all kinds
of havoc, possibly including the end of the world as we know it. This is ludicrous
and places the importance of ideas higher than the importance of people. Look
at it this way, imagine you propose a crazy idea to your boss. How would you
feel about each of these outcomes?
- Your boss says it is a very good idea. However, nothing more happens with it. You mention it to your boss again and she again says it is a very good idea. Still nothing happens.
- Your boss laughs at you and says nothing.
- Your boss thinks about the idea for a moment and then gives five reasons why she believes the idea will not work as stated.
All three of these actions are rejections of your idea. While criticism is never as nice as a compliment, I believe most people would prefer the third scenario in which the boss offers thoughtful criticism. Why? Because intelligent, thoughtful criticism demonstrates respect for the suggestion and the person who suggested it. In effect, the boss is saying, "your idea is worthy of my time and consideration. It may not be viable, and here are some reasons why, but it was a worthy idea."
The second option, of course, is the worst. Being laughed at is a humiliation, particularly if no reasons are given. Dismissive behaviour which criticises the person is just as bad.
The first option may seem the best. However, if the boss merely compliments ideas, but ignores them, she is not respecting them. People soon work that out and stop making crazy suggestions. Indeed, they may stop suggesting ideas all together.
In fact, I recommend a process I call the The Cs: consider, compliment and challenge. It is a better, more motivating way of delivering criticism.
Have a Viable Development and Implementation Process
The one thing that can really and truly encourage people to share crazy
ideas and develop them into creative visions is a belief that their vision might
actually be realised. Even if you get all of the steps above right, if people
do not believe their crazy ideas could ever see the light of day, they will
not be particularly motivated to share and develop their ideas. I've written
about a process
for implementing creative ideas. And that is a start. However, if you can
work with top management to lay down a crazy idea development and implementation
process suitable for riskier, crazier ideas -- this is better still. Such a
plan should keep a distance between the idea and approval committees, address
risk issues and be easy to back out of if it does not work.
If you can implement these steps in your organisation, people will start feeling more comfortable about sharing crazy ideas. But be patient. This transition will not happen over night. It will take your colleagues time to absorb, accept and eventually exploit your new approach to craziness. But the pay-off, in terms of innovation potential, is enormous.
Fix Your Innovation Initiative
If your innovation initiative is capturing lots of small ideas; not so many big, sexy ideas; and little implementation, I can probably help. You and your colleagues can build big, creative visions and you can implement more ideas than you are doing now! Get in touch to discuss your situation. Click on the link or reply to this newsletter.
Words of Dubious Wisdom
If You Are Afraid to Do Something
If you are afraid to do something – make a phone call, ask someone for a date, try something new – think about the possible outcomes. Which is the worst? Now find something positive in that outcome, something that you can appreciate, something you could enjoy. Feel good about it. Now you have nothing to be afraid of. So, do whatever it is that scares you.
Closing the Archives
In the next few weeks, I will close the archives of Report 103. Most important articles are now available in the Creativity Articles section of my web site, which is better indexed than the archives. Having many articles showing on the web site twice, once in the Report 103 archives and once in the Creativity Articles is redundant and apparently makes it harder for people to find what they want on jpb.com.
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I’m @creativejeffrey
Happy thinking!
Report 103 is a complimentary eJournal from Bwiti bvba of Belgium (a jpb.com company: http://www.creativejeffrey.com). Subscription information can be found at http://www.creativejeffrey.com/report103/
Report 103 is edited by Jeffrey Baumgartner and is published on a monthly basis.
You may forward this copy of Report 103 to anyone, provided you forward it in its entirety and do not edit it in any way. If you wish to reprint only a part of Report 103, please contact me.
Contributions and press releases are welcome. Please contact Jeffrey in the first instance.
