PERSONAS:
Creative Thinking Technique #1
Do you know why Halloween is such a popular holiday in America? People get permission to be somebody else for a night. Wearing a costume makes it easier to act differently, to let go of one's normal self -- perhaps the simplest and most socially approved way to change perspective.
And so, if you are feeling stuck or bound by old perceptions, why not declare TODAY your own, personal Halloween? Try on a different mask. Be someone else for a change. The more you can look at challenges or opportunities through the eyes of another, the easier it will be for you to have a creative breakthrough. In other words, ACT AS IF!
WHAT TO DO
1. Select a new persona -- anyone who inspires or intrigues you.
2. Close your eyes and imagine you actually ARE this new persona.
3. Brainstorm your biggest challenge or opportunity through the eyes of this new persona. How would he or she approach it?
4. Based on your persona's new approach, what compelling new ideas come to mind about what YOU can do differently to get a big breakthrough?
"Personas" is one of 35 creative thinking techniques included in AWAKE AT THE WHEEL: Getting Great Ideas Rolling in an Uphill World.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:56 PM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2007Here, Sonny, Catch!
Sitting here watching the World Series (LET'S go RED Sox, bom, bom, bom-bom-bom -- and how about that ca-razy percussion section in the bullpen?), I was struck by the now-common sight of a fielder flipping a foul ball into the stands. It's routine now, of course, but it wasn't always so.
It's one of those things that, once you see it, seems so obviously right. What kid who goes to a big-league game doesn't dream about being able to bring home a real, Major League baseball? And it doesn't matter how old that kid is.
When you compare the money that is spent on putting a team on the field to the Costco-like price of a baseball (I mean, I assume they buy them in bulk), and the public relations value of donating a dozen or so during the course of the game, it's the very definition of a no-brainer.
But I don't remember ever that seeing that when I was growing up watching the game. One day, someone in some ballclub's management saw it happen -- perhaps a ball was tossed by a player who remembered when he was a kid at the park himself -- and said, hey, why don't we do that all the time?
It's a nice example of picking the low-hanging fruit when you're looking for ways to innovate (which simply means, thinking differently to change things for the better), and points up what may be its first principle:
Start by examining what resources you have immediately at hand. You may be amazed at what significant changes you can make with a very small amount of effort.
(We love baseball here at Idea Champions -- check out "Measuring Up," our foremost expert Mr. Vadeboncoeur's earlier post on how the Kansas City Royals have begun to "think outside the radar gun.")
uploaded to Flickr by vinceconnare
Posted by Bill Ross at 11:10 PM | Comments (1)
October 23, 2007Owning Your Own Knowledge
One of the guiding principles of Idea Champions is that any large enough group of people who work in any organization already has the requisite knowledge to deal with the majority of the issues and challenges facing them. There may be issues where they need additional information from outside experts but, in general, they know their business, industry, and market and what they have to do to grow their bottom line.
Why they can't easily access this knowledge on a regular basis and act upon it is another story, however, and why, I imagine, we are in the business we're in.
The issue of not being able to act on the knowledge one already has does not exist because of organizations, of course. It exists because this phenomenon is a major issue for many human beings, and has been, it seems, for as long as there have been human beings. I have a psychologist friend who once confided that when he came across a patient who embraced this syndrome, he recommended other therapists to them as quickly as possible because he found their denial of their own knowledge, and subsequent lack of corrective action, totally exasperating.
Books have been written about the phenomenon of the tragic characters of Shakespeare "disowning knowledge" leading directly to their inevitable demise. Hamlet knows what he needs to know in order to act very early on in that play, but does not, requiring ever greater "burdens of proof" which delay action until it is too late. King Lear knows that he will create a power vacuum if he abdicates his crown that will lead to strife and confusion among his daughters and discord in his kingdom, yet he does so anyway, etc.
Speaking of vacuums... a simple example of this phenomenon occurred to me only recently.
Fourteen years ago, I purchased a fine, expensive vacuum cleaner. This machine cost over a thousand dollars back then and it's been worth every penny, as it is so well made that it probably will outlast me on this planet. During those years, I've often come across a warning in manuals and brochures that if one persisted in dragging the machine around by its hose, or lifting it by same, one would eventually loosen the electronic connections that give signals from the body of the vacuum to its end attachments and it would cease to function properly. The result: $300 to replace the hose and attachments.
Well, after 14 years of dragging the machine around by its hose and lifting it by same, the inevitable has occurred. I need to replace the hose and attachments.
D'OH!
Why didn't I simply use the knowledge I had instead of ignoring it? Well, for the first 14 years everything seemed fine, reminding me of the joke about the guy who wanted to see what it was like to jump off a tall building and thinking to himself during his descent, "so far, so good."
The very same goes for organizations and the people within it.
What knowledge of our organization, its processes, its people, its products and services, our customers, our markets, and our society are we choosing to ignore because, "so far, so good?"
One good way to check this collective syndrome of disowning our own knowledge in organizations is to conduct regular brainstorm sessions that use a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis or Environmental Scan as a starting off point. This tactic forces us to see what's going on in and around our organization, assess the level of threat or opportunity, and to consciously go about doing something about it.
Look around you. Check all your mirrors. Exercise your peripheral vision. What's sneaking up on you in your environment that you hadn't noticed before? What is the market telling you about your products and services? What are your customers telling you every single day in their words and actions, and even more importantly, in what they don't say and don't do? What threats or opportunities right there in front of you have you not taken the time and effort to act upon?
What do you already know to be true that you haven't shared with others or acted upon yourself?
Don't end up in your own self-made tragedy like Hamlet or Lear, or be like that poor guy falling from the skyscraper thinking everything is going to work out just fine, or that dolt in upstate New York staring at a sea of dust bunnies armed only with an expensive vacuum cleaner which no longer works.
Act now on what you know to be true. It's why you're alive.
Posted by Val Vadeboncoeur at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2007Just a Great Idea
(Occasionally we'll run little quickies like this one, examples of remarkably creative thinking that we found irresistible, just for the purpose of passing along a small flash of inspiration that may help raise your own efforts up a notch.)
Parent-Child Dancing Shoes
These shoes are meant to be worn by a father and a young daughter for dancing together.
Titled "Tanssitossut" or Dance Shoes, they were designed by Finnish artists Huopaliike Lahtinen and Haraldin Kenka. If you can think of anything sweeter than this (or "these"?), please let us know.
Found it on: Boing Boing
Who got it from: Neatorama
originally from Salakauppa / Secret Shop
Posted by Bill Ross at 04:18 PM | Comments (1)
October 13, 2007How do you view your customers?
Sometimes innovative, creative thinking -- in the ultimate service of increasing your business -- is simply about taking a step back to get perspective.
A recent post in the Endless Innovation blog, commenting on an entry in another, Futuristic Play, pointed to an observation that the latter's Andrew Chen made from his participation in a Web-oriented ad conference in New York. As the former put it, Chen found a "huge cultural gap between the East Coast and West Coast" when it comes to thinking about business. (Surprise!)
In New York, Chen reports, "people don't call things User Generated Content (aka UGC)," they call it Consumer Generated Media (CGM)." (The bolds there are mine.) He puts it down to your Silicon Valley types focused on attracting "users" to their sites, whereas, since the New Yorkers "are typically on the advertising side, they see these people as 'consumers.'"
(There are the similarities, too, of course: players on both coasts appear to suffer from the epidemic of acute "Acronymonia," the uncontrollable urge to reduce every human effort to three letters.)
As Chen says, it's "an interesting and subtle distinction." Endless Innovation remarks -- talking about the Web, but equally applicable to any business -- "The difference is a big one for any business hoping to expand its Web presence: Do you think of your customers as 'consumers' or as 'users'?"
To me (not to make too much of these particular terms), seeing people just as consumers is to think of them in a passive role; as mouths to be stuffed, you might say. "Users" casts them in an active role: mouths that also have something to say, to contribute. As a consummate user myself, I'm far more receptive to a company that addresses me as a person with something to offer, rather than as a receptacle they wish to pour products into.
It's just one more example of how we have to continually re-examine our basic assumptions and ways of thinking about our business, whatever it is. Naturally, a shorthand develops within any enterprise. Just make sure you continually remind yourself to listen to what you're saying to the people outside, your customers and prospects, and what it sounds like to them.
"Californians say 'UGC,' New Yorkers say 'CGM'" - in Endless Innovation,
referring to:
"5 differences between a NY ad conference and a SF web 2.0 conference" - in Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen
Posted by Bill Ross at 06:56 PM | Comments (1)
October 09, 2007SIX SIGMA UNRAVELLED: The Gotta Have a Process Blues
One of my favorite clients of all time was a key manager in a very prominent Fortune 500 company. She was smart. She was funny. She was creative. And she was kind. Then her company adopted Six Sigma. I couldn't help but notice that soon after this she started becoming uncharacteristically cranky, not unlike the way an artist gets upon filling out a tax form. When I asked her how the Six Sigma initiative was going, she rolled her eyes and mumbled something about "going through the motions."
Intellectually, of course, she understood its value. But her longstanding success as a manager and business leader went far beyond the intellect. Intuitively, she knew what Einstein -- the master of the intellect -- had said years ago when he noted that, "Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts."
In a recent online Business Week posting, Brian Hindo lucidly deconstructs some of the flawed assumptions of the Six Sigma approach:
"The very factors that make Six Sigma effective in one context," explains Hindo, "can make it ineffective in another. Traditionally, it uses rigorous statistical analysis to produce unambiguous data that help produce better quality, lower costs, and more efficiency. That all sounds great when you know what outcomes you'd like to control. But what about when there are few facts to go on -- or you don't even know the nature of the problem you're trying to define?
"New things look very bad on this scale," says MIT Sloan School of Management professor Eric von Hippel, who has worked with 3M on innovation projects that he says 'took a backseat' once Six Sigma settled in. "The more you hardwire a company on total quality management, the more it is going to hurt breakthrough innovation," adds Vijay Govindarajan, a management professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "The mindset that is needed, the capabilities that are needed, the metrics that are needed, the whole culture that is needed for discontinuous innovation, are fundamentally different."
And so, dear Heart of Innovation readers... in honor of all people who have ever questioned the long-term value of Six Sigma... in honor of all the people who have understood that increasing -- not decreasing -- variability is often the key to success, it is my utmost pleasure to make my graceful exit from this latest blog posting with the immortal, finger-snapping, toe-tapping, knee-slapping, put-on-your-blues-hat-and-sunglasses lyrics to....
THE GOTTA HAVE A PROCESS BLUES
I woke up this morning,
put both feet on the floor,
but I didn't have a process
to find the bathroom door,
so all I did was shuffle,
first the left foot, then the right,
forgot to count the tiles,
(hey boss, I ain't too bright.)
We got green belts, black belts,
corporate karate,
and soon we'll need a process
for going to the potty.
Lord, I need a chart and graph to help me choose
just what to name this song about the Six Sigma blues.
Back when we were kids
the only processed thing was cheese,
now we need a process
every single time we sneeze,
I say "achoo," I blow my nose,
I try to get it right,
my Black Belt says my charts don't flow,
not once a gesundheit.
I make no mistakes,
I do everything right --
to make sure nothing breaks,
I stay up all night,
I'm a Six Sigma cowboy
cutting cycle time in half,
I measure every joke
and the way it makes me laugh.
We got green belts, black belts,
corporate karate,
and soon we'll need a process
for going to the potty,
a fishbone diagram would be so cool to help me choose
just what to name this song about the Six Sigma blues.
I barely make a boo boo, I rarely blow a deal,
you might call it voo doo, but that's just how I feel,
I'm one in a million
though my defects number three,
I log on while I'm sleeping
and I've changed my name to "E."
We got green belts, black belts,
corporate karate,
and soon we'll need a process
for going to the potty.
Blind Willy Nilly
AKA Mitch Ditkoff
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)
The Passion to Innovate
Innovation is a big fat generic concept in most corporations -- like life on other planets or ending the war in Iraq. Unless the individuals within a given corporation have a genuine sense of urgency, personal ownership, and an authentic passion for innovation, nothing significant will happen. Innovation begins within the mind of each person. Corporate initiatives that fail to awaken the basic human instinct to innovate are doomed, no matter how many pep talks, tote bags, or t-shirts proliferate.
For me, as an innovation consultant, it is clear that the short amount of time I have with my clients needs to be devoted to awakening the passion to innovate.
Tools, techniques, theory, data, models, bibliographies, business cases, best practices, and the fabulous muffins served on breaks are all fine, but it is the passion to innovate that is the real driver of success. No passion, no innovation. Plain and simple. Unfortunately, most organizations squash passion. This is why start-ups have a much easier time innovating than Fortune 500 companies. And that's why savvy Fortune 500 companies recreate the feeling of start-uppiness whenever they can.
The best thing any consultant can do when working with an organization is to hold up a mirror and ask their clients what they see. Are they modeling what it means to be innovative? Or are they asking other people to do what they themselves have not done?
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:17 AM | Comments (0)
