New and Improved Innovation Blog Site

Position Available: Business Development

New & Improved, LLC, is seeking a full time Business Development professional. Responsibilities focus on outside sales, including lead-finding, qualifying buyers, assessing potential client needs, creating proposals, pitching solutions and closing to contract. The ideal candidate has a strong network and history of sales in the training, facilitation, speaking, and organizational development consulting areas. We work with all types of large organizations, with a focus on corporate clients. Some travel required. New & Improved is an organizational Development firm providing training, facilitation, OD consultation and executive coaching, all focused on improving the culture of innovation for our clients. Our clients are global and we currently offer our services in 7 languages. This position will have an initial training period at our headquarters in Paul Smiths, NY. Compensation commensurate with experience. Includes base plus commission.
Please submit a cover letter and resume’. Cover letter should include recreational and community involvement outside of work settings.
New & Improved, 9306 State Route 30, Paul Smiths, NY 12970

Would you deform your newborn’s skull to make them more creative?

If you saw these skulls would you think they belonged to extraterrestrials? Some do, but when one of our clients went to Peru and saw these deformed skulls dating back to 6000 - 7000 BC, he said he knew exactly why ancient Peruvians deformed the skulls of the newborns!

As the curious people we are, we did some research and found an interesting and easy to understand (for normal people like us) article on a blog by Katy Meyers, an Anthropology PhD Student at Michigan State University who specializes in mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology. Her blog is “Bones Don’t Lie”. Here is what we learned.

Known to be practiced in a number of areas because of skelatal evidence,  cranial deformation has been the cause of a lot of debate. While there seems to be no way to prove why it was done (and that’s where the debate is) it’s fairly well understood how it was done. Apparently cranial vault modification can be achieved through a number of means.  In Katy’s words: “Enchev et al. (2010) discuss two types of modification: tabular or annular. Tabular, or “flat-head” modification involves compressing the fontal and occipital with fixed, erect boards or pads. This creates a lateral bulging of the head. A variation on this is when vertical boards are placed higher up on the back of the head to produce more upright modification. Annular modification is produced when bands are wrapped around the forehead and the back of the skull to force the bone to grow upright.”

Ok, but what was the intent and purpose really? In the Journal of Neurosurgery, Ayer et al. (2010) points to arguments that deformation was a sign of political and socioeconomic status and that the modification was a literal symbol of being the head of the state. A 16th century Spanish chronicler, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, asked the Mayan why their heads were a different shape, and the reasons behind the modification. They responded: “This is done because our ancestors were told by the gods that if our heads were thus formed we should appear noble and handsome and better able to bear burdens”. Romero-Vargas et al. (2010) also in the Journal of Neurosurgery, argue that the practice has religious and socio-cultural meaning, and it is an integral part of someone’s identity.

 However, our client, the Head of Strategy Planning and Business Development in a pharmaceutical company has another fun theory about the intent and purpose of deformed skulls. He posits that they were deformed so people have a bigger cortex and thus think more with their cortex (executive brain) than react with brain stem (primitive, gator brain). Now if you know much about the way the brain would actually develop inside of a deformed skull, your own gator brain just kicked in at this creative thought. But it is a fascinating idea to have a little fun with.

             

The above pictures and the explanatory text found next to these skulls seems to correct him: “In this case deformation is in pyramidal form....causing the growth of Rolando’s incision where you find the motive center of CREATIVITY, philosophy, mathematics, etc.”

Our client was brilliant in considering the connection between what he had learned from us and the skulls he saw in Peru. We had taught him to control his gator brain, to upshift his thinking to his cortex and to make novel connections between previously unconnected thoughts so he could find creative solutions to problems he faced instead of getting stuck. And of course we had taught him some biological truths about the brain, so he knew where the cortex was: the upper-front part of the brain.

It’s highly unlikely that this deformation would have any impact on the overall function of the brain, but if the society and you both believed it did, we think their would be an impact due to the expectation setting. And that would be just fine!

As we still marvel at how the Egyptian made the pyramids and create conspiracy theories around how far advanced the ancient people were from us, we can’t help thinking that maybe they indeed were, and we need to learn from them. Could they have really deformed their newborn’s skulls to make themselves more creative? We don’t think so. But consider this, dear reader: We have it on good advice that if you go look in the mirror, you’ll notice the unique shape of your head. Rumor has it that the shape of your particular head is exactly the best shape to energize a creative brain! Now you know.

Being Resolute with Your Resolutions

It is the time of passage to a new year. The calendar has moved to January, named for Janus, the Roman god of passage, time and prophecy. Janus is depicted as a god with two faces looking in opposite directions — one facing into the past, one looking into the future. For over two thousand years in many cultures, this has been a traditional time to look back and ahead, to reflect upon the state of our lives and make New Year’s Resolutions. A time to look at what we have done and what we are committed to making different. Read on...

This is Your Mind on Questions

One of the greatest features of your human brain is, if you ask it a question it will answer it.

What time is it?  How far away is New York? What might be all the ways to get to New York?

See!  You can’t help it.

Phrase a problem as a question and your mind will start generating possible solutions.  Make a statement out of a problem and your mind will accept it, or it will look for data that refutes it.  Accepting it is sometimes the end of the mental line.  Your brain shrugs, says ‘ok’, and moves on.  Refuting it puts you in opposition to the speaker’s statement, usually not a good place to start if you’re looking for solutions to the problem. The beauty of asking a question is that your brain can’t help but try to answer it.

At New & Improved we believe the question-answering reflex is primal and universal.

Why?

Because the main job of the brain, the whole reason we have a brain, is to keep us alive and safe.  The fact that you can think with it is merely a function of the fact that thinking is one tool in the brain’s safety keeping arsenal.  And we all have a gator brain, our primal flight or fight brain that we share with all animals, even alligators.  Located down near the brain stem, it is interested solely in our security; in keeping us safe.  The theory on the gator brain is that it impacts our thinking almost all the time.  We are usually unaware of its influence, and it rarely impacts our thinking in a way that enhances our creativity.  And, because our gator brain seeks safety and security, it doesn’t like unanswered questions, especially unanswered problem questions.  Unanswered problem questions represent uncertainty, the unknown, possible danger.  Your gator brain, tasked with keeping you safe, doesn’t like that uncertainty.  A problem question, especially an open-ended one, leverages your instinctive gator brain to go get an answer.  For hard questions, it will trigger your neo-cortex, your big new brain, for an answer. So it’s our primal desire for safety that ultimately is why, if you ask your brain a question, your brain is motivated to answer it.

To get open ended problem questions, the stems; How to…, In what ways might I…, How might we…, and our favorite, What might be all the ways…?, are useful.  This last one invites lots of answers, which is helpful because the gator brain is lazy.  Once you’ve generated one ‘good ‘option’ the ol’ gator brain doesn’t feel unsafe anymore.  The first halfway decent answer will satisfy it, and it stops pushing for answers.  The discipline is engaging your neo-cortex to answer the question again and again to really answer the question  “What might be all the ways...?”

Your mind on questions is a powerful thing.  Phrase problems as questions and your mind will give you answers. You can’t help it.

What’s the #1 thing you can do to help your employees to be more motivated and engaged? (Hint: It’s not what you think it is!)

If we asked you, “what do you think the number one factor to help motivate and keep employees engaged in their work is” what would you guess?

Would you say?

Rewards? Or

Recognition? Or

A great team? Or

Something else entirely?

Go ahead, take a guess. What do you think it is?

Theresa Amabile, Harvard professor and expert in creativity and workplace productivity, conducted a study that asked 600 managers from a variety of organizations this very question, and the top answer received was recognition for good work.

Did you have a similar answer? If so, you might not be that surprised then.

However, what you might find surprising is that in subsequent research Amabile found out that the managers in the survey were wrong.  Recognition, it turns out, is not the most important factor in employee engagement!

By analyzing more than 12,000 diary entries from more than 200 employees across diverse industries, Amabile and her colleague Steven Kramer found that the #1 driver that helps employees feel more engaged and enthused at work is… (drum roll, please) whether or not the employees felt that they were making progress towards their goals.

That’s right, progress. According to their research, if during a work day, employees felt like they made some positive movement towards achieving their goals, they reported feeling more positive and having a stronger sense of drive and purpose at work. When they felt like they were running into obstacles or that their goals were constantly shifting, their overall moods were lower.

Amabile and Kramer detail their research and many of the practical implications in their book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. (highly recommended!)

As a manager or leader, if you want to help your employees be more motivated, you might want to leverage the progress principle by:

• Helping employees clarify goals
• Providing enough support (resources and time)
• Helping them monitor progress (no matter how small)

And you might want to do your best to:

• Avoid changing goals haphazardly
• And avoid holding up resources

And if you do want to use recognition, go ahead and make the most of it.

Recognize your employees for the great progress they are making!

Pushing the Limits of Our Willpower

Its the 12th week I’ve been on the road – 68 out of 91 days, 12 long car drives, 12 plane trips, most to different locations for different purposes, many with early morning startups and late evening end times. There is no pattern. I’m in a state of constant change. I can imagine some of the leaders I coach and many of my business partners saying, “What’s unusual about this?” They have been living like this for years.

This new road life is happening at a time when I have started several new self-care habits that will improve my health, my performance and have me walking my talk. I have been very disciplined in eating healthy foods and not drinking too much. But I'm not getting enough sleep to be at my best. I’m not completing 60 minutes of cardio-vascular exercise every day. My journaling practice usually feels rushed. I’m frustrated with my mental chatter as I juggle many clients, projects and ideas. I worry too much about the items on my “to do” list that are behind schedule.

To soothe myself I tell a story that I just don’t have the extra hours I need. But when I look more closely that’s just an excuse. At the end of the day I often find time for mindless activities - scanning blogs and articles on the web (justified as research), checking what my colleagues are saying on Facebook and LinkedIn or playing a video game. As I near the end of the day I’m finding I lack the willpower to stay focused on these new self-care habits.

I wonder how a road warrior like me might realistically practice the self-care habits the research says are needed for optimal performance as an innovation leader or team member? How might I develop the willpower to sustain these healthy habits when I’m on the road?

What Really Happens to Our Time?

How many hours do you have today? Do you need all 24? Can I borrow some of your time? I can return the favor later in the week.

Sound unrealistic? Yep, it is. We are all given 24 hours in a day – no more, no less. We can’t stretch an hour to be longer than 60 minutes. No matter how we use our creative problem solving techniques, we can’t touch this one. So, how are we supposed to get everything done when we don’t have enough time?

We asked Gloria Volz, Professional Organizer and Jane Bickford, Life Coach to share some tools for Time Management with us. Their philosophy is that Time Management isn’t about TIME at all, it’s about SELF. Self management determines how you use the time in your day, week and years of your life. In our Innovation for Results Program participants commonly want to find creative solutions to this “not enough time” challenge. We discourage the use of the creative process for this, as we know there are expert solutions available (assuming you’re truly motivated) and these two are experts. We think this will be an investment of time that will save you in the long run, but you have to read on. Before you do, set aside the hope for an answer that will make this challenge go away easily. You’re smart. If there was an easy answer, you would have already thought of it...

Questionable Selling

A colleague of ours, an individual who has fully integrated the Creative Problem Solving Process into her life, had an opportunity to be a consultant to the consultants. Our colleague was asked to make a proposal to a big box consulting firm to help them innovate in all areas of the organization.

During the preliminary meeting with the potential client, our colleague offered no solutions. She simply asked questions and listened, and listened and asked questions. Her first correspondence with the consulting firm was merely a converged list, taken from her notes, of about thirty questions. All the questions were from the client’s perspective. Each was an expression of a possible desire, phrased as a problem question, using the stems, How to…, In what ways might you…, and What might be all the ways…

It was a classically simple use of the CPS process. Gather data and then use that data and information to construct a list of problem questions. It turns out, as well, that it was a powerful template for running and responding to an initial face to face sales meeting with a prospective client.

The managing director at the big box consulting firm responded to our colleague’s correspondence with the following statement:

“You did for us what we should be doing for our clients.”

She got the job.

Story of a 50 year old boy

From clay toys to cartoons to innovative gadgets

Have you ever wondered if you're hindering your children’s creativity when all you intended to do was just the opposite? Meet Irfan Sayar and his legendary cartoon character Porof Zihni Sinir. Ifran started making clay toys when there was nothing else to do. Then he found the power of humor and started making cartoons. Today he is producing all kinds of innovative gadgets originating from these cartoons. He's also providing an enabling environment for children to put their creativity to use.

When I was young, children didn’t have many toys in Turkey. Those lucky enough to have some relatives living abroad would have the best toys. However, I remember spending hours with my friends in a room with either no or very few toys, but we would still have a great time. We would make horses out of brooms, helmets out of salad bowls, houses & cars out of boxes and wires. We would literally make our own toys. Now, I realize how this naturally nurtured our creativity. We would SCAMPER all the time. For those of you unfamiliar with the term SCAMPER, it’s a question checklist that jumpstarts idea generation by asking what you can Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Magnify or Minimize, Put to other uses, Eliminate and Reverse or Rearrange whatever you have at hand.

Today we want to introduce you to Irfan Sayar, father of a million crazy creations/innovations. Being the son of a farmer, he says he had no toys when he went to the village so he started making his own out of clay. This became such a passion for him that afterwards he never took the same joy from manufactured toys and always made his own. He started his career as a cartoonist and then started turning his cartoons into real gadgets. He has a famous cartoon character called Porof Zihni Sinir who is a very practical, curious and obviously humorous imaginary professor. Today when somebody really comes out with a very novel and weird idea in Turkey, it’s called a Zihni Sinir project.

I am a big fan of Porof Zihni Sinir who in reality is Irfan Sayar, his creator. First of all he's a great observer and is always attempting to find creative solutions to everyday problems. These problems are mostly a part of Turkish daily life. We accept them as a part of our DNA. We complain about them all the time, but never think about how we can solve them. They are like the organizational difficulties that we’re all used to just living with. Porof Zihni Sinir points out to these cultural dysfunctionalties and then offers crazy solutions. Turkey is a very proud nation and we don’t like people making fun of us, but when one of us does it in such a clever and funny way, we make that person our hero.

Here is a quick look at some of Porof Zihni Sinir Projects:

What kills creative ideas?

An alligator's reaction to newness in its environment is to eat it, attack it, or run from it.  Humans, like alligators and other reptiles, have a brain stem, the part of the brain that controls the fight/flight reaction.  At New & Improved, we refer to the brain stem as the "gator brain."  Reacting to newness or new ideas from the gator brain is a sure way to kill creativity in yourself and others around you.  Humans are so quick to disregard new ideas that don't fit their conventional ways of thinking.  If an idea does not fit what we know, our "gator brains" throw it away.  We train people to shift from their "gator brain" to their neo-cortex where we can shape novelty into something useful.

There is some new research that shows that there is something else that kills creative ideas--a bias against novelty.  In an article by Mary Catt, titled "People are biased against creative ideas, studies find",  she reports findings from a research study, “The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas” (Goncalo, Mueller, Melwani) that will be published in a future issue of Psychological Science. The studies findings include:

• Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
• People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical--tried and true.
• Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
• Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.

According to Goncalo, one of the researchers, "Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. . .The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.

So, it seems that individually, we need to learn to tame our "gator brains" and organizationally, we need to learn to create a climate that is more conducive to creativity and innovation.

POINt to Change the Energy

As facilitators we often talk about the energy in the room, and we ask questions like:

• How might we change the energy?
• How to increase the energy?
• In what ways might we use the energy in the room?
• What might be all the ways to keep the energy positive?

We were working with a Pension Fund advisor recently, with its institutional real estate investment team: a group responsible for buying real estate property for pension funds.  We were debriefing the first day of their annual strategy meeting using POINt, a debriefing and feedback technique the team had just learned.