New and Improved Innovation Blog Site

How much structure is enough?

We often ask people, as a training activity, to write down as many ideas as come to mind based on the picture on the screen.  We project something simple, like a circle, and give folks fifty seconds to work.  Then we ask them to repeat the activity; this time with two guidelines in mind, defer judgment, and go for quantity.  We’ll project another basic shape.  With the guidelines in mind, most people are able to generate more ideas than they did without any guidelines.  Then, after giving two more guidelines, seek the unusual and combine ideas.  We’ll repeat the activity again. Often in this third iteration, people get fewer ideas.  The reason many give for their reduced productivity is, “I was trying to employ all the guidelines and that distracted me from the task.”

With only fifty seconds to work, asking people to employ four new guidelines, limits productivity and creativity, rather than augmenting it.  It’s too much structure.

Here’s a real world example.  General Motors was working on an early fuel cell vehicle.  One design was a platform called a Hy-wire.  It looked a lot like a rectangular skateboard; basically four wheels and a thick flat base where all the mechanicals went.  Everything was drive by wire so there was no steering column, because it was all transmitted through electronics.  There was no mechanical engine for the transmission, or the brake pedal.

They gave the Hy-wire to the designers and said, “Build a vehicle around this thing.”

The designers looked like deer in the headlights.  Normally when you design a car you know where the steering column needs to be.  Normally you know where the transmission goes and you can orient around that.  But with the Hy-wire, the designers could put the people anywhere.

Effectively, there were no constraints, not even a vision or an aspiration, the designers had to go back to the beginning and develop their own structure in order to move forward at all.  This was not even close to their normal design and innovation process, and they wasted a lot of time figuring out how and where to begin.

Structure can be process and it can be content.  The structure can be the how you are going to do this, or it can be a vision for where you want to go, or it can be one or two critical criteria, like where the engine and steering column must go.  Some structure is useful, too much structure can be debilitating.  The answer is always contextual.  How many people do you have?  What is their creative process?  What are they used to?  How much time do you have?  Say you have one new, truly non-negotiable constraint?  Is it useful to make it part of the challenge question, to disclose those upfront and keep them in mind throughout.  If it’s the only constraint, and you have a skilled team using a practiced innovation process, the constraint might be a springboard.  But if there are other basic constraints or the process you’re using is new to the team, perhaps you have enough structure.  You might let that non-negotiable constraint be a criterion you measure ideas against later.

As in many things in life, there is no hard answer, but if you neglect to ask the question; if you don’t try to define the right amount of structure, you might find that you’re the deer in the headlights.

Did NASA spur Innovation?

I enjoyed listening to Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson as he made the circuit publicizing his book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Future. I must admit that I had a hard time following the discussions of space. But, one idea that struck me was his argument for the benefits of the space race of the 60s. He argues that the space race created a culture of innovation that reached throughout the US.

"Yes it was a space race, but what specifically mattered about the space race is that every day, we were reaching farther than we had the day before. And when you do that, either literally or metaphorically, you have to invent something. You have to innovate because you're about to do what has never been done before.

That practically, by definition, is innovation, and the space program became proxy for anyone's effort to try to create a new kind of tomorrow compared with the today they were living in."

Whether or not you can remember the space race, we would be interested in knowing what you think. Did the space rate spur innovation in the US in the 1960's? Would a 21st century version of the space race spur innovation today?

You can learn more here.

 

Life and Creativity

Your brain is a pattern recognition and construction machine. One thing your brain still does better than anything else, including its nemesis, the computer, is recognize visual patterns. Your brain can connect objects and concepts that are unrelated. It will create a connection, and if that connection is useful it will add to it and build on it. How about these two FISH and SKYSCRAPER. Can you connect them?

Of course you can, I bet you just did.

If you drive a car, your brain has created a number of connections, like how you ease off the clutch and on the gas. You have an imbedded mental and physical pattern for how you do it. You see a red light. You stop. You don’t have to think.  It’s nearly unconscious. You’ve built a mental process for driving that allows you to do it without thinking.

Why do we build patterns? Here are two pieces of data that shed light on the topic.

The Brain has 2% of the body’s weight, and uses 20% of the body’s energy, Tim Hurson points out in Think Better. Thinking uses energy, any optimizing system will take steps to reduce that drag on the system.

The brain, according to Dr. Win Wenger, can consciously process 126 bits of information per second. The brain receives 10 million bits per second. That means we can focus on only 1/80,000 of the data our brain is getting. Conscious thinking is a scarce resource and any system will take measures to husband its scarce resources.

Build a new pattern for how you do something, some might call that learning, and you also build corresponding neuronal pathways to go with it. You build connector cells between the neurons needed to do it. Your brain will also build insulator cells so the neurons firing within that repeated thought pattern are more efficient and faster. Firing is easier on the neuronal highway than on the mind’s back roads.  Though the problem with highways is there are few exits. If you’re not paying attention you go by your exit and you have to drive 40 kilometers to fix your mistake. So…

We build patterns because they 1) make us energy efficient.

We build patterns because they 2) free up a scarce resource; conscious thinking.

We build patterns because 3) it’s what our brain does best.

The challenge for exercising creative thinking is to constantly be building new patterns. The more patterns you have, the more easily it is to switch perspectives and view things from a different angle. All those new patterns build new connections and new connector cells in your brain, reinforcing creativity. This means that the best way to get quicker at learning new things is to learn new things quickly, and the best way to get more ideas is to get more ideas. They are self-reinforcing behaviors. In addition, all that brain growth has a secondary benefit; one that might be even more useful than increasing your creativity. Consider the case of Richard Wetherill.

From the website New Scientist

Richard Wetherill was an incredible chess player. In 2001 having retired from his job as a university lecturer, Richard became disturbed. He noticed that his capacity to think eight moves ahead in chess no longer existed. Richard was now thinking only four to five moves ahead. He made an appointment with a neurologist in London and was subjected to a battery of tests. The tests revealed nothing abnormal. Wetherhill had no indications of dementia, and seemed to have a functioning brain for someone his age.

Two years later, after living a normal life, Richard Wetherill died of causes unrelated to his brain function. An autopsy was performed and Wetherill, doctors discovered, had advanced stage Alzheimers. Richard Wetherhill should not, in his dying days, have been a functioning human being. Yet he was.

Doctors discovered that Wetherhill had a preponderance of glial cells. Cells that facilitate new connections between far reaching areas in the brain. (Einstein’s brain had the same phenomenon.) Wetherill also had high concentrations of white matter, connector cells that link neuronal clusters, sometimes connecting remote regions of the left and right neo-cortex. Neurologists, based on the lessons derived from Richard Wetherill, now believe in a concept called brain plasticity. A vigorous intellectual life of learning can make your brain more resilient and less susceptible to the effects of Alzheimer’s or dementia.

If you would like to read the complete article you will need a subscription to New Scientist: How brainpower can help you cheat old age 

Every time you connect unconnected thoughts and begin to build a new thinking pattern, every time you endeavor to learn a new skill, solve a difficult problem or exercise a new or existing hobby, each time you play in a new space,  you not only exercise your creativity and increase your problem solving quotient; you also increase your brains plasticity.

We knew it was true, but now we can say it with confidence.

Creativity for Life

Raise your IQ with Praise First

Our Friends at FourSight remind us of the power of Praise.

Read more here: http://www.newandimproved.com/newsletter/2020.php Learn more about FourSight here: www.foursightonline.com

With chocolate to Harvard – creativity takes courage

In our trainings we talk about the values of innovative thinkers. Apart from being humble, open and curious, innovation often requires a lot of courage and persistence. Having a creative idea can sometimes mean to belong to a minority consisting of one person.

The Austrian entrepreneur Josef Zotter is such a person. He is breaking almost all rules of established management thinking. However, doing this Zotter developed a very successful business model that made his chocolate manufacture the only Austrian enterprise that is now taught as a case study at Harvard Business School.

Zotter is not adapting himself and his company to the wishes of the customer but forces the customer to adapt to him.

The chocolate market worldwide is dominated by a few big players that offer their products more or less for the same price, with the same few varieties and using the same suppliers. The only differentiator is the brand printed on the packaging. What these big players have in common is that they only focus on a small part of the chocolate manufacturing value chain, outsourcing the rest to specialized suppliers. That is exactly what current business theories would advise. The Zotter Schokoladen Manufaktur uses a very different philosophy: Zotter follows his bean-to-bar approach controlling the entire value chain from the cacao-bean until the end product - the bar of chocolate. He has direct contracts with the cacao farmers, roasts the beans and does all further processing steps himself. Instead of efficiency and often poor quality he focuses on high quality accepting less efficiency in the production process.

Instead of 10 flavors he offers 300 (!) with highly unusual tastes like fish-coconut flavor.

FREE WEBINAR

Benchmarking Organizational Innovation - The Management Innovation Index

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

4:00 EST, 3:00 CST, 2:00 MST, 1:00 PST 

Is it possible to benchmark and measure organizational innovation to drive value and growth?  Absolutely. Not only possible, but wise. Unfocused efforts to build innovation create inefficiencies, waste, and loss of share momentum.

The Management Innovation Index (MIX) is a unique analytic that models an organizations innovation by:

• surveying across all strati of the organization
• analyzing the data collected using clear metrics
• creating benchmarks to convey the current state of the organization’s innovation and the creative environment and practices it operates in
• using the benchmarks to deliberately design strategies and interventions to increase the efficiency of  the organization’s innovation outputs
• creating a model of the organization’s innovation that can be measured for success over a period of time

Hear how the MIX benchmarks and measures innovation and how it has assisted one of the world’s largest financial services company become a global leader in innovation in its industry.

Join Bob Eckert, CEO of New & Improved and Dr. Ralph Kerle, Executive Chairman of The Creative Leadership Forum as they discuss the Management Innovation Index and how it is being used globally to help organizations turn the intangibility of innovation into tangible and measurably outcomes for success..

If you would like to attend, you can register here.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

4:00 EST, 3:00 CST, 2:00 MST, 1:00 PST 

We trust this is of interest to you and I look forward to your participation.  

 

 

Idea Theft, Language and the Future of Cooperation

A fascinating read and listen came to us this morning by the way of "Daily Good" our favorite non-innovation blog. We encourage you to check out the article and listen to the TED-talk that inspired it.

Our bottom line insight: Collaboration skills like those we work on in both the basic and more advanced aspects of our programs will be the ultimate differentiator (or limiter if weak) of an organization's ability to grow in a competitive niche. Anything that I or my organization does to inhibit good collaboration, partnering, sharing and thinking together will put us at competitive disadvantage. Anything we do to strengthen these will increase competitive advantage.

• Open Innovation? Brilliant move.
• Communication and listening skills training? Direct benefit to bottom line.
• Strategic Thinking Training? Seek it like it's a winning lottery ticket.
• Creative Collaboration skills development? Do it or go out of business.

Read and listen to the thoughts that provoked this blog post here: http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=195

Brain is more important than capital

In Germany black tea lovers know the tea campaign (German: Teekampagne) as the source of excellent Darjeeling tea. In its 25 years of existence it developed into the world's largest single importer of Darjeeling tea from India – importing more than 400 tons per year. What makes tea campaign special and so successful? The company sells only one type of tea: The finest Darjeeling tea from selected tea gardens in the Darjeeling area in India. It only sells packages of 1 kg and the tea can only be purchased through a website or mail order. There are no stores. The quality of tea campaign’s tea is radically better than the teas in most small tea shops in Germany and it sells for a much cheaper price than all tea shops.

The quality is so much better because tea campaign has exclusive contracts and buys the whole yearly output of selected tea gardens in India that have to adhere to strict quality standards. 25% of the annual revenue of tea campaign is invested in local projects at partner tea gardens of tea campaign to provide schooling for the families working at the tea gardens and to provide fair wages and prices.

The founder of tea campaign, the German university professor for entrepreneurship Günter Faltin, discovered 25 years ago that 90% of the tea price the end user pays in Germany is caused by various layers of intermediate wholesale traders that want their share of the import business. That resulted in a great variety of teas in small packages with way too high prices, according to Faltin’s view. If one could eliminate the wholesale traders from the equation there would be a lot of room to pay decent prices to the tea gardens and the people working there and to offer outstanding tea at a much cheaper price. Where before there was the wholesale market, the tea surveyor, the broker, the auctioneer, the intermediary, the importer, the exporter, the packager and the tea store owner, now there is only the tea producer, tea campaign and the end user. Using an innovative business model, tea campaign radically simplified the supply chain and the way tea is bought and sold.

The Impotency of Organizational Innovation

Dig into the rigorous thinking via Google Scholar on innovation and you will find there are 2,300,000 articles and books of an academic nature that have verified and validated every different type of known innovation process - disruptive, open source, front end, back end, induced, user, IT, supply chain, management, R&D and even innovative innovation! Enough information to drive you crazy. And worse still, there is a huge problem with most of it!

It perceives innovation as a theory and a process and it is neither.

It’s a practice!

Innovation as theory is like reading a mountaineering book and then setting out to climb Mt. Everest dressed in the attire you had on while reading the book. Innovation based solely on process is like being lost with a map on the side of a snow capped mountain with wild winter weather closing in – very few will survive. Most will freeze to death. A few get lucky. Luck, however is not a dependable process for succeeding in a competitive commercial environment.

Research by our strategic partners at the Creative Leadership Forum on innovation practice in organizations has revealed systemic failure in innovation initiatives, regardless of consultants, theories and processes in up to 52% of cases.

Importantly, there are clear and identifiable reasons for this.

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!

Photo by: Erin Sitt. www.flickr.com/erinsitt Cool Photography!

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.