New and Improved Innovation Blog Site

Why your team has no ideas...according to Dilbert

Once again, Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert has his pulse on the reason why the New & Improved team needs to go to work every day (the sad thing is, we've heard all of these things said in meetings for real).  Nonetheless, click on the cartoon if you can't read it below...enjoy!

 

Creative Collaboration: "The IT Way"

It’s hard to be sure exactly what social media will look like 10 years from now, but it is safe to say that it will have an impact on the way the world works. Just this week, LinkedIn was used by the US President as a platform to help him prep for a town meeting in California. A site called Quirky is using crowd sourcing to find product ideas, strengthen them, and make decisions about funding their development.

Companies see this, hope to benefit, but make serious mistakes.

More and more companies are going after some type of IT enabled “idea management” System, hoping to make a successful play at leveraging the social media phenomenon for finding the ideas sitting hidden in the minds of their employees. We run into this all of the time as we work as facilitators, trainers and coaches. In one case, with a large global client, we’ve run into no less than five separate IT groups creating some type of idea management or support system for their part of the business. The concept is to increase the number of opportunities a company can pursue to support growth.

At the same time, a recently released Bain study shares that a survey of nearly 400 executives worldwide finds only 15 percent cite lack of opportunities as the biggest barrier to growth — lack of focus, organizational complexity, and a risk-averse culture are to blame.

 We believe there is an intersection here that does offer opportunity. We think that companies should involve themselves with social media in a way that they can foster creative collaboration among their employees, help them focus, break down the barriers created by organizational complexity, and reduce the risk of the wrong idea moving forward at the wrong time.

So forget about Idea Management Systems. Start looking for Creative Collaboration systems. Social Media type solutions that let people publish challenges as much as share ideas. Systems that let a lot of minds — rather than the elite few — weigh in on what the smart bets are.

Quirky seems to be an interesting model to look at, and there is a strongly competitive group of companies offering full enterprise level IT solutions for creative collaboration. Most do nothing else and are totally focused on creating a market leading competitive offering. Our second unsolicited advice is to stop looking to build it yourself. Go to the market and buy it. Our guess is you’ll spend more on the up-front, but save a lot in avoided costs and false starts. We don’t have a strong opinion about the best vendor, but know who the half dozen strongest players are. So if you want the short list, let us know. If you’re one of those vendors reading this, please no unsolicited calls to tell us about your product. If you’re good, we’ll run into you, or already have. If you’re working your way up the food chain, you can hire us to facilitate your strategic planning.

DOWNLOAD OUR FREE WEBINAR: Organizational Development for Innovation: How to create a sustainable culture of innovation in your organization

Last week,  Jonathan Vehar and Bob Eckert, cofounders of New & Improved, LCC, explored the key drivers of organizational innovation. Maximizing these key drivers will rev up your growth engine and profit machine.

 In case you missed it, or enjoyed it and want to pass it on, you can download the webinar here.  (NOTE: If you get a message from your Windows Media Player saying you have a missing codec you will need to download it: GoToMeeting codec. Just follow the instructions)

If you are listening for the first time, you will learn:

1. What to pay attention to in order to go from ad hoc to intentional innovation?
2. Where to start your innovation initiative…or where to go next?
3. What’s blocking your innovation pipeline?

Download Our Webinar (NOTE: If you get a message from your Windows Media Player saying you have a missing codec you will need to download it: GoToMeeting codec. Just follow the instructions)

About the Presenters: Bob Eckert and Jonathan Vehar

Bob and Jonathan are Cofounders of New & Improved, LLC, a leading organizational development firm focused on the people skills for innovation.  They have been called “Innovation thought leaders” by Fast Company based on their extensive work helping organizations create growth through innovation leadership.  Their company works around the world with organizations to create people who can think and act differently in systems that are structured to sustainably innovate. Some of their clients include: Disney, GE, Johnson & Johnson, McDonalds, Pfizer, Texas Instruments, TE Connectivity, and various governmental organizations and agencies. Funny and funnier looking, the two take their work seriously while having fun doing so.

ATTENTION Gator Tamers!

(NOTE: This contest has expired at the New Yorker, but for their latest contest you can still click on the link below. Of course you can still send your responses to us for the gator picture.)

Have a little fun, exercise your creative muscle and make the world safer for innovation all at the same time! The New Yorker ran a cartoon caption contest that has two gators talking to each other on a subway train.

What are they saying? YOU decide! (and win fame and fortune.... well maybe a little fame...)

See cartoon below.

You can't dazzle the folks at the New Yorker any longer, but we would love to read your caption. You can write it in the comments section for this post. Practice your divergent thinking skills. Maybe you'll have two or three or more!

Burning Man Creativity

The Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada is an explosively creative event.  Indeed, the second sentence of the Burning Man mission statement is ...”Our intention is to generate society that connects each individual to his or her creative powers.”

Somehow Burning Man works, both as a temporary society and as an experimental culture that invites creativity. Burning Man is pretty extreme, but abstracting the ingredients of the Burning Man culture might show some hints to empowering creativity.

Here are those ingredients...

1) The normal cues are missing - Every environment, the supermarket, a friend’s home, the office boardroom have cues that we pick up and they impact our behavior. On your first visit to Burning Man’s playa, the flat open desert upon which rest hundreds of art installations, the environment  is completely, well…other. There are no reference points to connect you to ‘normal’ behaviors.  The desert surface is dead white and cracked for miles in every direction. Nothing grows. The landscape is decorated with 260 oversized art sculptures and hundreds of moving art cars, a giant fish, a scorpion, a Texas saloon, a pirate ship, all driving slowly around the desert bedecked in neon lights, pumping music and transporting people from one piece of art to the next.

2) The elimination of status - Everyone is in costume, Vikings, pole dancers, cowboys in white suits, Indians and flappers all join you wandering around the playa. Costumes are a great equalizer.  Everybody is there to play, to participate. The status cues that come with a Rolex, a Prada suit or a Louis Vuitton bag are all missing. The fact that Burning Man doesn’t allow money also adds to the sense of equality. People give things away, but nobody sells anything or advertises. Our man saw no publicity and not one speck of currency for the four days he was there.

3) Play - The art itself is interactive. You can climb on it, operate it, power it and touch it. Most of the artwork has a surprise in it, which you only find when you explore. Pull on that chain and you send a twenty-foot tower of flame into the sky, warming everyone within 50 feet and lighting up the whole playa. The interactive nature of the art invites improv. Spontaneously, a skit breaks out. Our New & Improved colleague participated in a Monty Python-esque satire on idol worship, that began among the viewers of an art installation. One space ship had little round windows. When you peeked in the window, viewers inside the vessel saw you as the head of a little puppet whose arms you could operate by moving little sticks that came through the wall of the installation. Just by peeking in you became the entertainment for those inside.

When an art car called the Board room, a giant conference table on wheels surrounded by office chairs and a whiteboard, stopped at an installation known as the Office, a little bar in the desert, there was an explosion of spontaneous spoofs on corporate culture. Burning Man has found a way to invite one of its ten principles...radical self expression.

Judgment is pretty useless. With so many surprises and zany behaviors, there is little point in trying to size anybody up. Expecting something novel to happen is probably the best stance to have. It’s the only thing you can count on.

Inspired by a bordello in designing a cathedral: What we can learn from Leonardo?

I was in Rome with my husband for our wedding anniversary. It was a big treat for our stomachs as well as our eyes and mind. (Not so big a treat for our feet though, they are still hurting.) We had great food, saw all kinds of finest art and marveled at how such beauty could be created. One of the peak moments of our stay was our visit to the Leonardo Da Vinci Museum. Even though many people know Leonardo as an artist (thanks to Mona Lisa) and a mysterious man (thanks to the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown), he is so much more than these that anybody interested in creative thinking or innovation should have a close look at him to learn what it takes to be so creative.

Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". Curiosity was constant in Leonardo’s entire life; like a devouring fever, this curiosity lead him, through the years, to concern himself with practically all matters. He was a Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer.

Apparently Leonardo made continual observations of the world around him and recorded these daily throughout his life. His 13,000 pages of notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, which he incorporated in an uninterrupted stream of research, study and experiments. In his codices one can see designs for wings, shoes for walking on water, military machines, studies of faces emotions, animals, babies, plants, rock formations, architecture etc. He actually conceptualized a helicopter, a wet suit, a tank, concentrated solar power and a calculator. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions entered the world of manufacturing. If he were living today, he would be a billionaire uncovering unmet needs of consumers.

I think we all have something to learn from Leonardo. He embodied all the values of an innovator  (as we teach in our workshops): humility, curiosity, courage, tenacity and integrity. He was so humble and curious that there was no end to his desire for learning. Because he had such a broad knowledge, he excelled at connecting dots. For example, attracted by the ingenious arrangement of the rooms in a famous bordello, he drew a similar floor plan for a cathedral.* He was courageous enough to voice the unvoiced in spite of the danger of being branded as a lunatic. “He was again the first man to speak of channeling the Arno River between Florence and Pisa” said Giorgio Vasari. And continued, “Everyday he made models and drawings to enable him to dig out mountains easily and to tunnel them from one level to another. Among these models there was one which he showed several times to many ingenious citizens who governed Florence, demonstrating how he wanted to raise the temple of San Giovanni and put steps under it without ruining it.” If this is not courage and tenacity, what is it?

* “Beside one of the rooms sketched Leonardo notes: “Le putte”, an abbreviation for “putane” (whores). Below this he drew a young man seen in profile, standing and with an erection. The little drawing is still visible in spite of attempts made to delete it at some time in the past by rubbing it with a finger dampened in water or saliva.” Close-up of a Genius by Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo - Art and Science, p.8, Giunti Publications

What Are You Missing

I was recently teaching a class on Innovation for a large company at one of their locations. When I walked into the building, there was quite a long approach to the security desk. The word "INNOVATION" was written in very large and colorful letters on opposite walls. On one of the walls there was a timeline of innovations spanning nearly 50 years of the company's history. It was quite impressive and a grand sort of entrance for an Innovation trainer!

At one point during the course, I asked the 16 participants, who all work at that facility and walk through the grand entrance five days a week, who can tell me what’s on the walls as they walk into the building. Guess what? Not one person in the group was able to say what was on the walls. They simply did not know!  Hmm!  What is this about?

How are your observational skills? In the video below see if you can count the number of passes the people in the white shirts make.

 

In the test video you were asked to count the number of passes between team members playing basketball as a person in a gorilla suit walks through the scene. In a study by Simons and Chabris, 50% of the subjects who viewed the video did not see the gorilla. This phenomena is referred to as inattentional blindness or perceptual blindness -- not being able to perceive things that are in plain sight. "It is caused by an absence of attention to the unseen object and is clear evidence of the importance of attention for perceiving. Without attention we are as if functionally blind" (Wikipedia).

So, back to the walls of innovation. Those employees are so focused on going to work and getting to their office that they miss something that is so obvious. It's as if they have turned off their peripheral vision. What else are they blind to in their environment? What are they missing? Maybe some critical data that would effect their job, or maybe some great ideas to solve some tough challenges. Now I have a new element to add to the Innovation course! By the way, what are you missing?