New and Improved Innovation Blog Site

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.

Steve Jobs is Dead. What's NeXT?

 The budget office bought me a Macintosh computer to cut what they viewed as exorbitant costs for the typography services I was purchasing for the agency's public documents. It was 1984, shortly after the famous Superbowl ad depicting the unnamed heroine smashing "Big Brother", saving humanity from conformity. I was furious. I was passionate about "real typesetting" having apprenticed with a graphic designer who was a master typographer. After a few weeks using the Mac I changed my tune. The flexibility to change type on the fly transformed how I approached design, the time from idea to execution evaporated.

Over the next few years I was able to purchase Macs for my entire department's staff. Strung together through AppleTalk and connected to the organization's PRIME mainframe system we produced astounding results. Our reports and presentations were ahead of schedule, contained the most recent data, and were visually elegant. This from a state juvenile justice agency!

I had heard of Steve Jobs during that time but didn't pay much attention. But by the time he was ousted from Apple and started NeXT I was ready to embrace his next offer, a different computer design, a sleek black box workstation that again changed the game and continuing his vision of integrating beauty and functionality without compromise. While the NeXT computer was a retail failure it provided the foundational thinking for the next wave of Macintosh operating systems when Jobs returned to lead Apple the second time. And my experience went on like that.  One beautiful functional tool after another from the inside out including the packaging, marketing, selling process, and Apple store experience.

With his recent death it has me wondering how his main characteristics as an innovation leader match those we at New & Improved belief are essential. What do you think?

• Passionate - he sure was that about what he cared about.
• Integrity - seems so.
• Tenacity - off the charts!
• Curiosity - about all kinds of things.
• Courage - took lots of what turns out to have been smart risks in the long run.
• Humility - after his first fall from the Apple tree, he got some.

I re-listened today to his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech where he tells his life story and encourages the graduates to follow the guidance on the back cover of Steward Brant's Whole Earth Catalog: "stay hungry, stay foolish". I believe this provocation from the 70's remains on target to inspire innovation leaders today. Jobs ends his speech with "don't let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition." Another way of expressing what we at New & Improved belief are essential attributes for innovation leaders.

His death has me asking myself , What do I want to be remembered for? What do I wish my legacy to be?

So we ask you - have you considered yet what you want to be remembered for?

The Difference Between Mistakes and Chronic Stupidity

First test passed. A good sign. We know it’s hard work to make time for new learning these days. But you’re choosing to do so. Keep it up.

We’ve often pointed to the research telling us that creativity flourishes in an environment where it’s OK to make well intentioned “misteaks” New neurological research, published in the prestigious journal Wired ignites some interesting sparks in this particular area. (Yes, we know Wired is not a scientific journal, but it makes good science easily understandable in this case, might be a great way of widening your reading range, and is accurately describing some research soon to be published in Psychological Science).

Here’s the insight: There are a number of different neuro-electrical responses to mistakes, which can be measured, can be potentiated, brought into some degree of voluntary control and which are predictive of productive learning from mistakes.

Two measurable (yet variable) responses occur immediately after a mistake. First, (on an Electroencephalogram -EEG) we can see a signal called Error Related Negativity (ERN) , which is mostly involuntary and arrives about 50 milliseconds after a conscious recognition of some failure in your self-expectation.  Following quickly is a signal known as Error Positivity (Pe) in about the 100-500 millisecond range. More intensive ERN signals, and longer, steadier Pe signals correlate with better learning. Better improvement. More growth in wisdom.

And you can consciously attend to strengthening both in a way that serves your future.

It seems the variable that is within our control is something researcher Carol Dweck (Who has had a significant impact on the lives of the partners and families at New & Improved... read on...) called “The Growth Mindset.” This mindset is characterized by a desire to grow and learn from mistakes, coupled with a belief that this is possible. Dweck found that if a person believed that they were capable of learning, capable of working hard at solving problems, they learned more rapidly than if they thought they were just smart. Once again, humility creates the basis for success, and is followed by the curiosity that sets us up for great learning. The Kids in her research, all of whom solved a problem, did better in the future when they were told “You must have worked really hard at this”, rather than “You must be smart at this”.

Carol gave these kids a choice of an additional test after their first success with two options: an easy one or a more challenging one. The “hard working” kids consistently chose the harder one, and learned more because of it. By the third round, the “hard workers” were up 30% in their scores from baseline, while the “smart ones” were down 20%.

We ran in the same circles as Carol when she was doing her original research, and it’s why those of us at New & Improved who are helping raise children never tell them they're smart. We point out that they're great learners. After almost 20 years of using this strategy with the kids we’ve all helped raise, and still working with kids who have not been raised this way, the impact is evident.

If you’ve been reading this, you’re a “good learner” too. You do work hard to feed your creative brain! Keep it up. And have a cookie. You deserve it.