Creative Silence [Brainstorming 2.0]

IF GROUP PROBLEM-SOLVING IS LESS PRODUCTIVE THAN THAT OF INDIVIDUALS, HOW CAN ONE GET THE BEST OF BOTH (INDIVIDUAL & GROUP) WORLDS COMBINING BREADTH & DEPTH OF IDEAS?

I have found that generating large numbers of ideas doesn't imply a larger number of potential nuggets. The free-association aspect of traditional brainstorming is often more useful as a means of mapping the preoccupations and thinking-styles of a group than in generating useful ideas.

 

THE DANGER OF THE FIRST IDEA

Another difficulty is that the first idea voiced in traditional brainstorming, may prove to be the last. I have noticed that extended stress-gaps in teams, combined with a high need to produce an output, can lead to the generation of ideas long before the team has agreed and formally defined the problem. Such teams are easily led astray by the first idea. It is as though the first idea dominates or "shapes" everything that follows to develop an inadvertent “groupthink”.

The need to work on something, often anything, can mean that the first idea voiced, slants or influences the expectations of the group and can misdirect all the ideas that follow. The team embellishes the initial idea, producing variations and investing in this direction until, much too late, it realises that this area is rather unproductive but feels unwilling to abandon work that has involved so much emotion, time and effort.
 

IDEA-VETTING

Ideas can be vetted inadvertently.  I have seen facilitators scribbling ideas down onto flipcharts as the team shouted them out in traditional brainstorming style and noticed their unconscious vetting of ideas that they disliked by not writing them down.  When asked subsequently why they missed these ideas and ultimately switched those individuals off from any further positive contributions, they simply said that they had not heard the ideas. 

When revisited on video, the excluded ideas sounded just as loud as the other "acceptable" ideas.

CREATIVE SILENCE

The solution to overcome this type of "groupthink" is to introduce a new discipline to traditional brainstorming, by asking individuals to "kick-off" the process of generating solutions or ideas by doing it individually, and in silence and recording their ideas on Post-Its.

This "Creative Silence" approach leads to a significant improvement in quality and diversity of ideas. The resulting ideas are collected by asking individuals to contribute their ideas in threes, and without comment, working round the team until all the ideas are represented. This also encourages individuals to listen to each others' ideas to avoid presenting the same idea again.

I find Post-Its for individuals a very useful way of accelerating this process. I have no investments in the manufacturers, nor do I (as yet) receive a retainer for making this suggestion! Remember: One idea per Post-It, write all ideas with the same colour flipchart-pen, to disguise the ownership of ideas and reduce status-awareness. 

A minor point to remember is that ideas may need to be expressed in more than just a single word on a Post-It in order to mean something to other team-members.
   

Creative Silence Brainstorming - 5 Basic  Rules

                1              Two Minutes Creative Silence (at least)

                2              One idea per Post-It

                3              Same colour pen

                4              Share 3 ideas at a time, going round the group

                5              Remove duplicates, build on triggers, seek combination and improvement

 

 Encourage individuals to introduce their Post-Its in their own words, without comment from the team beyond checking their understanding of the necessarily abbreviated content of each Post-It as it is put on display.

Whilst this is happening, encourage individuals to respond to what they see, using them as triggers to generate further ideas (another wave) or lead to grouping the ideas into families, identifying gaps and only then introducing another wave through another phase of Creative Silence, and so on.

If used correctly, this tool will help you and your team to effectively generate useful solution in a relatively short period of time. Its success however, depends upon your process discipline!

[Extract from: “The First Discipline: Process Leadership for Problem Solving Teams”, Victor Newman, 2010, http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2606757]

Why Mind Fitness is Essential in Uncertain Times

Where are we now?

All economies and businesses go through cycles of decay and rebirth. This means that the natural tendency to plug away at doing the same stuff in the hope that the familiar old reality will return, whilst comforting, is ultimately futile. The old rules don’t quite work the way they used to.

Part of the problem of the recession is that the nature of business decay has been disguised by artificial and unsustainable levels of government borrowing that created an artificial boom in growth that has become seen as a normal state.

Innovate or Die

The current economic climate is unpredictable because cash-rich businesses are holding on to their money and not investing it, because they cannot predict where the market will go next and how low customer demand may fall. And yet we know that the old trick of manufacturing products or delivering services that people actually want to buy still works under most conditions: the long-delayed but welcome success of the British Automotive industry says it all, JLR is having problems meeting global demand. Apple is having dip in analyst expectations because its customers are not buying the current iPhone because they know that the replacement will be available in November. What marvellous challenges to have to face in a global recession!

Do the Right Thing

There’s a great quote from Warren Bennis to the effect that: “Managers are people who do things right. [whilst] Leaders are people who do the right thing”.

Under stress, organisations and individuals tend to do 2 dangerous things: firstly they focus on hygiene behaviours (tidying or focusing on cosmetic issues – hence “re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic”) that comfort with familiarity instead of coming to terms with the new situation.  This tidying behaviour under pressure often takes the form of ensuring that “things are done right” are done properly even when they are not solving the real problem that needs to be addressed. The second dangerous behaviour is the tendency to work on solving the problem they are already familiar with, which is usually not the problem that needs working on.

How Mad Do You Have To Get Before You Want To Change?

There is an old definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, and Rita Mae Brown. How much insanity can we afford? 

Mind Fit is about learning to face your current reality and deliberately changing your thinking approach in order to succeed, by learning to pay attention to new variables that determine success in a changed situation or a situation you want to change by changing your performance.

Just as Lean Thinking was a response to the 1973 Oil Crisis, a systemic methodology that focused on waste reduction by identifying forms of waste that were an accepted cost in the automotive industry and eliminating them, Mind Fit is about recognising forms of behavioural waste in your current situation, confronting them and reducing them drastically to release energy to innovate.

Mind Fit awareness is the equivalent of an athlete learning to change the self-imposed rules of performance by removing an invisible rucksack full of rocks that a careless coach made them wear, and learning to run faster, different races without it. Mind Fit is about giving yourself the freedom to innovate personally, in your relationships, and in your organisation.

As Ghandi said: be the change you wish to see in others.

http://www.mindfitltd.com/mind-fit-programmes/

LEADERSHIP BEYOND LEAN - FOR INNOVATION & GROWTH

To paraphrase an old quote, insanity is the expectation that old approaches will still work when the context you are operating in has changed. If managers are supposed to do things right, and leaders to do the right thing, then a recession deepens the requirement to support today’s strategy, whilst crafting its innovative replacement.

But what do you do in the interim before the new, “effective” strategy is operating? Just as the 1973 oil embargo forced the adoption of lean thinking in the Japanese automotive industry, we need to adopt a fundamentally different approach to forms of waste that we may not at first be able to see or even characterize by creating new, dynamic way of thinking about the most valuable resource that organisations possess – their people. It is ultimately through people that growth will come.

We’ve all heard of Not-Invented-Here, and I have written elsewhere about “sticky” organizations and how closed Relational Capital protects the status quo, but understanding the problem is not the same as solving it. Ordinary people are like athletes in that both have all the innate assets needed to become innovative and succeed, but few dare to systematically realise this potential by developing a form of mental fitness that reduces expensive defensive, paternalistic leadership and its partner incompetence, in order to liberate new, hidden capability to innovate and grow.

Throwing money at the recession will not solve the problem. Telling the banks to lend money just begs the question of what exactly are they going to invest in, within a recession? So what is required in order to be worth investing in?

Current Recession Context & Innovation Credo

·    Growth in a recession will come from different and better use of current resources to innovate, chiefly through our people and their talents.

·    Champions are the product of the ability to focus and control their own minds and fears to deliver outstanding behaviours combined with a conscious use of technique under difficult circumstances.

·    Successful leaders in difficult times are able to lead themselves and also influence the behaviours of those around them.

·    The problem for leaders is how to get more and different outcomes for less, by understanding how to develop and apply a form of mental and behavioural fitness to manage their own attention in order to change behaviours and expectations, more.

One of the strategic imperatives that Clive Woodward brought to British Athletics (and he knows he will never be forgiven for doing it) was to focus investment on athletes in events where they were likely to win a medal. Successful growth in a recession requires a similar approach to mental fitness to enable innovation and growth.

On 19th September 2012, Graham Williams and I will be presenting a showcase workshop on this topic, entitled "Mind Fit - To Innovate for Business Growth" at the University of Greenwich's Hamilton House in Greenwich. Details to follow. 

The Real Need for Autistic Board Members to Avoid Excessive Risk-Taking

The past few weeks have featured several articles replaying the old sex-war narrative around capitalism, on the line that a more balanced representation of women in the boardroom would have reduced risk-taking behaviour that led to the financial crash.

The Times’s Business Section, yesterday (Wednesday 28^th March) suggested that this is a naïve, simplistic view, referencing Bundesbank research which suggested that “women board members were more likely to take risks with a bank’s finances than their male counterparts”.  Swimming against the traditional sex-war narrative, the report concluded that “women determine corporate governance of banks significantly and are not marginalised by a male-dominated board culture”.

Interestingly, it was noted that risky behaviour was generally increased by the lower age of board members, but that PhD-holders brought greater stability.

Reading Michael Lewis’s brilliant “The Big Short” on the epidemic of stupidity that drove the sub-prime disaster, a key feature of those who could see what was about to happen was their shared relative autism. That is, they all shared elements of autistic behaviour common to innovative people, as one of the key protagonists discovered when his son was diagnosed with Aspergers’s syndrome, for which the typical behaviours included a lack of:

1.       Ability to read non-verbal behaviours and eye-contact.

2.       Interest in developing peer relationships and interest in socialising with other people.

Allied with a strong tendency to:

3.       Find computers and the internet appealing because they avoid 1 & 2 above,

4.       Have hobbies and interests which are often solitary, idiosyncratic and dominate their time and conversations.

What made Dr. Michael Burry unusual was that “only someone who has Asperger’s would read a subprime mortgate bond prospectus [and understand what was actually going on]”.

In conclusion, I would suggest that we need a new model for rationality when it comes to decision-making in financial institutions (and others). We need to include people who are asocial enough to apply logic in the face of social groupthink pressure to conform, and empower them to ask the real, systemic questions that the group is avoiding.

Practical Innovation Leadership - 20th September 2012

A Flash Innovation Workshop with Victor Newman and Simon Evans, Innovoflow Ltd.

Developing Responsive Fast-Twitch Muscle Training for Rugby! 

Date: 20th September 2012 @ Hamilton House, University of Greenwich         Timing: 0900-1700

Overview

Innovation Agility combines flexible thinking about your innovation process, the willingness to exploit the full range of options outside current products, services and business models, plus the ability to learn rapidly.

Agile Innovation Leadership skills are especially valuable in turbulent markets and for developing Open Innovation strategies to work with great ideas from both inside or outside the company, and also for going to market with external partners.

 This workshop provides a model (through simulation) to help innovation leaders to develop agile thinking and the necessary decision making ability to operate successfully and meet the needs of the emergent, post-recession world.

Content 

·         A warm-up task to stimulate innovative thinking.

·         Current challenges and problems with innovation.
·         Use of simulations to accelerate innovation learning.
·         Introducing the concepts of the “Innovation Eco-System” the “Idea lifecycle” and “Agile Innovation leadership”.  Discussion.
·         Learning from experience - using simulation components to illustrate examples of failed innovation initiatives and how they could have been rescued.  Participants illustrate their experiences using the simulation.
·         Constructing an optimal innovation ecosystem with constrained resources.
·         Reverse Innovation Thinking: Identifying barriers to innovation and harvesting experience to develop antidotes.
·         Who is the custodian of the eco-system?  Discussion
·         Summing up, review and take-aways.

Learning Objectives

1. To understand that innovation is at the core of all businesses
2. To understand the nature of an idea and how it survives
3. To take the broad view of innovation and ensure that ideas have the best chance of generating real value – it’s not just about coming up with ideas
4. To recognise that innovation must be “part of the day job”
5. To treat the innovation eco-system as something that requires feeding, watering and nurturing in order to be successful
6. (Most importantly!) recognise that innovation is not a free lunch -  you must invest many different types of resource

Who should attend

All SMEs or entrepreneurs who care about developing innovation agility in a turbulent environment, who realise that new ideas sometimes need new ways of thinking and working, to turn them into practical products, services and business models.

Benefits to you and your business

·         Acquire a new and practical way of discussing and thinking openly about the way you innovate in your organisation.
·         Discover how to design and test a comprehensive innovation eco-system to ensure ideas are supported throughout their whole lifecycle to generate maximum value
·         An opportunity to share experiences of successful or failed innovation approaches and how to learn from them
·         Have an enjoyable learning day, much of which can be taken back to your business
·         To start to build a relationship with the Centre for Entrerprise & Innovation which could lead to other opportunities

How do you sell innovation to current business leaders?

We are in an interesting situation. Businesses that could be investing in innovation are holding onto their cash and waiting to see how the global economy plays out. That’s one explanation. I have another.

There’s an old consulting joke that goes like this:

Question - How many consultants does it take to change a light-bulb?

Answer - The number of consultants is immaterial, the key issue is that the light-bulb has got to want to change!

Let’s unpack the current context:  what have we got?

• POLITICIANS: Who borrowed irresponsibly to create artificial economic growth & buy elections through unsustainable public service expansion and vanity projects.
• BUSINESS LEADERS: Who successfully rode artificial growth-curves but don’t know how to grow businesses in a recession.
• ORGANISATIONS: With Products/ Services & Business Models at the wrong end of the S cash-curve, who are betting their pensions and bonuses on product extensions.

And we have even got CONSULTANTS who can see the need to move out of EFFICIENCY strategies and into EFFECTIVENESS strategies but cannot package a new paradigm & don’t know how to sell it to current leaders, but we either innovate or we die and we cannot borrow our way into growth.

We can sell transactional efficiency, product optimisation process consulting BUT we know that having the right people with the right psychology will make a lot of the KPI architecture completely irrelevant. Unfortunately at the top, we have people (probably not really leaders in the true sense) who can play political games in a growth phase, but who may not be the right people to grow the business in the current environment through innovation.

So how can we sell change in order to innovate to people who don’t understand what it means?  We could possibly begin with the linguistic trick that launched Lean Thinking. The word “lean” was powerful because of the implication that those who didn’t adopt it were fat (organisations). We need a similar linguistic trick that carries a hidden insult for non-consumers to act as a Trojan Horse to begin a literally vital, viral makeover.

Creativity, Projects, Project Leadership and Project Managers

Spencer Holmes interviews me on Youtube, discussing creative thinking, project leadership and managers. An introduction to the 30/70 rule as a means of aligning specialists behind a project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aigg1rMwZ8&feature=youtube_gdata_player