Report 103

Your newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

Wednesday 20 March 2013
Issue 224

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your twice-monthly (or thereabouts) newsletter on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

As always, if you have news about creativity, imagination, ideas, or innovation please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103. Your comments and feedback are also always welcome.

Information on unsubscribing, archives, reprinting articles, etc can be found at the end of this newsletter.

Note

Most articles in this issue of Report 103 can also be found in the archives together with dozens more articles, papers and thoughts.

In this issue of Report 103

Everyone Loves a Creative Idea -- Unless It Applies to Them
Teach Your Team to Be More Creative with Anticonventional Thinking (ACT) adv
Shake Up Your Office

Everyone Loves a Creative Idea -- Unless It Applies to Them

Some time ago, I wrote an article inspired by a research paper that demonstrated that people seem to have a bias against creative ideas. This is probably the single biggest hindrance to your innovation initiative. It means that managers are unlikely to authorise the implementation of highly creative ideas. It implies that given a choice between highly creative ideas and moderately creative ideas, such as evaluating ideas from a brainstorm, moderately creative ideas are more likely to be selected for action. Sadly, I am seeing more and more evidence that this is very true.

For example, take a look at this article, about walking meetings, on the Wired web site. Nilofer Merchant argues that too much sitting is bad for us and recommends walking meetings not only for health purposes, but to get out of the office and to keep meetings short. It's a creative idea, no doubt. If you scroll down to the comments, you will find that most of them are critical of her idea. However, when I checked, not one of the criticisms were "I tried a walking meeting. It did not work for me because..." Instead, they were abusive, provided excuses for being unable to do a walking meeting or simply rejected the idea out of hand.

This is sad, because a walking meeting is an idea that is ridiculously easy to try out and virtually risk free -- unless your office is in the middle of a war zone. Yet, a surprising number of people found it easier to criticise this idea untried rather than test it and provide feedback!

In a similar vein, I have written and spoken about research that demonstrates that allowing people to criticise ideas during brainstorming actually results in more creative results than does prohibiting criticism during the idea generation process. A number of people have responded to this very critically, saying that the experimenters did not understand the creative problem solving process; that it is critical to prohibit criticism during idea generation; that allowing criticism during idea generation would cause confusion. Yet, when I have asked these people if they have actually tried out this approach (of allowing criticism during idea generation), they inevitably say they have not. The approach is apparently too appalling to test -- even though it would be remarkably easy and risk free to test!

And it raises a worrying question. If the people who claim to be champions of creativity; the people who help their clients generate new ideas; the people who write blog posts about the importance of creativity are unwilling actually to try out a radical, but risk-free idea, what hope is there for more conservative businesses?

The Problem Is Change

It seems the real problem is that most people do not like change. And both ideas presented here are changes that affect fundamental actions that people have been doing the same way for long periods of time. Someone who has been working in an office environment for 20 years is very used to meetings happening in a predictable fashion. They know how to behave, how to take notes and how to surreptitiously send text messages to friends when meetings get boring. This is very comforting. So, changing this process is presumably so disturbing, that the change becomes abhorrent even when it is easily testable.

Likewise, people who have been facilitating the same structured brainstorming method for years find comfort in their methods. They know how their brainstorms will unravel, the challenges they are likely to face and how people are likely to respond to requests from the facilitator. Making any change in a reliable method is frightening. It adds an element of unpredictability to a highly predictable process. As a result, people find it frightening and therefore risky. It is easier to criticise the idea of criticism rather than try it, irrespective of how easy to test the idea may be.

What Can You Do?

Unfortunately, when people do seem to have a strong bias against creativity even when ideas are easily testable and involve no real risk, it is hard to know how you can overcome this bias. Nevertheless, I have a few suggestions.

Firstly, take ownership and responsibility for the idea yourself. No one else will. Set up your walking meeting. Invite a few people to try out a new way to generate ideas.

Secondly, test the idea. If it is a product idea, build a prototype. If it is a process idea, find a low-risk way to test and demonstrate it. If people can see that the idea works, and will not adversely affect them, they will become much more open to it.

Finally, address the emotional risks that people feel in addition to the financial risks that are usually addressed when evaluating an idea. A walking meeting has little financial cost or risk. But it makes people nervous. Address that. Make it clear that you are just trying out a new approach to meetings and that you want the participants' feedback. If you listen to people's concerns, you can address them and, if need be, comfort them. If people try a walking meeting and like it, they will become more open to it. Then you can expand on the idea, invite others to run walking meetings and slowly incorporate it into normal activity in your organisation.

Be Aware of the Fear of Creativity and Change

If you are a creative contributor to your organisation, it is important to be aware of this fear of creativity and change. Be aware that when people reject your ideas, it may not be because the idea is bad. Rather, it may be because the thought of implementing your idea and the change in routine scares people.

And here's one last suggestion. If you do run brainstorms, an idea management software or a suggestion scheme and have a number of ideas to consider, instead of asking people to vote for the best idea (which is a mistake), ask them to vote on the idea they would least like to implement. My guess is that the ideas that get the most votes will be the most creative ideas!

Teach Your Team to Be More Creative with Anticonventional Thinking (ACT)

Anticonventional thinking (ACT) is a new approach to creative thinking that is about purposefully rejecting conventional thinking in favour of unconventional thinking throughout the creative process. Unlike brainstorming and other creativity techniques, ACT does not focus on ideas. Rather it focuses on understanding your problem or goal and transforming it into a sexy goal that makes it easy to devise unique, novel solutions. ACT also differs from other creative thinking processes in that it directly addresses the implementation of the idea.

If you like the idea of your team learning how to use and exploit a creative thinking method that boosts creativity and leads to implementation, you will almost certainly like ACT.

And if you have been disappointed by the results of brainstorming, then you will love ACT with its focus on developing a big, viable idea (instead of dozens of little ideas) and an realistic action plan.

To learn more about ACT, read my paper (PDF) here, or read about my workshops here or contact me here. Or you can reply to this newsletter and I'll get back to you!

Shake Up Your Office

You, of all people, surely know the importance of shaking up your routines. Changing even simple routines, such as the route you take to work or what you eat for breakfast, is supposed to make your mind sharper and enhance thinking, which can only help creativity. Moreover, changing your routines from time to time helps make you less adverse to change and hence more open to trying out new ideas (see above). Here's a great list of little changes you can make to your regular routines.

If changing your personal routines is a good way to enhance your own thinking and creativity, surely changing routines in your office should lead to enhanced collective intelligence and creativity. Changing office routines will presumably make your team more flexible, more thoughtful about the value of operational routines and more open to trying new ideas.

Here are a handful of ideas you can try in order to shake up office routines, without disrupting operations.

Vary the way you hold meetings. Try standing meetings, walking meetings, sitting on the floor meetings. Meet in an outdoors space or on the roof. Start your meetings with some stretch exercises or bring in a karaoke machine and sing a song together. Bring people into the meeting room, but insist they can only communicate via email and text messages during the meeting.
If yours is an office of suits and ties, prohibit suits and ties now and again. If the dress code is informal, have everyone dress up in formal business clothes one day a week. Or insist that everyone (irrespective of sex) wear a tie, but not around the neck!
For one week, prohibit the use of email and telephones to communicate with people in the same building (or same floor if you are in a massive building). Make people go to one another to communicate and share.
Prohibit the use of PowerPoint presentations for a week and insist that people find other ways of presenting ideas. Offer a fun reward for the most creative alternative presentation method.
Encourage people to come to work without cars.
Set a half hour siesta period in the early afternoon. During this time, people may nap, read, chat with friends. But they must not work or talk about work.
If your office is in a non-English speaking country where most people speak English, set aside a "Speak English" day when everyone is expected to speak English to each other.
Do training programmes in non-work related skills such as cooking, drawing or fencing.

There you have it, a handful of small changes you can make in the office. These need not be permanent changes. Some things you might try just once -- at least to see how they work. Other actions might be once a week or once a month. When I ran a company in Bangkok, for instance, every Friday was speak English day. Everyone had to speak English for the day and I would refuse to understand Thai (unless it was a client, of course!)

Think about your own office. What routines could you change now and again? There must be many! And if you are instinctively wanting to tell me the reasons why you could not possibly do these things in your office, then it is doubly important you change some routines!

What do you think?