Tap Into Your Inner Innovation Child
I recently had the privilege of speaking to a group 400-plus senior executives from a very large organization. During my allotted 90 minutes, I conducted an activity used to demonstrate the power of divergent thinking. At the conclusion of the exercise, I asked for solutions to a specific problem. Twenty hands went up, if that. And, of those, most were only halfway raised.
Contrast that with a presentation I had given later that afternoon to a group of 200 high school students. When we conducted the same exercise, all 200 hands went up. In fact, half of the students had both hands up, so technically 300 hands were up. And, in an effort to gain my attention, a quarter of the students were jumping up and down on their chairs. The solutions provided by the high school students were off the charts. They were so creative that some ideas were beyond comprehension.
The difference between the adults’ and teenagers’ sessions were night and day.
My own observations, while not overly surprising, have been validated by research.
There was a study done a number of years ago by George Land. He found that 98 percent of 5-year-old kids tested as highly creative. By the time they were 25 years old, only 2 percent tested at that same level.
If children possess such a dynamic level of creativity, why aren’t companies hiring a collection of 5-year-olds to enhance innovation efforts?
The answer lies within the distinction between innovation and creativity.
What I admired most about speaking to the children was their passion, not necessarily their responses. They had a level of enthusiasm that was unparalleled. They all wanted to play. They all wanted to contribute. And no one was concerned about looking bad in front of his or her peers. In fact, it seemed as though the more they participated, the more it made them look good in the eyes of others.
Adults, on the other hand, are calculating and careful when responding. They are more concerned with saying something “stupid” and being labeled as a failure. As a result, they sit quietly — often with the best ideas buried in their minds — and resist participating fully. This robs teams of their full potential.
Read the rest of this article on the American Express OPEN Forum site
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The Performance Paradox on IdeaConnection
The second half of my interview with Vern Burkhardt from IdeaConnection was recently posted. Here are the first few paragraphs of this much longer interview.
“We can conclude that creativity is about being present, just as pit crews changing the tires on a Formula 1 car need to be present.” Stephen Shapiro
Vern Burkhardt (VB): While living in England for four years you worked with a Formula One race team. Would your Personality Poker playing card tool be useful in selecting the pit crew and drivers? (Vern’s note: see last week’s article for a detailed discussion about Personality Poker)
Stephen Shapiro: I’m not sure it would be useful in picking the pit crew members or the drivers, but I did learn a lot about how teams collaborate while watching Formula 1 pit crews.
There are some simple principles that pit crews use. One is each person is playing to their strong suit. Everybody understands completely what they must do. The person changing the lug nut on the front right tire does it better than anyone else. If I’m one of the two removing the rear left tire, we will do that better than anyone else.
The second principle is to make sure all positions are covered. If the person who is supposed to be fueling a car – back when they fueled a car in Formula 1 races – decided not to show up, you’ve got a serious problem that will cause the race to be lost.
The same thing applies to all organizations. They will have problems if they’re not “playing with a full deck” – that is, they don’t have all of the different positions or thinking styles addressed.
Another analogy to the card game we didn’t talk about last week is dealing out the work. It means we want to use a divide and conquer strategy. Everybody doesn’t do everything. They know how and when to pitch in.
Finally, from time to time we want to shuffle the deck to create some tension without having to have groupthink all the time.
The pit crew was a good model for creating high-performing innovation teams.
VB: The people who are the pit crew have to be present; they have to be focused on exactly what they are doing. Their brains can’t be wandering or thinking about anything else. Would that be fair to say?
Stephen Shapiro: That’s fair to say.
You bring to mind an interesting phenomenon that I call ‘the performance paradox.’ A study done by one of the pit crews found that when people did not focus on the stop-watch – on how fast they were working – but instead focused on being present, they actually completed the tasks faster even though the pit crew members thought they were going slower. They were encouraged to think about being ‘smooth’ if they were changing the tires or doing the other tasks.
We see the same thing happening inside organizations and, in particular, in the creativity space. When we tell people to be creative, and measure them on their creativity, the result often is less creativity. The process of focusing on the extrinsic measure of creativity paradoxically has the impact of worsening or lessening the level of creativity inside the organization. We can conclude that creativity is about being present, just as pit crews changing the tires on a Formula 1 car need to be present.
VB: Was it a difficult decision in 2001 to leave your job at Accenture, where you led that company’s Global Process Excellence Practice, to become a writer, speaker and consultant?
Stephen Shapiro: It was somewhat of an easy decision.
The launch of my first book, 24/7 Innovation, was on October 10, 2001 and my last day with Accenture was October 11, 2001. I had been speaking to audiences on behalf of Accenture for 8 years, and I felt it was time to try something different by promoting the book while still doing speaking engagements.
I quickly learned an important point about innovation when I launched my own business. There’s a difference between being a great speaker and having a great speaking business. I believe I was and still am a great speaker, but in the beginning I had no work. Just because I had a book published didn’t mean people were going to bang down my door so I had to be creative about how to find work.
For a lot of organizations you need to be creative about the way you market and sell because those are as important to the growth of the business as having a good product. Peter Drucker once said, “since the purpose of business is to generate customers, only two functions do this: marketing and innovation. All other business functions are expenses.”
I learned very quickly that he was right and marketing is king. The best product that no one knows about is not going to sell. Having said that, the ability to develop new products, services, and business models is also important and I don’t want to downplay their part in the success of a business.
VB: What do you do to psyche yourself up before you speak to a large audience?
Read the rest of this interview on the IdeaConnection website
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Open Innovation Book
Paul Sloane, an innovation colleague, approached me a while back to write a chapter in a book he was compiling on open innovation & crowdsourcing. The book is now officially out. In it you will find articles from a wide range of experts in the area of open innovation.
Although the writing style of each author is quite different, and the points of view at times may contradict one another, the value in reading a book like this is that you will get a broad and diverse set of perspectives.
You can buy your copy on Amazon.com.
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Innovation & Poker Interview with Chris Taylor
I recently had the great pleasure of welcoming Chris Taylor into my condo. He came with his video camera, an in depth understanding of my work, and an amazing interview style. The result? One of my favorite video interviews…ever. Be sure to check it out and learn more about Chris at Actionable Books.
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Your Customers Are Cynics
[This article originally appeared on the American Express Open Forum]
A large portion of my business is public speaking. And I know many others who make their living the same way. But to be perfectly frank, companies are often wasting their money when they hire a speaker. I say this not because there aren’t many gifted men and women who can deliver an engaging presentation. The problem is with the customers, not the speakers.
As Oscar Wilde once said, “a cynic knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” Using this definition, most buyers are cynics.
The truth of the matter is that your customers do not know what they truly need. And they certainly do not know how to define value.
This creates an opportunity for you to engage your buyers in new ways, generating more value for them… and greater wealth for you.
To test the hypothesis that my customers could not articulate what was valuable to them, several years ago I tried an experiment. I called it “PW3 – Pay What We’re Worth.”
As background, in determining the fees paid to a professional speaker, traditionally the speaker sets the rate before the work is done. With the PW3 experiment, I turned this model upside down. Instead of quoting a standard rate, the client would determine my fee after the work was done.
The plan was to send the client a blank invoice after I gave a speech, and they would pay “what I was worth.”
The only stipulation was that we would have a conversation about value up front. I wanted to learn the value they got from previous speakers. How were the concepts reinforced after the presentation? How were ideas implemented? How was value measured?
What I discovered was that Oscar Wilde was indeed right. Companies were unable to define value, at least in terms of tangible results. In fact, in nearly every situation, when I asked them how they would determine what to pay me after an event, they said, “Um, I guess we’ll pay you what we paid the last speaker.” In fact, with 90 percent of my speeches, the client asked me for my standard fee and just paid that.
How can you create exponential value for your customers? How can you in turn create greater wealth for your organization? Let’s first look at the way organizations tend to operate.
In my work, I have defined three levels of innovation:
Level 1: Innovation as an event
Level 2: Innovation as a process
Level 3: Innovation as a system
Read the rest of this article on the American Express OPEN Forum
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