Phrase Concerns as Opportunities

One of the most simple, yet most powerful approaches for increasing your creativity potential is to phrase concerns as opportunities. 

When brainstorming, inevitably someone will say, “We don’t have enough time to implement this idea,” or “We don’t have enough money.”  When you say this, you are stating it as fact.  Instead, state this concern as an opportunity.  For example, “How might we get more money?”  Or, “How might we do this for less money?” 

Once you have a new opportunity defined, you can use creativity techniques to find new solutions.

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Move From Consensus to Alignment

Here is another tip from my new “innovation tips” book.

There are two extremes of innovation culture. One is “the right of infinite appeal.” This is a culture where anyone, anytime, has the right to veto any suggestions, bring the process back to the starting point. In this environment, very little gets done, and innovation is completely stifled, as everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator. This is the most common culture – the consensus culture.

The other extreme is “run and gun.” These are companies with lots of people with lots of ideas, all of which seem to be getting implemented simultaneously. The good news here is, there is in fact quite a bit of action. Unfortunately, no one is talking to anyone else, and everyone is doing work in his little corner of the universe. It creates more anarchy than progress.

A company needs to strive for a combination of these two: well-thought-out ideas that get incubated and propagated rapidly through an organization.

The solution?

Organizations should strive for alignment. Using this philosophy, people in the organization say, “Even though this is not my solution and is not the way I would implement it, I will support it as though it were my idea.”

This is a simple, yet wildly powerful tool for gaining momentum with teams. Instill this mindset early in the process and you will find incredible gains throughout your innovation journey.

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Ethos, Pathos, Logos

Today’s blog entry is from my new “innovation tips book.” But this is also an extremely useful concept in every day life. In fact, anyone who knows me eventually hears me say: “ethos, pathos, logos.” Selling is fundamental to your success – personally and professionally. Ethos, pathos, logos is a simple recipe for selling anything – products, services, or ideas.

Ethos, pathos, and logos are the three corners of Aristotle’s “Rhetorical Triangle” – the use of language to persuade. Ethos is credibility, pathos is empathy, and logos is logic. I find that selling your ideas using this construct, in that order, leads to more persuasive arguments.

Ethos: First, establish your credibility. You need to get people to listen to your ideas. They will only listen if you have credibility. Why should they believe you? So, before trying to sell your ideas, make sure people believe you, trust you, and want to listen to you. Maybe you can start with a story that establishes your credibility. When someone hears that I was the cover story in O, The Oprah Magazine and I am one of Tom Peters’ “Cool Friends,” they listen to me differently. Testimonials and trusted references build credibility. Do this first, without sounding like you are hyping yourself, because at the end of the day, you are there to create value for others. This leads to the second step…

Pathos: Create an emotional bond with others. Speak their language. Address their needs. Tell them what they will get out of paying attention. Why should they care? This is all about context. Remember, people rarely listen to the emergency procedures when an airplane is taking off, but they are highly attentive when the plane is about to crash. You must get people to the point where they really want to hear what you have to say about the proposed solution.

Logos: Finally, after addressing credibility and empathy, you get to the solution. Features and functions. How will the change be implemented? How will it affect them? What do they need to do differently? What actions do you want them to take?

Want a successful change effort? If so, you must be able to sell your ideas. In order to sell your ideas, you need to understand how people make decisions. People rarely make decisions intellectually, they make them emotionally. Ethos, pathos, logos is a powerful, emotionally-driven, non-manipulative formula for persuading others to take action.

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Move Your Innovators to the Front-Line

I am writing a new book on innovation that contains over 100 tips for turning creativity into profitability. Every tip is bite sized (typically one page in length) in order to be easily digestible. Each week I will post at least one tip from the book. Organizations who are interested in creating a culture of innovation can request an early draft of the book by writing us at tipsbook@24-7innovation.com.

Here is tip #1 from the book:

Move Your Innovators to the Front-Line

A study carried out at Eckerd College in Florida challenges traditional “back-room” innovation models. Managers at the school were tested to determine whether they were “innovators” (those who do things differently and break the rules) or “adapters” (those who do things better within the rules).

The managers were then broken into teams to solve a given problem. Each team was comprised of two groups: 1) the “planners” who had to work out a solution to the problem, and 2) the “implementers” who were charged with making it work. There were three teams, each made up of planners and implementers.

Team #1: The planners were made up of the “innovators” and the implementers group was comprised of “adapters”.

Team #2: The planning group had both “innovators” and “adapters,” as did the group of implementers.

Team #3: The planning group contained only “adapters” and the implementers group contained only “innovators”.

Which was most effective? Although most organizations use the first model, the third model was most effective. The “adapters” were able to come up with a design very quickly. The innovators were then able to take that design and build something from it, correcting and improving as they went along.

Move innovation out of the back room and bring it to the forefront of your organization. This creates greater speed, responsiveness, and flexibility.

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Speaker’s Corner Brainstorming

Today’s blog entry is a goal-free approach to brainstorming.

Brainstorming sessions are useful. The standard approach is one person up front facilitating, while the conversation is single-threaded. To overcome this limitation, some groups use breakout sessions. The problem with this is that they do not allow for cross-pollination of ideas.

To combat these problems, I developed a powerful technique called “Speaker’s Corner” – named after the place in Hyde Park London where people can speak on any topic of interest (typically religion, politics and aliens). Instead of one conversation, there are many conversations. Instead of the leader deciding what to discuss, everyone decides what is important.

Here’s how it works:

• The group captures (either in the meeting or in advance) a list of topics that are of interest to the individuals
• The group then prioritizes this list down to critical few – typically the number of people divided by 8. For the sake of argument, let’s say there are 30 people, and hence four topics/corners.
• We ask for four volunteers (one for each topic) who agree to facilitate a conversation. Each facilitator goes to a different “corner” with a flip chart to capture the ideas associated with their assigned topic.
• All other meeting attendees then wander freely from corner to corner as they see fit. The only rule is to make sure they are either adding value to a corner, or are receiving value from a corner.
• Any person, at any time, can create a new corner around any topic.
• A corner leader can recruit a new leader if that individuals want to participate in other corners.

What you find is that the most important topics with the highest level of energy attract a lot of people. The conversation can continue for quite some time. Topics which fail to attract a crowd wither on the vine (just like in Hyde Park – time to pick up the soap box and call it a day). This is the ultimate “free-market,” egalitarian approach to meetings. In one hour, you can capture more ideas than you would from a full day meeting. And each topic benefits from the cross-pollination of ideas from all attendees.

Rather than having a specific meeting goal, let the attendees determine what is of value. Let go of control and you will find unpredictable – and spectacular – results.

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