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

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

Cathedral or Chaos?

The other day I gave a speech on open innovation at a conference primarily focused on open source software.

One of the presenters at the event suggested that instead of trying to create a cathedral by controlling software development, we should instead be comfortable with a mess.  The point of open source is to let creativity emerge from the mess.

I thought that was an interesting point and was curious if this is how open source really works.

Just then an audience member made a comment (paraphrased here) – “Nearly every major, successful open source software effort has been backed by (and loosely controlled) by a large group. For example,  Mozilla’s support of Firefox and Oracle’s support of Open Office.”  He listed a few others and concluded that the only one that was not organized this way was Apache.  He implied that maybe the “mess” is not best.

I’m not an open source software expert, but I don’t find that surprising.

When there is no structure, chaos ensues.  Structure, even simple structure, can help bring together people so that they can work together more efficiently AND creatively (we know that even creativity requires some structure; innovation more-so)

As the morning progressed, I realized that the conference itself was an example of what can happen when there are no controls. It quickly became apparent that there was no formal emcee, no one in charge of the running of the conference, and no well-defined agenda.

The morning plenary was scheduled to go from 9AM until 10:30AM followed by a 30 minute break.  After the break were concurrent breakouts, including the one where I was presenting.  Immediately after my speech, I would hop off the stage, hop into a taxi for the airport, and head to my next speech in Italy.

At 10:30, when the break was supposed to start, another speaker took the stage.  I assumed we were running a little late, but it was hard to tell how late since they did not list who was supposed to speak.  And then a parade of speakers continued.  It seemed like it would never end.  I think there were four or five speeches that went on after the scheduled end time.  And quite a few of the speeches were nothing more than long-winded commercials from sponsoring companies.  It was 11:30 – a 60 minute overrun on a 90 minute session – before the speeches were done.  And then, no one was given instructions.  Should they take a break?  Should they go to their breakout?  People were confused.  They did not know what to do.  I didn’t know what to do.  And I wasn’t 100% sure I would make my flight given the delay.

Although it would be an exaggeration to call this event “chaotic,” it certainly was not orderly or efficient. And it demonstrated what can happen when things are left on their own without any kind of process.

I realize that innovation requires a bit of flexibility and comfort with ambiguity.  Nothing is totally predictable in the world of innovation and you can’t schedule everything as neatly as you do in the world of operations or manufacturing.  I also agree that new ideas can emerge from chaos that might not otherwise come to the surface (reminds me of the infinite monkey theorem).  And when you have millions of people donating their time to the open source movement, the resulting inefficiency associated with the mess can be tolerated.

But can your business afford this level of inefficiency?  Probably not.  I have written frequently about the “signal-to-noise” ratio of your innovation efforts.  If you modeled your business after the “uncontrolled, mess model,” you will almost certainly end up with an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio.

The real objective of your innovation “process” is to put in just enough structure to help make it efficient, while not putting in so much that it stifles creativity.

I’ll close this post with something I wrote back in 2001 in my first book, and reused in a blog entry a year ago:

(As innovators,) we are architects of companies and industries.  An architect is not a ‘reengineer.’ To illustrate this point, I often ask clients what is the difference between an optimist, a pessimist, a reengineering consultant, and an architect. The optimist looks at a half filled glass of water and sees it as half-full. The pessimist looks at the same glass and sees it as half-empty.  The reengineering consultant sees too much glass. Cut off the top. Downsize. An architect looks at the same glass and asks questions such as “Who’s thirsty?” “Why water?” Or “Is there another way to satisfy the thirst?”

We need to architect our innovation efforts.  And in order to do that, we need to ask better questions.

In fact, one of the most critical skills for accelerating innovation is to – ask the right questions, the right way, of the right people.

With this approach, you get both the efficiency of the controlled cathedral building process and the emergent creativity associated with the messier forms of open source software.

P.S. It has been pointed out that some of my open source examples are not accurate.  I only wrote what I thought I heard, which clearly I didn’t get perfect. Even if I had the specific applications/companies wrong, the paraphrased concept came from an open source practitioner. Regardless, my focus in the article was not open source software specifically, but rather the implications for innovation in organizations. I still stand by my points of view. Even if the “mess” model works in open source, I don’t believe it can work inside of a company that wants to make money. Companies do not have unlimited access to unpaid resources.

P.P.S. The picture is one I took of St. Marks Basilica while in Venice, Italy.  Although your business might not want to create a cathedral, this one was pretty impressive!

Are You a Fire Fighting Arsonist?

Imagine you are heading to a REALLY important meeting that is being held out of town. You have your bags packed. You have your airplane tickets, hotel and car rental reservations, and GPS.

You hop on the plane and fly to your destination. After deplaning, you pull out your hotel reservation and type the address into the GPS.

And then, you realize…you have a problem. A BIG problem.

Although your destination airport was Buffalo, NY, the event is being held just over the border in Ontario Canada…and you don’t have your passport.

I am completely embarrassed to admit it, but this happened to me just last week.

My speech was in Niagara Falls. For some reason I believed that the event was on the United States Side. This was a BAD assumption.

A friend once described herself as a fire fighting arsonist. She was constantly putting out fires that she started. I was beginning to understand what she meant.

If you were in my situation, what would have gone through your mind?

During my 45 minute drive from Buffalo to the border crossing, I went through three distinct phases of thought.

Phase 1: “Oh $#*!” – Not a very useful phase, but I had to acknowledge the reality of the situation

Phase 2: What can I do to get into Canada? – I first considered swimming across Niagara Falls. If I were Michael Phelps, then that might be an option. But I am not. I then pondered begging and bribery as options. But I needed to consider more practical solutions. It is amazing what the mind can remember when it is pressed. I recalled the fact that I had once taken a picture of my passport and that the image was on my computer. I thought through all of my documents: contracts, hotel reservations, car rental agreements, and return airplane tickets.

Phase 3: What would I do if I couldn’t get into Canada? – Getting into the country was not guaranteed.  Therefore I needed to think through what I would do to best serve the customer in light of this situation.  I considered how I might deliver the speech via video Skype. Given that it was a Personality Poker session, I thought through ways of getting decks across the border.  I even thought through a list of innovation speakers I know in Canada, which admittedly, is not a very long list.

After I went through all of this in my mind, I finally arrived at the border crossing.

I tell this (very embarrassing) story to make a point.

Your ability to solve problems is your key to success. The bigger the “game” you are playing, the bigger your problems will be. You cannot be stuck in “phase 1” and be paralyzed by the situation.  Finding productive solutions is critical.

The same is true for organizations.

Some problems are obvious, like self-inflicted ones, pervasive quality issues, or those evident from an eroding market share.

But sometimes the most important challenges are in our blind-spots. These represent the biggest opportunities:

• Strategic opportunities for developing new products, services, or business models
• Marketing opportunities that would grow market share
• Process improvement opportunities that would create time for innovation
• “Cultural” issues that prevent innovation (e.g., not-invented-here syndrome, poor collaboration, etc)

Innovation is nothing more than identifying, prioritizing, solving and implementing your most important challenges in the most efficient way.

Mastering this one single skill will catapult your organization to higher levels. There are many articles on this blog discussing problem solving and challenge-driven innovation. And more articles will be written in the future.

You may be wondering how my personal story ends.

Fortunately I was able to get into Canada. It did not take too long and they were very friendly. They asked for most of the documents I had already catalogued in my mind.

Interestingly, I was told that if I were a Canadian trying to get into the US, it would be a lot more difficult and I would probably not have been allowed in.

The morning after my speech, I wanted to make sure I did not get stuck at the US border crossing, so I left my hotel 5 hours before my flight. Given it is a 45 minute trip, I figured that should give me enough time to deal with any kind of interrogation.

I get to the border crossing. The guard looks at my driver’s license. Asks me the city I was born in and lets me through. I got to the airport with almost 4.5 hours to spare.

My days of being a fire fighting arsonist are over. It is too much work and too much stress. I would rather focus on more productive challenges!

Adult Games vs Kid Games

In my blog post, “How Can Goals Enhance Creativity” I said…

“…As long as everyone in the organization believes they are playing a game which is designed to get them energized today, and it is not specifically about hitting the target, I can assure you that people will be more motivated.”

Games can be a useful tool for enhancing creativity.  They make work more fun, they reduce stress, and they get people in action.

HOWEVER…

Not all games are created equally.  There are adult games and kid games.

With adult games, there tend to be rigid rules, the games have an ending, and there are winners and losers.

Think about nearly every game we play: Monopoly, poker, or basketball.

They typically have a complex set of rules that all of the players need to adhere to.  If you break the rules you “go to jail,” are disqualified, or get penalized.

Adult games end.  The game is over when all of the other players are out of money, when the “clock” says there is not more time, or when everyone has had their turn.

And nearly every adult game has a winner and one or more losers.  They are competitions.

Contrast this with kid games.

Kids play games with very loose rules, the game continues until they say it ends, and there is no concept of winner/loser.

If you watch kids play.  They tend to have very few rules in their games.  And if there are rules, they make them up as they go along. They improvise. Even universal rules don’t apply to kids.  They can don a cape and fly through the air, defying the laws of gravity.

Rarely is a stopwatch involved when kids play.  They play the game until they get tired of playing that game.  And then they invent a new game.  The only clocks involved with kid games are the watches on the wrists of their parents.  The adults end the game when it’s dinner time or bedtime.

And there are no winners or losers.  They don’t even have that concept. Yes, they might have battles with imaginary swords or super powers.  And there are victims who get hurt or die in the heat of battle.  But they come back reinvented as a new character.  The play does not end at death.

Kids play for the sake of play and no other reason.

Adult games can limit creativity. The rules, deadlines, and pressure prevent the flow of new ideas.  They create stress.

If you want to enhance creativity, passion, and productivity, I encourage you to play kid games. These timeless, unbounded, and rule-free games can create an environment of free-flowing-thinking.  As mentioned in previous blog entries, studies show that 98% of 5 year olds test as highly creative, yet only 2% of adults do. We don’t lose our creativity; we learn habits which stop it from emerging.

I contend that the types of games we play reflects our level of creativity.  When people are most creative, they play kid games.  When they are least creative, they play adult games.

Maybe it is time to recapture our creative youth and start playing more kid games.

In future blog entries, I will discuss HOW kid games can be used to enhance creativity, productivity, and success.

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