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The Original Article on ACT...
Introduction to Anti-Conventional Thinking (ACT)
by Jeffrey Baumgartner
Have you tried brainstorming, ideas campaigns, crowdsourcing and other idea
generation activities only to be disappointed by the results? Does it seem most
corporate brainstorm sessions generate little more than pat phrases comprising
the management’s favourite buzz words? Does your idea management system
fill up largely with predictable ideas that at best might result in incremental
innovations? If so, you are not alone.
The truth is, many of these creative exercises – and in spite of what
anyone tells you about innovation, idea generation is a creative activity that
can eventually result in innovation – are poorly conceived. They are designed
to generate as many ideas as possible in the hopes that once the obvious, conventional
solutions to problems are exhausted, more creative, unconventional ideas will
come to the surface. Yet in truth, the only time this happens is when highly
creative people are participating in the brainstorm.
Fortunately, there is a solution that allows normally creative people to behave
more like highly creative people and so generate better ideas. I call this method
Anti-Conventional Thinking (ACT). It requires that you throw away many of the
rules you have learned about brainstorming and idea generation.
What is ACT?
ACT is an approach to creative thinking that involves purposefully rejecting
conventional thinking in order to generate unconventional ideas. It seems obvious,
doesn’t it? Yet it is an approach that people do not consciously follow,
but which highly creative people subconsciously do all the time.
Think about it. Creative ideas can be defined as new, unconventional ideas
that are formed by combining two or more established ideas in new ways. By definition,
then, creative ideas are unconventional. So, it only makes sense to seek them
when looking for ideas. To do this, we need to tweak some of the fundamental
rules of brainstorming. But first, we need to be clear on what it means to be
“anti-conventional”.
How to Be Anti-Conventional
You are doubtless familiar with conventional and unconventional thinking. Conventional
thinking is the usual way of thinking and doing things in your organisation
and in your industry; in your family and your community; in your society and
your culture. Conventional thinking tends to lead to conforming to cultural
norms in behaviour and thinking. Unconventional thinking, of course, is the
exact opposite. It it taking a point of view or behaving in a way that is contrary
to cultural norms.
Being anti-conventional means to be purposefully unconventional. That is to
consider what is the conventional reaction to any situation and explicitly doing
something different. Being anti-conventional can be as simple as saying “Hey
there!” rather than the traditional “good morning” to your
colleagues in the morning.
If most of your colleagues drive to work, you can be anti-conventional by bicycling
or walking to work.
If the usual way to present results to management is in a PowerPoint presentation
of bullet points, you can do your presentation in a slide-show of artistic images
or, better yet, do away with PowerPoint all together.
However, being anti-conventional does not mean being rude, dishonest or unethical.
Sure, you might consider unethical approaches in the idea generation phase,
but only in order to devise ethical approaches that might be inspired by unethical
alternatives. In fact, the best means of getting away with being anti-conventional
is to be especially polite and well mannered.
Although we are mostly concerned about applying anti-conventional thinking
to the idea generation process, purposefully being a little anti-conventional
on a daily basis will help you to think more creatively and find creative solutions
more easily.
With this in mind, let’s look at how ACT can help you be far more creative
at work.
The Cult of the Idea
The first thing we have to learn to accept is that the quantity of ideas
generated in any event is totally irrelevant. Creative problem solving
(CPS) experts like to stress the importance of listing is many suggestions
as possible during the idea generation phase of a brainstorm. And so many
idea jams, crowdsourcing and other idea generaton exercises rate their
success based on the number of ideas generated. But the truth is, 100,000
ideas generated is a waste of time and resources if you only implement
10 of them and they are all incremental improvements. On the other hand,
generating only five great ideas but implementing them all as a single
multi-idea should be considered a screaming success.
But, most corporate idea generation exercises, whether small brainstorming
sessions or massive crowdsourcing extravaganzas are designed to generate lots
and lots of conventional ideas. They typically succeed. Moreover, the classic
brainstorming rule of no criticising of ideas, which is designed to avoid inhibiting
people from suggesting radical ideas can actually result in the inhibition of
radical ideas. We will get back to this in a moment.
Creative Challenges
Most brainstorming events and ideas campaigns are based around a creative challenge
or a problem. However, these challenges are typically ill thought out and, even
when they are carefully considered, fail to inspire creative thinking. Typical
challenges include:
What new features might we add to product X?
How might we cut costs in our logistics system?
Such challenges fail to inspire truly creative thought and invite highly conventional
solutions. Instead, challenges should inspire people to think. Consider these
alternatives:
In what totally new and unexpected ways could we deliver value to our
customers?
How might we revolutionise our logistics system?
It should be clear that such challenges will have the opposite effect to traditional
corporate brainstorms where people suggest lots of conventional ideas, but are
afraid of being mocked for suggesting wild and crazy ideas. With these examples,
you are actually encouraging unconventional ideas and discouraging the conventional.
But why should the challenge remain the same throughout the brainstorm or ideas
campaign? If you look at truly creative people, like artists, at work, you will
see that they continually re-frame their focus. In effect, they create sub-challenges
as they define solutions to their challenges. A sculptor carving away at a piece
of wood to make an abstract female figure will likely be inspired by the wood
as she works, changing the proportions and positioning of the figure. The end
result will still be the female body, but the details may well be different
from her initial vision.
Comic teams preparing scripts for a television show will start with a theme
for the show, but if someone comes up with a brilliant joke, it may result in
taking the characters in a direction unanticipated before the joke was written
into the script.
Likewise, when solving corporate problems, you need to be flexible with the
challenge. Of course you need to maintain the big picture. But why not create
subchallenges as creative participants generate great, unconventional ideas?
After all, incredible ideas can change your outlook on the challenge you are
addressing.
Unconventional Ideas Only, Please
As individuals and in teams, normally creative people tend to squelch outrageous
ideas because they fear those ideas may be stupid. Worse, they fear that may
face ridicule or reprimand for sharing wildly unconventional ideas. This is
doubly true if they are forced to share those ideas with someone higher up the
corporate ladder.
To allay this fear, Alex Osborn (who invented brainstorming) rightfully included
the rule that Hence that you should never criticise ideas in a brainstorm.
But the truth is, unless a brainstorm comprises highly creative people (and
it is important to note that Mr. Osborn ran an advertising agency, so his pioneering
brainstorms surely did include highly creative people), participants will squelch
their own outrageous ideas before sharing them with colleagues This is doubly
true if the creative challenge they are addressing is conventional in nature.
This is because we all have inner censors that review our ideas before taking
action on them. These inner censors are a necessary part of the mind. They analyse
ideas and prevent us from doing things that could get us in trouble. For instance,
if you are urgently in need of money, your inner censor will (I hope), prevent
you from taking action on an idea to mug the rich old lady who lives across
the road and always carries lots of cash in her handbag. Likewise, this censor
also prevents us from saying rude things in polite company. Sadly, it also prevents
many of us from suggesting outrageous ideas at work for fear of real or imagined
consequences.
So, rather than push people to turn off their inner censors, which is unnatural
and difficult, it makes more sense to use those censors to stop conventional
ideas and let unconventional ideas pass. How? Simply start with an unconventional
challenge and then establish a rule that ONLY unconventional ideas are allowed.
Moreover, rather than prohibit criticism, welcome it! But, there should be
three rules:
- Criticism is to focus on conventional ideas and boring ideas.
- Criticism will always be formulated politely and respectfully.
- Whenever an idea is criticised, the person who suggested the idea and anyone
else in the group must be allowed, and indeed encouraged, to defend the idea.
This will serve several purposes that will result in fewer ideas than traditional
brainstorming, but those ideas will be far more creative. Firstly, by rejecting
conventional ideas – which will be obvious to anyone in the company anyway
– you reduce the administrative overload that comes from having to review
lots of mediocre ideas.
Secondly, by allowing people to defend their ideas and their colleagues’
ideas, you push people to think in more depth about their ideas and toimprove
them in ways that make them more viable for your company.
Your Goal Is Not Quantity. It Is Unconventionality
The key thing to bear in mind here is that unlike in brainstorming, your goal
is not to generate as many ideas as possible in hopes that a few will be good
ideas. Your goal is to generate a few unconventional ideas that could make a
big difference.
This is why the process is called “anti-conventional” thinking.
Your aim is to go against the conventional and be unconventional. Be a rebel.
Be different. Be Creative. An insane idea that results in a breakthrough innovation
is worth far more than a dozen small ideas that result in incremental innovation.
ACT Also Works Solo
ACT works just fine when you are trying to generate ideas on your own. Simply
follow the same rules:
- Frame a challenge that pushes you to think unconventionally
- Allow yourself to re-frame the challenge and introduce sub-challenges as
you define the solution in your ideas.
- Reject conventional ideas. They are too easy.
- Criticise your own ideas, but when you do you must then try to defend the
ideas. Sometimes this will result in new and more radical ideas. More often
it will make you rethink the original idea and determine how you could improve
it. These are good things.
In fact, this is essentially what creative people such as artists, musicians,
writers and others do all the time. They purposefully reject conventional solutions
for unconventional solutions. Pablo Picasso did not ask himself how he could
paint better portraits. Rather he asked outrageous questions such as how could
he show three dimensional subjects from multiple viewpoints on a two dimensional
canvas? His solution to this problem was to invent, along with Georges Braque,
cubism: a radically new and extremely creative art movement.
Be Creative at Every Step
To a great extent, ACT requires that you be creative and unconventional at every
step of the idea generation process, from defining challenges that encourage
unconventional thinking to generating unconventional ideas to defending those
ideas and their unconventionality. Again, this is how highly creative people
do it naturally. The better you become at emulating this process the better
you become at being exceptionally creative.
Only Scratched the Surface
This article only scratches the surface of ACT. I plan to develop the concept
over the next few months and will doubtless address it again in Report 103 and
elsewhere. In the meantime, as always, I
value your thoughts on the topic. Please share them with me!
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