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Report 103
Your newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in
business – delivered to your e-mail box on the first and third Tuesday
of every month.
Tuesday, 6 September 2005
Issue 65
Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your fortnightly 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.
MIXING AND MATCHING GROUPS FOR CREATIVITY
Any innovation expert will agree that the key to building creative teams or
groups is to populate them with a variety of people of different backgrounds
and expertises. Let's call such groups multidisciplinary teams. Carlos Ghosn
- who recently turned Nissan around from being a boring car manufacturer losing
billions of dollars a year into a highly profitable car company with a handful
of exciting new cars and multibillion dollar profits - provides a good example.
He attributes a substantial part of his success to establishing multi-functional
teams to handle projects.
For example, if you are looking for new ideas for improving your sales department's
performance, the worst team you could build to find creative solutions would
be a team comprised of sales staff. They almost certainly all have similar backgrounds,
they work together every day, often eat lunch together and frequently go for
a drink after work together. They are used to each other and each others' ideas.
As clever as they certainly are, they alone are unlikely to come up with radically
creative new sales ideas.
On the other hand, a team comprising people from sales, marketing, operations,
research and development, accounting, human resources and logistics would dream
up substantially more creative ideas; including ideas that the sales people
would never think up on their own. That's because a variety of people with a
variety of backgrounds will have a wider range of knowledge combined with a
variety of problem solving approaches. Moreover, team members who do not come
from sales will also have the advantage of not being constrained by established
corporate ways of thinking about sales.
While the notion of filling creative teams with a variety of different kinds
of people is clear cut, actually filling those teams with a variety of different
kinds of people is often a challenge.
Keeping with our example, if the senior sales manager wants to come up with
creative ideas for improving sales, the only people she has the authority to
assign tasks to will often be the sales people. If she starts trying to pull
people from other departments to participate in her creative team, there is
a good chance other departments will cry foul.
Even if the sales manager is in a position to borrow people from other departments,
there is a good chance she does not know many people outside of sales, making
it difficult for her to put together a varied team of problem solvers.
Clearly, in order to facilitate multidisciplinary teams, top management needs
to permit and encourage managers to borrow people from various departments for
project teams, brainstorming and advisory boards. One approach might be to create
a market for staff sharing. If department A borrows someone from Department
B for two days, Department B would then have the right to borrow someone from
Department A for two days.
In addition, a means of selecting team members from other departments should
be established. A staff directory would be a good start, but staff directories
are not usually so good at indicating people's creativity levels. Of course
the sales manager could simply ask the HR manager to provide someone creative
for a project team. But, the HR manager might be tempted to lend the sales manager
her least productive staff member in order to minimise disruption to her department.
Humour can be a great indicator of creativity. Most genuinely funny people
are also creative. Indeed, I would argue that creativity is essential to humour
(humour and creativity is a topic I've covered in Report 103 in the past. See
the archives at http://www.jpb.com/report103/archives.php
for articles). Selecting a couple of clowns from other departments, therefore,
can be a good way for the sales manager to bring new creative thinkers into
her project team.
Alternatively, you could select people from your company directory at random.
If your IT staff have a little spare time, you can have them write a programme
to randomly select staff member from the LDAP
server (a directory of users found in most corporate networks). This would
be a relatively simple tool to facilitate populating creative teams with a random
selection of people from different backgrounds and expertises.
If you are running a workshop and want to break the big group into smaller
project teams, it is always best to randomise the teams. If you ask people to
form teams, they will inevitably select people they know or the people sitting
nearest them in the workshop. Counting off (ie. Counting 1 – 2 –
3 – 1 – 2 ... and putting the 1's in one team, the 2's in another
team, etc), randomly appointing people to teams or having people select teams
from a hat (ie. Fill a hat with one slip of paper for each participant. Each
paper has a team name on it. People select a paper from the hat in order to
determine their team) are all good ways to ensure teams have varied populations.
There are in fact many methods to ensure teams have a variety of people in
them. The method is not so important as the result. Thus if your company does
not have a mechanism for facilitating cross functional teams, you need to make
such a mechanism. And if you do not encourage cross functional teams, you need
to start encouraging them as soon as you finish reading this newsletter!
TOTAL OPEN COLLABORATION IN IDEA MANAGEMENT
In view of the fact that every innovation expert agrees on the importance of
multi-functional teams, it surprises me that most suggestion schemes and idea
management processes do not facilitate true open collaboration across the organisation.
In general, there seem to be three approaches to collaboration in suggestion
schemes...
1) The Zero Collaboration Approach. In many suggestion schemes, when a person
has an idea, she submits it to a suggestion box (which may be an e-mail address
or an on-line idea management tool). That idea is sent to evaluation. The evaluators
make suggestions and send the idea back to the submitter for development and
resubmission. The evaluation team is usually comprised of experts on the topic
(ie. A group of similar minded people working in the same or closely associated
divisions). This is not very multidisciplinary.
2) Limited Collaboration Approach. Some suggestion schemes allow a person with
an idea to bring together colleagues to work on the idea. Once they are finished,
the idea is routed to an evaluation team as described above. This system is
fine. But most people will obviously select collaborators they know from their
divisions at work, rather than select people from a different divisions and
locations. As a result, the collaboration team is not particularly multidisciplinary.
3) Total Cross-Enterprise Collaboration Approach: You will probably not be
surprised to learn that Jenni idea management (our idea management virtual software:
http://www.jpb.com/jenni/)
allows total, open collaboration across the enterprise. The process is simple
and was inspired by web based discussion forums where people from around the
world share ideas, help each other solve problems and generally network.
When someone submits an idea to Jenni idea management, everyone participating
in the ideas campaign (Jenni is a campaign based idea management tool, see http://www.jpb.com/jenni/campaigns.php
for more information on campaign based idea management) can read the idea and
collaborate on it. As a result, people who do not know each, people who might
live in different countries and work in completely different divisions can readily
collaborate on an idea.
In our minds, anything less than total open collaboration does not truly take
advantage of information technology to maximise the creative potential of your
workforce.
Jenni also provides a Genius Directory to facilitate innovation networking.
If someone collaborates on your idea, or if someone submits interesting ideas,
you can look her up in the genius directory in order to learn more about her
and to contact her. As a result, the Genius directory is an ideal tool for finding
creative thinkers across your organisation and bringing them into your teams.
For more information about Jenni, look at http://www.jpb.com/jenni
or contact
me or one of our sales reps for a demo and discussion of how Jenni can maximise
the innovation potential of your organisation.
EVERYONE WANTS TO WORK FOR A MORE INNOVATIVE COMPANY
Petra (a friend) works in a small family owned chain of shops with about a
half dozen other employees. Petra does not like her job or her employers very
much. The employers seem to operate in an environment of mistrust. They mistrust
their staff, whom they believe are trying to avoid work. They mistrust their
customers even more, apparently assuming that every customer is a shoplifter
until proven otherwise. However, the shop is a very good supplier in a niche
market, so business grows slowly in spite of the bad management.
When Petra and her colleagues go to lunch together or go out after work, they
inevitably gripe about work. I accidentally sat through such a gripefest a while
back and vowed never again to allow myself to get trapped in a round of complaining
like that.
Nevertheless, it interested me that their gripes were really ideas in disguise.
“If we put those expensive products in a locked display case, no one could
take them.” “If Mr. X assumed customers brought sales rather than
that they were thieves, the environment in the shop would be more positive for
us and the customers.” “Ms. X nags me that I am too slow with inventory
checking, but if I do not check carefully, prices are not the same in all our
shops. Customers notice this and they complain to me! Why can't Ms. X trust
me just a little?” And so on.
Even though Petra and her colleagues do not like their work; even though they
would leave in an instant if offered an even slightly better job; even though
they complain constantly, they all really want their chain of shops to be more
innovative. They would happily make the extra effort to implement their ideas
in order to prove that these ideas would make the shop a better place to work
and a better place to buy from – if only their employers would let them.
This situation is not unique. I have seen it in many companies and bureaucracies
where people are dissatisfied and looking for new jobs. Inevitably, the one
thing that would keep them not only working in their current jobs, but working
harder, would be the opportunity to share their ideas with management and to
implement those ideas in order to prove they would help the organisation function
better – and be a better place in which to work.
Now if people are willing to go so far to help firms, which they do not like,
to innovate; imagine how far people would be willing to go for firms which they
do like.
Or to put the matter in another way: your employees desperately want to innovate.
What opportunities and tools are you giving them to do so?
CORRECTION
Arthur VanGundy kindly corrected me on the origin of the Notebook Exercise
which I wrote about in last week's issue of Report 103 (http://www.jpb.com/report103/archive.php?issue_no=20050816).
To quote...
“The notebook exercise as a formal technique generally is attributed
to John Haefele who created it while working at Proctor & Gamble in the
1960s and he published a book on it. (I wrote about it in my Techniques of Structured
Problem Solving, 1981; 1988. )
He called it “the Collective Notebook Method” and the original had
participants recording one idea per day for a month and then a coordinator summarized
the results. Alan Pearson in 1978 or 79 created a variation in which participants
exchanged notebooks after two weeks to create some cross-fertilization which
makes it similar to the Delphi method. I later wrote how it is like a brainwriting
method which is what is described in your report, except people are not face
to face. Of course, we now can do such things via email and also build in a
provision to slow it down, which was Haefele's original intention (i.e., provide
incubation over time).”
Dr. VanGundy, by the way, is a well known expert on creativity and particularly
idea generation techniques. He has a number of books to his name. A mini-bio
with links to some of his books is at http://www.gocreate.com/Brainline/brains/bios/vangundya.htm.
You can also search Amazon for his books.
NEW NEWSLETTER: REPORT 105
In view of the success of Report 103, we are trying out a new concept. Report
105 is an e-newsletter of ideas about the future, technology, society, government,
philosophy and more. Report 105 is a look into the future together with a collection
of ideas ripe for exploiting. I hope it will be often provocative, sometimes
controversial and regularly inspirational. In short, Report 105 is for anyone
who likes ideas.
Report 105 will also be edited and largely written by me and the second issue
will be out next Tuesday: 13 September 2005.
Subscribe by visiting http://www.jpb.com/report105/.
THE IMAGINATION CLUB
If you like being creative as much as reading about creativity, please join
the Innovation Club. The Innovation Club is an informal e-mail based forum for
stretching your imagination, sharing ideas and playing with ideas. Over the
past few weeks that the imagination club has been active, we have had a variety
of interesting creative challenges – and some even more interesting ideas
developed.
This morning, Maulik Dave launched a most intriguing challenge:
“Your challenge is to think about the 'Next Great Invention' which will
change our or next generation's lifestyle entirely. Your imagination
should not be influenced by what news you have heard about new researches. It
should be completely your brain's product.
Think beyond....”
I am intrigued to read what community members will dream up.
Interested? You can find more information at http://www.jpb.com/imagination/about.php.
Happy thinking!
Jeffrey Baumgartner
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Report 103 is a complimentary weekly electronic newsletter from Bwiti bvba
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Archives and subscription information can be found at http://www.jpb.com/report103/
Report 103 is edited by Jeffrey Baumgartner and is published on the first and
third Tuesday of every month.
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