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, 20 September 2005
Issue 66

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.

EXPERIMENTATION

When talking about corporate creativity and innovation, we tend to talk about a lot of structured things like idea management, brainstorming, mind-mapping, ideas campaigns and the like. As a result, it is easy to forget one of the most important creativity techniques: experimentation.

Certainly, pharmaceutical companies, engineering firms and other high technology organisations innovate through experimentation in their research and development laboratories. But how many firms use experimentation in their human resources, marketing or sales departments? Not many.

That's a shame, because experimentation is a wonderful means of playing with ideas and innovating. “Wait a minute, Jeffrey,” you are probably thinking to yourself, “a chemist can experiment by mixing chemicals together and analysing the results. How can a human resources professional experiment? Genetic engineering of the staff?”

In fact there are a number of possibilities. The human resources (HR) manager can try out ideas on small groups of staff – such as populations of individual departments or offices. For example, if the HR manager wants to test the effects of flexitime (allowing staff to be flexible about what hours they work provided they work a minimum number of hours per week), she can have several different departments try out different forms of flexitime. One department might use a rigid software tool to time everyone's schedule to the minute, another might be given freedom to work when and how they please provided certain targets are met. Another department may have only a small amount of flexibility. And another may have significantly more flexibility. After a couple of weeks, the HR manager can analyse the results by talking to the employees, their division managers and attempting to measure productivity, work satisfaction and other factors. She can then tweak each group's flexitime structure, re-experiment and re-analyse the results over time.

In addition, creating models, building prototypes and drawing concepts on paper can all be effective means of experimentation. Operational people can often play with ideas by cutting out bits of paper to represent people, equipment, divisions, customers, actions and so on. By moving the paper around to represent different work flow possibilities, it is possible to experiment with ideas surprisingly effectively. If, like me, you think three dimensionally rather than two dimensionally, use children's building blocks or Lego building bricks to build models.

Sales and marketing people can experiment through role play, using actual customers, other employees or even acting students from the local university, to act as the customer while the sales or marketing people experiment with new ideas.

The important thing to bear in mind when experimenting is to push ideas as far as you can. If an idea seems to work in experimentation, don't stop. Push the idea further. (see “Don't settle for first” in 5 April 2005 issue of Report 103:
http://www.jpb.com/report103/archive.php?issue_no=20050405)

Finally: don't be afraid to try out radical ideas based on hunches. After all, that is where the best ideas often originate.

TOO MANY EVALUATORS SPOIL THE IDEA

You've heard the saying: “too many chefs spoil the pot”. Today, I propose my own saying: “too many evaluators spoil the idea.”

When I talk to larger organisations (2000+ people) that are developing innovation processes, a lot of them set up very rigid multiple evaluation procedures for implementing an idea. Typically, if an idea is identified as having potential, it goes through a preliminary evaluation. Provided the evaluation is successful, it goes through a more rigid evaluation and a then a final evaluation. Ideas – together with a critique - which do not make it through an evaluation, are often sent back to the person responsible for the idea. She can then improve the idea and resubmit it for re-evaluation.

Such a structure is fine if you are limiting your innovation to incremental innovation; but deadly for radical innovation. That's because evaluation is largely about risk control. Once you get too many people looking for potential risk in a creative idea, you can be sure they will find a lot of risk – too much risk to their minds. Thus the most creative ideas are likely to be sent back with comments like: “try to make this fit better with our current product line”; “such big changes in our operations are likely to cause disruption, please scale back your ideas to fit better with our current methods”; “that does not fit in with out business model.”

Rarely does an idea receive a critique such as: “that's a crazy idea, but we believe you can make it even crazier. Go for it!”; “that idea is so radical it will redefine the market. But let's see if we can push it even further. After all, there's no point in being radical unless you are going to push your ideas to the limit”; “Albert Einstein once said 'If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.' Your idea is not absurd enough yet. Push it further.”

Of course large companies need to be careful about risk. After all, if an idea could “make or break” your company, you do have to bear in mind the “break” potential.

On the other hand, one major reason why small companies tend to be more innovative than large companies is because the latter often require that ideas undergo multiple evaluations prior to implementation. In small companies, there is usually a single decision maker who can readily say “let's do it” to an idea.

This is not to say that large companies should do away with their structured evaluation process. In the case of an idea that will not bring about major innovation, evaluations are useful for determining whether or not that idea is likely to succeed and where its weaknesses are. This is important.

But, large companies should have a fast track to implementation for radical ideas which division managers believe have the potential to boost income substantially – even if they also believe those same ideas have the potential to cost the company a fortune if they do not work.

When an idea goes to the fast track, a very small team should review the idea, determine how to implement the idea while minimising risk; such as by launching the product concept in one market initially, testing the operational overhaul in a single office, build a prototype and take it to the dealers, etc. Sometimes, however, the idea will be so radical that the best move will be to implement immediately, before your competition has the same idea.

It is important that any risk reduction action should aim to reduce risk in the event of failure rather than to dilute the innovativeness of the idea. One way to do this is provide division managers with discretionary budgets for high risk, innovative projects.

But why stop at adding a fast track to implementation? Why not provide flexible evaluation of ideas? Thus normal ideas would go through a highly structured evaluation process. Radical ideas would take a fast track approach. Hot ideas would undergo a single evaluation and so on.

In other words, taking an innovative approach to evaluation can lead to successful implementation of more innovative ideas. And that's what innovation is all about, isn't it?

OOPS!

I got it wrong again! In the 6 September 2005 issue of report 103, I published part of a letter from Arther VanGundy correcting a previous article on the Notebook Exercise. However, in paraphrasing the letter, I incorrectly wrote that "Michael Michalko usually doesn't provide attributions..." That of course is not true. Dr. VanGundy was pointing out that I had "incorrectly attributed the Notebook Exercise to Michalko, when the technique generally is attributed to John Haefele." My apologies to Dr. VanGundy and Mr. Michalko, both of whose excellent books are worthwhile reads on creativity.

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.

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.

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 of Belgium (a jpb.com company: http://www.jpb.com). 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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