17 January 2012 | Jamie Napper
Generating innovative ideas and approaches isn’t always easy. Jamie Napper offers tips to help you and
your teams think differently.
About a year ago, I was sat with sourcing colleagues and suppliers working out how we could be more innovative in our interactions. We had all been looking forward to it and started off in high spirits, but ultimately the session didn’t deliver: it lacked, for want of a better phrase, va-va-voom. We had all the theory, but when it came to killer ideas none seemed to be forthcoming. Was it that we weren’t doing it right or maybe we had killer ideas, but didn’t realise it?
On running a ‘lessons learned’ session, I realised it was similar to
the journey I went on to embed supplier relationship management (SRM). In other words, you can have all the theory in the world, but unless you know how to apply it in real life, it’s just words. I also started to realise that despite the theory and enthusiasm, I’d lost the ability to – and I use this well-worn phrase to make a point – ‘think outside the box’. The more I tried to think differently, the harder it got, especially where I was trying to be the catalyst for creativity.
Around the same time, I had been thinking about what academic step
to take next when I received an email from the Open University about a degree course in design and innovation for the 21st century. The first module promised to “change your way of seeing and solving complex problems forever”. After speaking to a few of the tutors, the course seemed to strike a good balance between being fun and creative for personal enjoyment along with a distinct business edge. There was a focus on problem definition, design thinking and the re-awakening of the creative being hiding inside.
Innovation, in whatever form, has its own processes and approaches that range from the radical, often gained though crowd-sourced innovation, through to the more incremental gained through business process re-engineering. All require participants to exercise the ability to be creative and think about things in a different way because if they can’t do this, they are always going to be restricted both in terms of their contributions and the acceptance of others’ ideas.
From my experience and learning to date,
I’ve seen the following key elements promote creative thinking:
1. Be childlike in your approach
As adults, especially in business where competition among peers is rife, we have developed a fear of the judgement of others and we are embarrassed about failure or ridicule. This can stifle creativity and cause us to be conservative in our thinking.
Children, on the other hand, are less restricted. Take drawing a simple picture for example. Bob McKim, a creativity researcher in the 1960s and 70s, introduced an exercise in his lectures where he would get people to draw the person next to them in 30 seconds. The usual result was a lot of embarrassed laughter, apologies, half attempts and even refusals to take part. This demonstrated the pressure we place on ourselves, especially
in group environments, and the fear of being judged on our output.
McKim observed that if you asked a group
of children to do the same thing they would
do so happily and in most cases be pleased
with the outcome, however unrealistic the
pictures were.
As we grow older, we become sensitive to others and the barriers come up. Creativity doesn’t seem to be something we learn, it’s something we forget as we get older. To get
over this, we need to ensure there are clear rules when running a creative session to promote open and honest contributions. I therefore suggest this one rule: no idea is a bad idea.
2. No idea is a bad idea
There was a great scene in the recent series of The Apprentice when Tom Pellereau said “traffic lights” during a brainstorming session for a new smart phone app. The rest of the team looked at him and he shrugged and said: “Okay, not great, scrub it” and they moved on.
There is a need to triage, assess and rank ideas in terms of priority, especially where there are time constraints, but the way the scene was edited made it look as if all the team thought it was a stupid idea. So, let’s take a look at the quickly dismissed traffic light app idea. I took a couple of minutes and came up with the following possible applications for it on a phone:
- A medical device by which you could read your heart rate and get a red, amber, or green readout based on age, and so on. (Trust me – smart phones can do this).
- A link to your local traffic news to pop up warnings based on your GPS location in the same way the traffic news does on your radio.
- A link to a number of different travel apps to show where congestion may be on the road, railway or tube.
- A game where you have to follow the traffic light sequence, rather like Simon Says.
- A reaction game where you have to tap whichever light flashes first (and then in sequence, like the idea above).
- A link to your chosen review sites that gives
you a red, amber or green rating for hotels, pubs, and so on.
I’m sure there are many more. The point is no idea is a bad idea – there just may be a better one worth exploring more at this point in time. All ideas should be captured and explored (time permitting) because you never know when it may become the most relevant idea.
3. Understand the problem
You have to understand what you’re trying to fix. Be clear on what the objective is even though you are trying to think divergently at first. While you may be trying to think like a child, there does need to be an ‘adult’ in the room facilitating and controlling the output of the session.
The problem statement can be purposefully open, such as: “How do we as a company save money?” to the more focused: “How can we reduce the cost of electricity in each office by
5 per cent in six months?”. Either way, some control needs to be exercised to ensure
thoughts converge back to the problem statement during the creative session.
4. Diversity is king
Getting people who know a process inside out to change it is difficult. Make sure you have someone in the room who knows nothing about the process or service you are discussing. These people will ask “why?” and “how?” much more often and get down to the basics far quicker than those close to the subject matter.
5. More than words
I prefer visual and kinesthetic methods of learning, I like to use diagrams and images and be hands on. Understanding that people operate in different ways is important in drawing the best out of them. Flip charts are pretty restricted mediums for creative play and
thought, so I regularly use things like magazines for people to flick through and cut up to find images that help them move their thought
process along, stickle bricks for people to play with, lots of paper, pens, tape, sticky notes and junk items for modelling.
6. Safe environment
We need to create a ‘safe’ place for innovation to occur and where failure is okay to allay nerves about being creative. This can be tricky because you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but a neutral space where people feel relaxed is important.
Depending on the group of people and mix of internal staff/suppliers, I’ve found taking the group out of the office works well and introducing moderate levels of alcohol or chocolate can help. Our local pub is often host to a team of people covering its tables with flip chart paper and drawing stuff in various colours and ways.
The bottom line is people need to be happy that any mistakes they may make are not going to be judged in any way.
7. Be aware of your subconscious
I’ve alluded to the possibility we have had creativity trained out of us and here’s another example of how we are conditioned to think in certain ways.
Here’s a quick exercise: in 30 seconds draw or visualise a hair dryer. Do it before you read on. Now draw (or visualise) something with which you can dry your hair. Most people think of the default answer, which is the traditional gun-shaped hair dryer, but a hair dryer could be a towel, the sun, the wind, a fan, or a number of other weird and wonderful things. The best answers I’ve had are drawings of Alex Ferguson (for his half time/post- match team talks) and a dressing gown for a hare.
There’s an argument that this issue is about terminology, not the inability to think differently or creatively. However the question remains the same we just shortcut to an answer and assign our view.
For those who thought of the standard hairdryer, you weren’t wrong – the exercise was to prove that we become conditioned quite quickly and this restricts the ability to be more creative.
A good example I experienced of this was
when reviewing a supplier’s KPI measures. They had been achieving an average of 1.5 per cent failure rate against a target of 6 per cent. The immediate reaction of the business area was to reduce the target to 1.5 per cent to match the ongoing result.
I challenged this logic because we didn’t know why the score was so positive and we didn’t know what the impact would be if we reduced the measure. Nor did we know if we actually needed
a 1.5 per cent service level – was 6 per cent still okay? If so, could we not relax the effort in this
area to the benefit of another more important KPI? All things that needed a quick step outside the norm to consider.
8. Commit to the process
Finally, it’s more than just the thinking that’s important. The full creative process includes exploring the concepts, developing proposals, evaluating them further then putting them into practice. After all, an innovation cannot exist unless it has been adopted. Make sure there is firm commitment to take things forward after the session. Take notes and clarify all areas of thought. After the session, the hard work really begins.
There is a whole lot of effort involved in the creative process to get to the point where change can happen. A great analogy of good innovation is like seeing an explosion backwards in slow motion – there’s a lot of dust and debris for 95 per cent of the time, as you explore and propose and evaluate, then bang – the idea takes shape.
☛ Jamie Napper is head of strategic supplier relationship management at Best Buy Europe/Carphone Warehouse.
