Switching to INTRIGUE

An elephant trap in innovation is judging new ideas too early.

Indeed one of my clients introduced a scheme whereby all the company’s thousands of employees were encouraged to submit ideas, which were then each immediately submitted to some basic screening questions.

Is the idea likely to sell over $x million? Is it a practical, implementable idea? Will it fit with existing systems and capabilities?

The consequence was efficiently to kill off at birth all the most exciting and ground-breaking ideas suggested. For, in the earliest stages, anything radical is highly likely to fall short when subjected to those innocent and sensible-sounding questions. .

A much better approach to ask is this question:

Is the idea INTRIGUING? If we were to devote time and attention to it, using our best creative problem-solving and design skills, might it turn into a real humdinger?

That way, breakthrough ideas get selected, developed and implemented. And it’s the paltry, incremental, time-wasting ideas that get discarded.

Brainstorming for breakthrough

One of the reasons that people feel that brainstorming doesn’t deliver is that, so often, when it comes to selecting which ideas to progress to the problem-solving stage, it’s the ones that seem most doable that get selected, rather than the ones that offer the potential to be breakthroughs.

It’s so natural to vote for ones you can see being implemented. But it’s the ones that have the tingle factor – if I knew how to do that, it would be amazing – these are the ones to go for.

So when I’m facilitating a brainstorming workshop, I spend a good deal of time and effort at the selection stage coaching the participants (and in particular their leader), so that they have the best possible chance of going for ideas that really intrigue them.

That’s how to get breakthroughs from brainstorms.

Peter Drucker and the perils of fact-based management

The problem with “fact-based decision-making”, so popular these days among leaders and business schools, is that it’s bound by its nature to restrict the possibilities for future action.

If what you have is a bagful of incremental innovations in your pipeline, chances are that fact-based may serve you well.

But if you are looking to have some breakthroughs in there, it’s very unlikely that the deepest, widest crunching of the data will be of any real help. Indeed a fact-based approach may well be the most efficient way to kill them off at birth.

Ideas-based management? So much more likely to grow your business.

As the great management guru Peter Drucker put it: “The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash and conflict of divergent opinions and out of serious consideration of competing alternatives. To get the facts first is impossible.”

How long haul business class was transformed

In the 1990s, there was a battle royal between airlines over long-haul business class.

In fact, the competitive situation seemed to me to be like angels being danced on the head of a pin, so slender were the real differences between the various players. One would offer a 45 degree seat recline, another an extra four inches of legroom, while a third would offer bone china crockery.

But in practical terms they were all so close together that customers bought primarily on price. Everyone was losing money.

So British Airways set up a big innovation workshop. People from every part of the airline plus several regular long-haul business class passengers. Some sixty of us in all. I designed and facilitated the workshop for them – in Dubai – and people flew in for it from around the globe.

Mostly on day one we brainstormed possible wishes for improvement. I was astonished by the services that business class passengers might wish for: massage my feet, cool my brow, peel me a grape, champagne intravenously and so on and so on.

Then, towards the end of the day, quite quietly, one of the passenger participants said: “You know, I’d trade all that, every bit of it, for a decent night’s sleep.” And what that meant, to him, was to have a flat bed, just like the folks in First Class.

It was as though the clouds had parted. Here was a genuine difference. After all, the majority of long-haul flights are overnight ones.

But identifying the breakthrough insight was just the beginning. BA then had to work out how to deliver the new benefit without sacrificing half the passenger density. And this they did using their “herringbone” layout.

Altogether it transformed BA’s long-haul business class – Club World as it’s branded – in terms of reputation, share, sales, price-point and profitability.

And for some reason or other, their competitors failed to respond for several years. But that’s another story.

“Gradually, then suddenly”

I came across this phrase from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in Narelle Hanratty’s blog. And it occurs to me that so many discoveries and inventions happen this way - gradually, then suddenly.

A good example is the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in the early 1950s. I wrote about the way that they battled with this fundamental problem (20 December 2009), together with Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins and others, over a long period of time, and how quite suddenly one day the sun rose - and the answer was clear.

“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” wrote Watson, describing the Eureka moment in his exciting book, The Double Helix.

Of course an analogy in animal life is the gestation of foetuses followed by the birth of the young.

Have you noticed examples of this in your innovation work and elsewhere?

Open Innovation and P&G

It has always puzzled me as to why Procter and Gamble has garnered such kudos from embracing Open Innovation.

For me, it has always gone without saying that openness to the outside world is critically important in the search for powerful new collaborations, new insights, new connections and new ideas. Most of the companies that I have worked with were engaged in Open Innovation long before P&G got themselves into that particular boat.

My assumption is that the concept became attached to them as a result of their then CEO, AG Lafley, and his very public pronouncements on the subject some ten years ago. These were aimed, I’ve always supposed, primarily at his own staff around the world, getting them to change radically their way of thinking and being.

For up to that point Procter and Gamble had always been one of the most introverted and secretive organisations imaginable. This had enormous benefits in the areas of strategic and operational focus, but had made breakthrough innovation doubly difficult for them.

The switch has certainly made a big difference for the company – but, in truth, it was not before time.

Individuals or teams for breakthrough creativity?

For years I believed that the best ideas emerged collaboratively. As international managing partner of Synectics for many years, a leading proponent of team creativity, that’s what you’d expect.

I’m not so sure any more.

It’s gradually become clearer to me that real ground-breaking ideas are more often hatched in the brains of highly creative individuals. Think Galileo, Harrison, Einstein, Edison.

Certainly Edison’s biggest breakthrough ideas were conceived in solitude – but he was also superb in organising his innovation project teams to work systematically towards implementation once he’d made that initial imaginative leap.

In my experience team creativity is generally better for more day-to-day creativity, for problem-solving, for the creation of strategy and for getting the team fully on board.

In Memoriam Bill Boggs: Managing Mavericks

All my working life, I’ve worked with and managed mavericks – highly creative individuals who don’t fit well into the corporate mould.

For many years this was in ad agencies. They rarely produce outstanding work if they don’t have some mavericks on staff. And they won’t join unless there are signals that it’s OK to be different. It’s the same for all organisations that are committed to creating breakthrough of one kind or another.

When I joined the innovation consultancy, Synectics, one of my American colleagues, another recent joiner, was Dr Bill Boggs. And it didn’t take long to discover two things.

One was that most of my colleagues did not appreciate Bill’s ways. He was difficult, self-obsessed, driven, irreverent and disruptive. There’s no doubt that he thought that corporate rules, even ones he personally participated in shaping, applied to others, not to Bill.

The other thing that I discovered was that Bill was uniquely brilliant, creating completely new ways of working and producing far, far more business for our firm in the USA than anyone else – in effect bringing the revenue that paid many colleagues’ salaries. And he was on his day the finest facilitator of creativity I ever saw.

All this seemed to make no difference to colleagues’ attitudes to him and many thought he should be fired – and said so frequently.

Somehow or other we held on to him for several years, but in the end he went. What he discovered then was that in reality he needed the relatively secure home that we provided. He was nowhere near so effective without us.

But then we were so much less without him.

Put bluntly, the issue for organisations is: how to recruit and retain the mavericks who can and will drive their future – and have colleagues appreciate their value. It’s not easy, but it may be vitally important.

Strangeness in proportion

There are always problems in recognising breakthrough innovations at the initial idea stage.

Incremental innovations are a doddle to get by comparison. I’m sure there are no hard and fast rules. But generally real breakthrough ideas do make one feel uncomfortable. Sometimes even slightly cross.

The real question to ask is: is it really intriguing? Is there something about it that, although it feels unnerving, has one sensing that it just might change the game, be disruptive, break current rules, create a new way of being?

Sir Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare (wrongly believed by some to have written those amazing plays and poems), wrote: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in proportion.”

Worth bearing in mind when you’re confronted with tomorrow’s equivalent of the internet, the mobile phone, the airplane, the bicycle, the light bulb, the plough, the wheel…

Creativity bubbles at the edge

In a recent issue of the RSA Journal, management guru Charles Handy states unequivocally: “Creativity has always bubbled best at the edge of an organisation.”

This certainly chimes with my own experience. For example, some years ago I was hired by a major multinational to explore the stories behind the breakthrough innovations of all kinds that they had launched in the previous decade. We identified ten of them and built up each case through one-to-one interviews with all the key players who had been involved.

It became obvious quite quickly that, although the business was headquartered in Europe, most of the breakthroughs came in countries far from HQ – in Australia, South Africa, Finland and so on. Far from the eyes and ears of the centre.

I shared this finding with the chairman. Mistake. He and his management team had just decided that innovation needed to be concentrated into “innovation centres” where projects could be resourced and scrutinised continuously.

The consequence has been that those centres have indeed produced a continuous stream of incremental improvements.

But breakthroughs?

There are clearly many upsides to centralisation – two of them being control and cost efficiency. Unfortunately breakthrough innovation doesn’t appear to come in this package.

What’s your experience of local versus central in innovation?

Metaphor and the Art of Naval Warfare

Did you see Peter Weir’s film Master and Commander? It’s a great favourite of mine, as are several of Weir’s movies.

Having left the Galapagos Islands, where the ship’s surgeon, Maturin, and young Midshipman Blakeney have collected armfuls of newly discovered species (and spotted the enemy – the British ship is being pursued in the South Atlantic by a larger, better-armed French frigate). Maturin and Blakeney show the skipper, Jack Aubrey (brilliantly played by Russell Crowe), what appears to be a twig. It is in fact a phasmid, “an insect that disguises itself as a stick in order to confuse its predators,” says young Blakeney.

Intrigued, Aubrey conceives the idea of re-dressing his British warship as a harmless whaler, a “nautical phasmid”, luring the enemy into a trap. “I had no idea that a study of nature could advance the art of naval warfare,” says Aubrey.

Metaphors such as this are often the springboard for breakthrough ideas. As the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset puts it: “The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by men.”

Do you have favourite ones that have led to Eureka moments?

Why are senior managers the enemies of innovation?

Many years ago the founder of Synectics in Europe, Vincent Nolan, wrote an article entitled “Why is marketing the enemy of innovation?” It’s an apparently paradoxical but still very relevant question.

Building on Arun Prabhu’s comment on the “If at first the idea is not absurd…” post (October 28), I’d like to widen it to senior managers more generally. As Arun says, “In my experience, senior leaders who shout loudest about the need for breakthrough innovation are often the biggest barriers.”

There is the centre of the paradox. On the one hand, senior managers push hard for significant innovations, at the same time frequently putting the boot in when interesting, sometimes shocking, possibly breakthrough ideas are floated.

What’s more, the more a breakthrough the new concept seems, the less likely conventional market research is going to give a good reading on its performance in the marketplace.

Of course, there’s no evidence that seniority goes with judgement when it comes to new ideas – especially ones that break the mould in some way or other. In fact, there may well be an inverse correlation. They are exactly the folks who know lots about what has not worked in the past.

What’s needed? Often it’s for senior managers to invest in personally developing new skills in open-mindedness. Some chance?

So if that’s not going to happen, innovators need to develop new processes for getting senior managers into the boat.

What is your experience of all this?

Mavericks – for us or against us?

A qualitative research programme I did for a major multinational demonstrated that the original ideas behind all their significant innovations of the previous decade were attributed to people who might best be described as hero mavericks.

What’s more, although they may well have disliked each other, these mavericks had much in common. They hated bureaucracy, were disruptive, found it very hard to conform to corporate rules, were seen as difficult to work with, and they kept rather odd hours – you could never be sure where they were. They were the ones who were happiest going on long and lonely journeys in search of the Holy Grail.

One other thing: they had all left the company – some deciding for themselves to go, while others had been pushed out.

And it was generally agreed by their former colleagues that their departure was better for all concerned – for the mavericks and for the company.

Of course, this begs the question: if the way we’ve got breakthrough ideas in the past is from mavericks, and the ones we know about have left the building, how sure are we that we’ll get new disruptive ideas in the future?

Most of the large companies that I know could easily accommodate these creatures. After all they are always a small minority. But in order to do so, they need to be recognised, succoured and supported, not just tolerated.

What's your view - nurture or eject?

“If at first the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.”

An innovation manager in a major multinational said to me today that there were two camps in his company: those who think that significant growth will come primarily from breakthrough ideas and those who think that it will come from a continuous stream of incremental ideas.

Of course, in reality it needs to come from both. But how to tell the difference when you’re confronted with a new idea?

One test is quite simple: does the idea seem somewhat (or even completely) absurd? If it does, odds are it’s not an incremental idea. But does that mean it’s a breakthrough? Maybe. Maybe not.

The thing about absurdity that Einstein was identifying in his famous line is that those who are experts in any particular field necessarily build up a series of boundaries and ground rules. By definition breakthrough ideas confront and in some way overturn one or more of those givens. So “experts” are often the very ones who reject breakthrough ideas.

That’s why so many organisations appear to be organised around the rejection of absurdity – and in the process jettison new concepts that might radically change their growth trajectory.

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” asked Harry Warner of Warner Brothers, one of the greatest of the Hollywood movie moguls, in 1927. That was exactly the moment that talkies were to move from mere possibility to overwhelming success. Was he stupid? Not really. He was just an expert confronted with what seemed to him absurd.