Improv in Innovation

Angela Dove of Cass Business School proposes IMPROVISATION as an addition to my short list of “Words, words, words”.

I know that, well handled, it can be catalytic in powering up the creative process, enabling folk to escape from those unhelpful impulses – correct/incorrect, aggressive/defensive, rule-bound, power-driven, anxious, fearful, hierarchical, information-driven, sacred-cow-filled, risk-averse – and generate fresh, new thinking, feelings, connections and ideas.

Over the years I’ve used improv in many different contexts – loosening groups up, on the way to developing breakthrough concepts, problem-solving barriers, in NPD and in strategy development, and so on. Usually it creates a kind of stepping stone towards new solutions.

There are just so many different forms that improv can take. For example, I’ve had groups writing poems or jingles (sometimes a word at a time, working in a circle). I’ve had them creating and acting out a scene from a soap (Neighbours or Eastenders or Coronation Street or whatever), or collaboratively creating and presenting a human sculpture. Or making collages from piles of rubbish.

The important thing is to help people to be truly “in the moment” when they do it, spontaneously responding both to their own inner feelings and thoughts, and to others.

This kind of approach is habitually used these days in theatre, in comedy, dance and music. But I find it extraordinarily powerful when it’s used well with scientists and engineers, with lawyers, bankers and accountants.

What’s your experience with improv?

Mind Without Fear

I shared this wonderful poem by the Indian poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore, with participants in my Creative Leadership masterclass in September:

WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

I wonder what it says to you?

By the way, the final masterclass of the series – “Turning Ideas into Action” – will be at Cass Business School in London on Thursday 11 November. http://bit.ly/9JfYAc

Searching for flaws

At last week’s Brand Renovation Masterclass at Cass Business School, our guest speaker David Walker talked about the need to use testing and research not as stop/go indicators, but rather as springboards to improving the innovation or renovation.

It put me in mind of the great philosopher of science, Karl Popper. Popper totally rejected the commonly-held notion of scientific method – that research leads to knowledge and that knowledge leads to ideas or hypotheses.

Popper held that the only reason for conducting research is because you have an idea in the first place (however sketchy it is) – and the purpose of research is to test the idea rigorously, so that it can be improved. In short, in research we are not looking for confirmation of the concept, rather trying to identify flaws, so that they can be problem-solved.

As he put it: “Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.”

So often, in the commercial world, managements want the warm and comforting feeling from the data that they are backing a winner – and end up going to market with an innovation that does not work in practice in some way or other because there are still issues that need to be addressed.

And in academia, I often seem to read papers that apparently have no idea behind them at all. Often the work is prefaced by a question to be answered, where no one has interrogated the idea behind the question. The result is usually just to add to the bottomless pit of never-to-be-seen-again “knowledge”.

A useful way of thinking about all this is to focus at each stage on the question, “What’s our BEST CURRENT THINKING?”, and go forward from there.

Views?

11/10

At the new Brand Renovation Masterclass at Cass Business School on 7 October http://bit.ly/cNPhQl , I’m being joined by the wonderful Dr David Walker, who leads the successful innovation consultancy, Happen.

We were colleagues for several years, and, thinking about the forthcoming event, it came back to me that David and I together achieved the rather remarkable result of scoring an average of 11.3 recurring out of 10 when we asked for feedback from the group we had just trained together in creativity and innovation at Unilever in the Netherlands.

I’d love to say that this kind of thing happens frequently, but no such luck. The team had clearly managed to escape from the constraints of logical thinking.

Happened to you?

Renovating Skoda

What do you call a Skoda with a sun roof?
A skip.
What do you call a classic Skoda?
A Lada.
How do you double the value of a Skoda?
Fill the tank.
Why do Skodas have heated rear windows?
To keep your hands warm when pushing.
What do you call a Skoda in winter?
A freezer.
What do you call a Skoda at the top of the hill?
A miracle.
“Do you have a windscreen wiper for my Skoda?”
"Sounds like a fair swap."
How do you overtake a Skoda?
Run.
What do you call a Skoda with twin exhausts?
A wheelbarrow.
How is a Skoda similar to a baby?
They never go anywhere without a rattle.

These familiar jokes are now totally from that foreign country, the past. In fact, Skoda turned around both the quality of the product, and the reputation of their brand, to become the car manufacturer with the highest level of repeat purchase in Britain.

Join us and learn more at the Brand Renovation Masterclass at Cass Business School on Thursday 7 October http://bit.ly/cNPhQl

Creative Leadership Summit

On Tuesday 17th I’ll be chairing a meeting of prominent leaders at Cass Business School in London aiming to shed light on “Creative Leadership”.

As I wrote recently, it was voted as their top requirement in an IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs worldwide. But what does it really mean? Why is it so important? Are Creative Leaders properly supported and promoted? Is their special ability fully recognised and rewarded? Do recruitment processes make it easy for Creative Leaders to be hired?

I’ve already had valuable feedback by email. But what do YOU think about all this?