Creativity, Braintorming, Outcome Driven, Open, Customer Driven - STOP

I normally carefully plan the articles that I post to my blog and to various websites that I subscribe to but in this case I am driven by Innovation Rage!

Each day I see posts telling me exactly how to be creative, how to manage my innovation projects and who I should collaborate with. Each time the articles seem to become more prescriptive and hence more constraining. Taken too much further this would mean that all of those innovation gurus out there are actually stifling Creativity and Innovation. Remember, Charles Handy once said that guru is just a word that Americans use instead of charlatan!!

As a recent post suggested, Innovation is about tomorrow and not yesterday or even today, so how can we predict in such detail? Surely Innovation is about attitude, behaviours, skills and know how? We take a look at where we might like to go and then apply ourselves to getting there? Maybe we take a circuitous route, maybe we never get there at all but we usually go somewhere.

Is SatNav innovation applied to transport or is it restricting our enjoyment of travel? Would it be more innovative to ban SatNav or maps? Perhaps we should ban private vehicles so that travel becomes a social experience as we are compelled to interact with each other?

I'm sure that the companies that we most think of as innovative such as Google, 3M etc don't have a complete documented system (if there is a manual they won't follow it) they just get on with it. The 'system' such as it is, is embedded in company culture. Those wanting to adopt someone else's Innovation best practice should be careful. Best practice is yesterday's implementation and taken out of context can be dangerous.

So throw away the labels and your best practice manuals and start experimenting (and throw away your SatNav if you dare).

Innovation - is there such a thing as best practice?

On many blogs and websites there is evidence of people asking for examples of best practice in Innovation and many (often poor) responses. The question is are those seeking an answer asking for the impossible and are those providing answers actually talking gibberish?

I have no doubt that the pleas for help are genuine but do those behind them know what they are asking for (and even why)? Those seeking knowledge about Innovation often do so for four main reasons:

• They are stuck and want some (free) help to extract themselves from the mire
• They are thinking about Innovation and believe that if they obtain the correct formula they can 'wing it' without really understanding the process
• They are thinking about Innovation and want to have everything planned before they start
• They are trying to set themselves up as gurus and want to attain 'guru ship' the easy way

Each of these reasons stems from a belief that there is one true way, which is not the case. There are many examples of 'best practice' being borrowed or transferred and working less effectively, or even not all, in its new environment. Environment and context are key here.

Consider the simple example of constructing a model aircraft from a kit made of plastic components, paint and glue. Such a kit made in Europe might be assembled with no problem in Europe or the USA but for reasons of heat or humidity there might be issues in India, that is unless someone with knowledge of the components of the kit and local environmental issues assists.

So when a kindly soul provides you with a copy of the One Minute Innovator or Innovation for Dummies and states 'it worked for me' you need to make sure you pay attention to the following:

• Go elsewhere and obtain information about as many information projects as you can and learn from both successes and failures
• Try and map the information you have onto your copy of Innovation for Dummies to get some sort of plan together
• Thoroughly understand the differences between the examples given and your own environment paying particular attention to both corporate and organisational culture
• Be prepared to learn as you go along and change your plans on the fly

Remember, 'best practice' transferred and applied without contextual knowledge is as much use as a chocolate teapot

Is it good to be lean?

Many people believe that lean 'everything' is good without knowing what it really means. Even the term 'Lean Innovation' has been used. How can a process that can potentially generate hundreds or thousands of new ideas by described as, or made lean? Could it be that we do not know what lean actually is?

I started thinking about 'lean' whilst on holiday. I booked a last minute break to Greece and was expecting the worst, only the sun could make up for the horrendous time I was expecting to have. Nothing could have been further from the truth. We did not have to pick up our tickets at the airport, we had brilliant transfers, we picked up our hire car in the middle of nowhere without signing any paperwork .... Hang on, you said ....Yes I know it sounds odd but it was just symptomatic of the way in which the holiday company, car hire company and all of the rest of the components were plugged together.

On our Greek island it would be impossible for a coach to visit all of the accommodation but we all had hire cars. The solution was to leave a line of hire cars by the side of the road, drop people off and let them drive to their villa and fill in the paperwork later and let the car hire company collect it in the evening. This was heaven compared to waiting for 2 hours in blazing sun in Majorca before picking up a car. Their answer was cold drinks but it still took 2 hours.

We still do not know how the excellent welcome hampers got from the local town to the holiday properties, everything seemed invisible and it worked like a dream. Creative it certainly was, lean it almost certainly was not. Other tour operators are lean - I know which I would prefer.

I also read a good book whilst in Greece, 'Stuart a life backwards' by Alistair Masters. The subject is fascinating but I was intrigued by the style. The book started in the present and then went backwards in time. This gave me an interesting thought. Many things work well forwards and in reverse, a bit like the Greek holiday machine but some things do not (remember your worn bicycle sprocket and chain from childhood). Even if your business process is not meant to work in reverse, try thinking about it in that way and any deficiencies will leap out at you. Fixing this will leave your process well oiled and maybe leaner.

Innovation – why best practice could be bad for you

Even though Quality is no longer the buzzword that it was in the 1980s, its offshoot, ‘Best Practice’ unfortunately lives on. In the private sector this does not have a huge impact because many organisations try and keep their cards close to their chests and often ‘reinvent the wheel’. In academia or public sector organisations, the sharing of Best Practice is widespread. In some cases, the accompanying knowledge is also transferred, but the dangers of doing this are great.

It always seemed to be the case that Quality was ‘inspected in’, i.e. the more you inspected a system, the more quality you got. This was thankfully superseded by modern quality systems where the emphasis was on the process itself. Best Practice seems to have followed a similar fate. It seems to be something that you give to other people and the more you give (or receive) the better it is. Or so the theory goes.

If someone tells you to do something but without telling you why, you would think twice about doing it, particularly if it might hurt. Often, organisations adopt working practices and tools simply because someone else is using them successfully and they have no idea why that course of action should work in a new situation or what the side effects might be.

For instance, I have a classic car which occasionally has a problem with a sticking carburettor float. The remedy is to tap it gently with a small hammer. Someone else might deduce that the way to fix a car which has stopped without explanation is to hit it under the bonnet with a hammer. I have made use of some knowledge that was transferred with the ‘Best Practice’. This is just one of the reasons why knowledge transfer is an important part of any Innovation Programme.

If we look at the world of Literature or Art, then copying what someone else has created is known, rather bluntly, as plagiarism. This is quite rightly frowned upon. Even if the originator gives you permission to duplicate the work, the original ‘soul’ or ‘emotion’ that went into the work is lost.

Next time you adopt Best Practice, think about what else you should be transferring into your organisation to make sure that it works.

Busting the myths surrounding business creativity

Myth #1 Creativity Comes From Creative Types

The fact is, nearly all the research in this field shows that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some creative work. Creativity depends on a number of things: experience, including knowledge and technical skills; talent; an ability to think in new ways; and the capacity to push through uncreative dry spells. Intrinsic motivation -- people who are turned on by their work often work creatively -- is especially critical.

Myth #2 Money Is a Creativity Motivator

Research shows that people put far more value on a work environment where creativity is supported, valued, and recognised. People want the opportunity to deeply engage in their work and make real progress. It is therefore critical for managers to match people to projects not only on the basis of their experience but also in terms of where their interests lie. People are most creative when they care about their work and they are being stretched.

Myth #3 Time Pressure Fuels Creativity

People are least creative when they are racing the clock. Actually, you may find that there are 'after effects' -- when people are working under great pressure, their creativity is likely to go down not only on that day but the following day or two days also. Time pressure stifles creativity because people can't deeply engage with the problem. Creativity requires an incubation period; people need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up.

Myth #4 Fear Forces Breakthroughs

A US research project coded 12,000 diary entries for the degree of fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, joy, and love that people were experiencing on a given day. They found that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety. The entries showed that people are happiest when they come up with a creative idea, but they're more likely to have a breakthrough if they were happy the day before. When people are excited about their work, there's a better chance that they'll make a cognitive association that incubates overnight and shows up as a creative idea the next day. One day's happiness often predicts the next day's creativity!

Myth #5 Competition Beats Collaboration

Creativity takes a hit when people in a work group compete instead of collaborate. The most creative teams are those that have the confidence to share and debate ideas. But when people compete for recognition, they stop sharing information. And that's destructive because nobody in an organisation has all of the information required to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

Myth #6 A Streamlined Organisation Is a Creative Organisation

Creativity suffers greatly during a downsizing or restructuring. But it's often worse than many of us realise. A 6,000-person division of a global electronics company experienced a 25% downsizing, which lasted a painful 18 months. Every single one of the stimuli of creativity in the work environment was significantly reduced. Anticipation of the downsizing was worse than the downsizing itself -- people's fear of the unknown led them to basically disengage from the work. More troubling was the fact that five months after the downsizing, creativity was still significantly reduced.

Taking the 'In' out of Innovation

There have been many articles recently that have focused on putting the 'Lead' back into Leadership or the 'Man' back into Management. But what about Innovation, I thought, what does that need that it doesn't already have? One of my recent articles focused on Slow Innovation, going back to basics and making sure that everyone understands the concept, the parts that they play and the overall objectives.

This is, however, an internal issue for organisations. What is happening in the external environment that is helping or hindering Innovation? One possible problem is 'spin'. Innovation as a word is incredibly fashionable and sexy. To coin a phrase, it is 'in'. Unfortunately to take the 'in' out would take quite a bit of work, the best we can do is warn the participants in this fashion game.

Who is taking part and what is the problem here? First of all we have a message that 'Innovation is good' from governments, with grant funding for the wrong things, targeted at the wrong organisations, with advice from the wrong people! At a slightly lower level, Innovation is seen as a panacea for all ills. Wrong! If you hear this, an out of touch consultant is trying to sell you a 'thinly disguised' change program. Embedded within organisations are people jumping up and down shouting 'eureka' and wanting to set up innovation projects. Some may be well intentioned but they want to play with pet projects in their spare time.

This is making some very sweeping statements but next time someone in you organisation mentions innovation, think about what it is intended to do, and that everyone is speaking the same language. Ensure that Innovation is not just a fashion accessory, but an essential part of being a successful organisation.

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