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Business Creativity & Innovation

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Rough Cut Creativity

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I recently recorded a number of short videos that I have grouped together as a playlist entitled Rough Cut Creativity. They are short and recorded on an adhoc basis. They are not meant to be showreels or a tv production, just my thoughts and musings on using Creativity and Innovation in a business context. The playlist will very shortly feature on my speaker website www.derekcheshire.com but for now, you can view them by clicking on the image above. There are 4 titles currently with more to come shortly. If you have any ideas for future topics then please do let me know.

Is It Healthy To Measure Everything?

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Measurement is it healthyI must admit that I do have an aversion to control and authority so when people ask ‘do we have to measure things?’ I like to say no without thinking. Common sense dictates the opposite. We are all familiar with the adage ‘you can only manage what you can measure’ so then one would think that we do need to measure things.

Is it that simple though? There has also been a huge outburst in the media about draconian monitoring of the productivity of warehouse workers.

We now have the ability (but more worryingly the desire) to see how fast our employees walk, how long their toilet breaks are and how many widgets they can carry per hour. This sort of measurement focuses only on actions that the employer has previously determined will help the business. It ignores actions that the employer has forgotten about (productivity failure there for the board) or on problem-solving and thinking.

Ought we to care about how far an employee walks as long as they fulfil their orders? What if they ran around the warehouse and so could take breaks that were double the norm? Are we actually measuring the wrong things? We tend to measure what we think that an employee should be doing in fulfilling a service or customer need. Why not just determine if the customer needs were met? Why go into that much detail.

What should happen if an employee takes the time to stop and think? What if they suggest moving racks of widgets so that employees do not have to walk so far? Potentially an employer is removing the likelihood of the business becoming more productive!

So productivity tools do not measure the usefulness of thinking!

There are many bad things about measuring productivity, enough perhaps to write a book about but here are a couple more to get you thinking.

In order to foster a culture of innovation we need to embrace ambiguity and we often have to perform non-standard activities – we need to take risks. Activities such as prototyping or research are often unplanned with uncertain outcomes. Our productivity measurement machine would not like this. Do you think this is helpful to our innovation efforts? Will most employees conform because it maximises their pay at the end of the month?

Core features of innovation are killed by productivity tools!

Innovation is a team or perhaps company-wide activity, but our monster measurement tools are usually looking at what individual employees are doing. This does not recognise the fact that individuals contribute in different ways or more importantly that when an employee has an off day his or her colleagues can rally round and help. No, we must let poorly performing individuals drown apparently.

Productivity tools are looking at the wrong things! 

These are just a few ideas on why such tools may not help. If you use any tools to help measure productivity or the performance of employees please take the time to think about what you want to achieve, and why. More importantly, think about what these tools could be stopping you from achieving (thinking, team working, less stress, innovation …).

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle also has a ring of truth about these cases. If we try and measure something then the act of measuring will affect the system we are measuring. There is no such thing as non-intrusive measurement. Oh, and I forgot to say that simply introducing such a system introduces an overhead anyway (not good for productivity is it?).

Measuring productivity – is it healthy?

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We now have the ability (but more worryingly the desire) to see how fast our employees walk, how long their toilet breaks are and how many widgets they can carry per hour. This sort of measurement focuses only on actions that the employer has previously determined will help the business, not on actions that the employer has forgotten about (productivity failure there for the board) or on problem-solving and thinking.

What should happen if an employee takes the time to stop and think (and possibly find an improved way of doing things) in a warehouse? What if he or she could suggest moving the racks  of widgets so that they and their colleagues do not have to walk so far in a day? Potentially an employer is removing the likelihood of the business becoming more productive!

So productivity tools do not measure the usefulness of thinking!

There are many bad things about measuring productivity, enough perhaps to write a book about but here are a couple more to get you thinking.

In order to foster a culture of innovation we need to embrace ambiguity and we often have to perform non-standard activities – we need to take risks. Activities such as prototyping or research are often unplanned with uncertain outcomes. Our productivity measurement machine would not like this. Do you think this is helpful to our innovation efforts or will most employees conform because it maximises their pay at the end of the month?

Core features of innovation are killed by productivity tools!

Innovation is a team or perhaps company-wide activity but our monster measurement tools are usually looking at what individual employees are doing. This does not recognise the fact that individuals contribute in different ways or more importantly that when an employee has an off day his or her colleagues can rally round and help. No, we must let poorly performing individuals drown apparently.

Productivity tools are looking at the wrong things! 

These are just a few ideas on why such tools may not help. If you use any tools to help measure productivity or the performance of employees please take the time to think about what you want to achieve, and why. More importantly think about what these tools could be stopping you from achieving (thinking, team working, less stress, innovation …).

Oh, and I forgot to say that simply introducing such a system introduces an overhead anyway (not good for productivity is it?).

Innovation on Flexi Time

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How does an organisation balance the needs of its day to day business operations with a desire or need to innovate?

Often there is no budget for innovation so it can be difficult to make innovation part of everyday life when the bean counters demand that everything is charged to a cost centre.
This is the big dilemma, the trade-off between money and the time that we need to ‘steal’.

Most organisations understand the need for innovation, even if it sometimes means very different things. We all find it hard to run skunk projects as they are usually carried out below the radar (often adhoc in nature and poorly managed) as we generally put the need to get maximum value out of our day to day jobs above the need to create the profitable revenue streams of the future.

Some organisations set up research and development or new product development departments but this has the effect of concentrating innovation effort in one place and isolates such ventures from inputs from throughout the organisation or business.

Successful organisations such as 3M and Pfizer have set up such departments or structures but they also allow employees to spend some of their time on skunk projects. Often this is a percentage of the hours worked by an employee but a percentage of what? There are some immovable and time gobbling activities in most organisations so 10% of not a lot might be less than not a lot!

So how can we sort this? Well how about innovating using flexi time? Many organisations have flexi time to cope with the fact that employees work extra hours and wish to take the time off later, maybe have a 3 day weekend.

What if we used this time in a different way. If you accumulated a few days of flexi and some our colleagues had done the same then maybe you could work on an innovation or skunk project for a few days (using company resources, lab etc).

As a reward for developing potential future revenue streams employees could be rewarded for their loss of vacation by the opportunity to have a stake in these revenue streams (bonuses or shares etc).

This is just one potential way, but could your business innovate on Flexi Time?

Calling all CEOs – here are some ways to encourage Creativity

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Get Implementing

As CEO, if you want people to be creative, you must be prepared to implement their viable ideas. Employees will soon work out that your support of creativity is a sham and will hold back on the creativity. After all, what’s the point in making the effort to develop and promote ideas if they just get ignored? On the other hand, if new ideas are tried out and regularly implemented, employees will be keen to keep the ideas flowing.

What you can do tomorrow

Create frameworks for developing, testing and implementing creative ideas.

Ditch The Metrics

Business leaders rely a huge range of metrics to work out how well their businesses are doing. This often includes attempting to measure creativity which is fairly abstract and hence difficult to measure. The result is that you will measure the wrong stuff just so that you can feed numbers into monthly reports.

How many ideas you have, how many people participate in your ideas programmes etc. are very nice numbers but they are useless. What matters is a) having ideas and b) doing something with them. That is how you will be profitable.

What you can do tomorrow

Stop counting the way you have been. Measure success through the number of new products, improved existing products, better packaging, improved processes, positive PR etc.

Hire Creative People

Most companies claim they want to hire creative thinkers and those with entrepreneurial backgrounds (who are assumed to be rather creative).

Diversity feeds creativity while uniformity leads to conformity. If the CEO wants creative employees, she must ensure the company hires people with diverse backgrounds and creative minds, not people who fit a corporate mould.

Diversity should not simply be limited to experience and education. Women, people from different cultures and even people of different sexual orientations can bring new thinking and creativity to a business.

What you can do tomorrow

Invest in training for your human resources team so that they can understand, hire and encourage creative employees. Train managers to support rather than hinder creative employees. Establish a policy of encouraging diversity in hiring.

Participate in Creativity and Innovation Activities

When running creativity and innovation workshops I have found that the results improve if the CEO is present and actively participates. Both organisers and participants of the event will get a lift and this will also send a powerful message that you, the CEO, actually cares about innovation.

Be careful though, this works only if active participation occurs and attendees feel that here is genuine openness. If attendees feel that the CEO has a hidden agenda then they will always go for the safe option.

What you can do tomorrow

Actively participate in creativity and innovation activities, but be careful about the ones you pick.

So here at least 4 things that you can do tomorrow. What is stopping you?

Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Lean Startup

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The annual Lean Startup conference was held at  the end of 2014. At the conference, Cory Nelson of GE, estimated only 15-20% of all employees across the company understand the core elements of Lean Startup – the need for identifying assumptions and running experiments to test assumptions. Although this is particular to Lean Startup, the concept of testing and prototyping is common to all who work in the field of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. GE has trained thousands of people in this system which they have named the Fast Works program.

The use of early assumption identification and experimentation (also known as playing) is highly variable in its application and highly dependent on the maturity of the organisation and the sophistication and flexibility of the employees.

Many employees who are actually within, or who have come from more traditional R & D backgrounds are used to multiple phases of development with go/no go points along the way and cannot understand (or in some cases tolerate) a more flexible and ambiguous framework.

In the world of Agile development there are 3 levels of employee mastery:

  • Level 1 (doing): Employees need a process to follow and may be new to the discipline or position
  • Level 2 (understanding): Employees are open to the possibility of alternative processes, but still like a defined process to fall back on
  • Level 3 (fluent): Employees are able and willing to adjust and improvise without a specified process or framework

Based on such a framework, a company wishing to adopt any Lean Startup principles would need a stable base of level 3 employees,  supplemented with level 2 and 1 employees.

Going back to the observations of Cory Nelson, does this mean that a large proportion of organisations only have 15-20% of their development employees at Level 2 and Level 3? GE is only one example but it does raise the interesting point about employee development and staff turnover. How does your business improve employee mastery both individually and collectively?

Checklist For Successful Innovation

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Innovation check listHere is my list of the top ten things that you should make sure that you are doing to give your Innovation efforts the best chance of success. Please note that they are not necessarily in order of importance, just the order that they came into my head!

1. Create ideas (lots and lots):

You do need to generate lots of ideas. It is possible to calibrate your idea generation pipeline but the ratio of wacky ideas to those that might be worth looking at is roughly 10:1. The ratio of ideas worth looking at to those actually worth a prototype or further investigation is once again 10:1. So for every idea that you really need you will be looking to get at least 100 wacky ideas! Do not worry if your ideas seem stupid or unrelated to the problem.  Take a time out then when you start to think about the problem again see what new ideas emerge.

2. Give people time and space:

Try out new ways of doing things, allow people to shift their mindset to be more innovative.  Allow risk taking (calculated of course) and learn from mistakes.  Make some physical space available for innovation, and allow time for play that will not get swallowed up by other duties.

3. Revealing your ideas carefully:

Selling an idea is like selling a product to a customer, so your audience (e.g. manager, investor etc.) is your customer.  Don’t just expect them to ‘get’ what you are talking about, try to understand their objectives and their needs. Think about how they will decide if they like your idea. You will also need to pick your time carefully, not just simply jump out of the bath yelling Eureka.

4. Don’t stand still:

It is often said that the only constant is change. Markets and even our business environments change. Requirements alter, and your competitors will be looking to gain advantage also (preferably before you do).  Don’t let current successes be the enemy of future innovation by standing still and thinking how clever you are.

5. Act like an entrepreneur:

Know what you want and stick to your guns about your vision. However, you should be flexible about how that vision might be achieved.

6. Take the portfolio approach:

Canny investors often take a portfolio approach so that they spread their risks.  Consider yourself to have a portfolio of ideas or potential projects, some of which might not make it but if they do, could create substantial rewards for you or your business.  Don’t just consider one or two ideas and don’t be afraid to fail once in a while.

7. Choose the right time:

Choose the right time to reveal your ideas and plans.  If your audience (possibly just your boss) is busy then ask for some time when they are free. You may be keen but rushing in will not give you time to explain everything. When you do have an audience, involve them. Ask for feedback or for any aspects that you might have forgotten or simply not thought of.

8. Know your strengths:

If you want to innovate, develop a list of your strengths and resources.  If you are looking at your business as a whole then don’t forget to include skills and knowledge that people might use in their spare time. You never know, your tea lady could have hidden talents and it is not unknown for a receptionist to be a linchpin as far as organisational knowledge is concerned. This may prevent you from needing external help but if you need help then get it!

9. Provide support:

Don’t start your innovation initiative with a great fanfare then delegate responsibility and forget about it.  Monitor, support, commit and encourage.  Above all you must commit so that those around (and below) know that you mean business. Implement a process to manage risk, investment and of course reward.

10. Be transparent:

There are lots of ideas, but the real challenge is in commercialising them.  Look outside to add value, talk to people, share their knowledge and expertise. Often it is not being secretive that ensures success, but being open so that you can create the right partnerships.

 

Are You Really Thinking Outside The box?

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‘Thinking outside the box’ is a phrase that I hate but sometimes you just have to use the language that others use! My first objection to the actual phrase is that by mentioning a box you have just introduced a box that you now simply cannot ignore. Do you remember the old saying ‘don’t think of a blue elephant’? After reading this you will be hard pushed to forget about it!

My next objection to the concept of a box is that some people decide to implement innovation or at least conduct creative thinking by introducing a separate space (commonly a room or ‘laboratory’) in which to work. So we tell our employees to ‘think outside of the box’, a phrase that we should avoid anyway, and then actually put them inside a box!

Innovation requires changes to behaviour, a rich set of stimuli, freedom to think and experiment and opportunities to interact so we should really be releasing our employees into something much bigger than a box. In fact when we release our employees into this imaginary thinking space they do not wander far from home. It is the idea of freedom that is important, not necessarily the freedom itself.

To aid creative thinking don’t try and create a space with a shape, just let off the brakes and see what happens.