Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

Perhaps we have a hernia to thank. 

In 1942, Eric Hoffer attempted to enlist in the armed forces in San Francisco was rejected because of a hernia. A former migratory worker and longshoreman, Hoffer received laudatory notices in 1951 for his book The True Believer.  .

Of his early life, Hoffer has written: “I had no schooling. I was practically blind up to the age of fifteen. When my eyesight came back, I was seized with an enormous hunger for the printed word. I read indiscriminately everything within reach—English and German.”

Occupying a prized position on my desk is his book “The Passionate State of Mind.” It is a  collection of 280 aphorisms – ideas and insights on everything from passion to the art of living.

# 58 is one of my favorites. “Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we don’t want to know.  One often obtains a clue to person’s nature by discovering the reasons for his or her imperviousness to certain impressions.” 

At my Inotivity Seminars, I often ask the question “What don’t you want to know? Or what does your company not want to know?”

Nell Merlino, Founder, President and CEO of Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence, recently talked at BIF5 (Collaborative Innovation Summit) in Providence and talked about some of the barriers women face in growing their business “Some women believe that if they pay attention to numbers, their dreams will die.”

What didn’t they want to know? They didn’t want to know that the effort and motivation they were investing in a dream wasn’t paying off. (Merlino added that the opposite is actually true.)

It is a great question to inspire creativity and deeper thinking.  There are always easier questions to ask.   What do you know? What don’t you know or need to know?  But what don’t you want to know?  Or what are you avoiding or clouding or ignoring may be a strong key to solving your biggest challenge.

Here is an example in a larger organization.  The answer to What don’t we want to know may be “our business model or product” may be obsolete.  (Think the brick and mortar DVD or music store vs. broadband downloads and streaming).  But that very question could be the catalyst to transforming your model or finding new ways to deliver value.  That’s where an innovation initiative is critical. 

So 58 it once in a while.  Check out Hoffer’s The Passionate Mind for more. 

A few years ago I came across an essay by David Mamet called “The Audience: Or, lessons from duck hunting. (Bambi vs. Godzilla, 2007)

It has resonated with me ever since.

“A duck decoy doesn’t need to look like a duck. It needs to look like a duck to a duck.  Wisdom, therefore, lies not in the phenomenological question ‘What does a duck look like?’  But, rather, in the practical ‘What is a duck looking for?

“A wealthy hunter might bespeak a decoy realistic to the nth degree. This decoy might be realistic in every particular of size, form, color, and yet the poor hunter in the next blind down might be attracting all the ducks with his roughed out and unpainted decoy.  Why is that?”

It was a metaphor for the evolving relationship with movie producers and the audience.

But it applies equally as well to marketers.

Typically, a client will say they need a brochure.  We marketers who are consistently in the wooing mode, say “we can do that.” Sure, we can create a wonderfully-crafted decoy.

What we really want to say is “Do you really need a brochure?”  “Who is the audience and what do you want them to feel, think or act?” The good agencies do that.  But most are still in the decoy business.  

The yang problem is that often the audience doesn’t or can’t articulate what they want.  The classic story, probably apocryphal, is from Henry Ford. “If I asked people what they wanted, they would probably say faster, more comfortable carriages.”

So how do we stop creating decoys?  That’s the value of creativity. Don’t start with answer. Start with a question.  How might we get more people to attend our college?  How might we get more people to invest with our bank? Or how can we start building trust with a prospect?

One answer may be a brochure. Or maybe it’s better word of mouth. Or something no one else is doing.

I’m bringing a duck to my next meeting.  How about you?

It all began with a spontaneous comment by host Saul Kaplan on the second day of the BIF5 Collaborative Innovation Summit.  After thanking two of the speakers, he made the observation that there is a strong connection between vulnerability and innovation.

The bloggers and tweeters, all noted the remark. During the next break, I asked Saul what he meant. He told me he was reacting to each innovator’s openness to new and often contradictory ideas.

Melissa Withers, Executive Director of the Business Innovation Factory, echoed the same idea a few days later in an interview with Ted Nesi of the Providence Business News.   “I saw a deep and authentic vulnerability that was inseparable from their strength. In both cases, they showed that innovation requires an openness to the world that most of us are afraid of, whether we realize it or not. It was as though a flashbulb went off in my head, and now I can see things – about my business and about myself – that I couldn’t see before.”

Both observations, reveal another paradox of innovation. Innovators need a healthy degree of both confidence and openness to succeed.  Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company says, “I find that the best leaders demonstrates a capacity for vuja dé.” It is the flip side of déjà vu – experiencing  the familiar in a whole new way.  It is an openness to reevaluating the status quo.

The idea of “openness” isn’t new, but what makes it provocative is that we continually have to watch for our own evolving blind spots.  It is a continual process of rethinking what works and what doesn’t.  I think it is a variation of what Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein call “Schooling the Imagination.”  It is about schooling an “innovation mind-set.” It is being open when staying closed would be easier alternative.

BIF is all about vuja dé.  It is putting ideas under a collective microscope and seeing what new species of ideas we can find.

Since the publication of The Laws of  Simplicity, John Maeda has become the patron saint of the art balancing simplicity and complexity. 

A former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Maeda taught media arts and sciences there for 12 years and served as Associate Director of Research at the MIT Media Lab. Today, he is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, a place world renown for nurturing artists and designers of all stripes.

At BIF5, he was interviewed by co-host Bruce Nussbaum, Professor of Innovation and Design at the Parson’s School For Design. Considering their mutual interests, it was an interesting pas de deux.

The interview was an odd mélange of non sequiturs that got the audience laughing when host Saul Kaplan said, “I hope someone will provide a good translation of what just happened.”

But it’s all part of the art of BIF. Ironically, it made many in the audience want to discover more about both Maeda and Nussbaum.  Each has made an impact on how "innovation" and "design" are framed in current discussions in both the classroom and in corporate America.

If Maeda could design a new curriculum for innovators, he would start with a pencil, paper and sketchpad. These supplies would not be for taking notes or brainstorming ideas. Rather, Maeda would use art as a way to open the mind, stimulate creativity and cultivate truly radical ideas.

“If you think of design as a way of making ideas, I think art is the idea itself. Art thinking is everything that design thinking isn’t,” he says. “If you think of an image, you have the image and then you have everything that sits in the white space. Art is the part that isn’t defined yet and I find that perspective quite exciting.

“So many organizations and companies are downtrodden in this economy -- they are dead inside -- because they have lost the ability to imagine. They need something more vibrant, more emotional, and more connected to being human. When asked to distill down to the basic principles of art thinking, Maeda thinks it starts with reacquainting ourselves with an “almost child-like fascination with the world.”

In many ways, it echoes the core of Matthew Crawford’s excellent book, Shop Class as SoulCraft.  Crawford’s book is about the loss of manual competence and Maeda’s is about disconnecting temporarily from the digital world and reconnecting with “thinking” and expressing ideas in the simplified realm of pencil, paper and thought.

In the past year, Bruce Nussbaum took on a new career --  Professor of Innovation and Design at The New School at the Parsons School For Design.

As BIF’s Christine Flanagan writes, “Nussbaum recently launched the university’s core lecture series “Life in Beta” to show students how design tools, methodologies and approaches can move us forward in today’s environment. His class focuses on the demographic, technological, cultural, economic and political changes that are disrupting our social organizations and personal lives.

“I really want to push students to think widely about the forces shaping their lives,” explains Nussbaum. “Gen Y is perhaps the most dynamic cohort and it’s critically important they learn to harness the tools and methods of 21st century design.”
 

Nussbaum believes that design holds the key to change because of its ability to redesign large-scale social systems: “Design gives people the ability to be one with the consumer culture–to be anthropologists and sociologists and deeply understand the myriad cultures around them. It has a set of tools and methods that can guide us towards a much better way of doing things.”

In the relatively tiny geography of business magazine world, it was the equivalent of a pre-1981 Beatles reunion. Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, co-founders of Fast Company magazine, took the stage together at BIF5 for the first time in many years.

It was easy to see the synergy they brought to an enterprise that became the fastest growing, most successful business magazine in history. Webber talked about his 5-year experience as managing editor and editorial director of the Harvard Business Review.

 He lead the journal’s visual redesign and created the architecture for its editorial performance that continues to this day.

The idea for Fast Company began when Webber spent time in Asia and began to see China and other emerging markets as a big idea. But HBR wasn’t as enthusiastic about Webber’s perspective.

So, he and Taylor worked on a model for a magazine that would push the envelope beyond the clinical to include a social perspective of business. Fortunately, they had the serendipity to enter the market just as the internet began its ascendency.

Bill Taylor has been a strong supporter of BIF since the first conference and has co-hosted the event for the past years. Seeing them together was a glimpse of their complementary strengths. Taylor is adrenaline and Webber is cerebral.  But the joy is seeing them reverse roles.  They are both good listeners.

 Later in the day, Webber gave a 25-minute talk based on his new book “Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business without Losing Yourself.” was published this year to great reviews. Webber said, “Rules of Thumb is in part a memoir: In writing it I drew from more than 30 years of work and life experiences. Some of the rules come from the 1970s when I worked in the Mayor's Office in Portland, Oregon; some come from my time working as the editorial director of the Harvard Business Review; quite a few derive from the experiences I had in launching and editing Fast Company.”

The 52 rules come from real-life lessons learned and recorded on 3”x 5” cards, a technique borrowed from one of the many mentors whose teachings Webber captures in his book.

Here are just two of the 52 rules. 

Rule #5. Change is a math formula. Webber faced the crowd at BIF5 and said, “Change is really a math formula.  Change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change.  C(SQ)>R(C).

(This echoes Pip Coburn’s Change Function “most people will not adopt a new technology until the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived pain of trying to learn something new.”)

“I learned this lesson more than 30 years ago,” adds Webber.  “Since then I have been involved and written about dozens of change efforts.  Usually they involve deeply committed people who believe in their cause, are convinced they’re right, and are prepared to sacrifice their careers, if that’s what it takes to win. Most of the time, they lose and sacrifice their careers.”

Webber says it’s not enough to be convinced you’re right.  The other side is equally convinced it’s right. “On the other hand, if you really want to win, rather than settling for dying for a cause, there are some techniques and tactics that can help change the math in your favor.”

“It’s not enough to be against something that’s bad – you’ve got to be for something that’s better.  This is particularly true if you’re trying to convince the boss or the voters that the status quo isn’t good for them.  Frustrated as you may be by the status quo, keep your powder dry until you’ve worked out the details, the arguments, the economics, and the math of your much better alternative.”

“Learning to make change is all about learning to do the math of change. Done right, it’s not just a soft art, it’s also a hard science.”

Rule #10.  A good question beats a good answer.

Webber writes in his book, “Questions are how we learn. Which means questions are how we create change.  Why? Because questions are dangerous. Imagine being alive and the mid 1500s and asking whether the sun revolves around the Earth or the Earth around the sun?

Questions are liberating.  Questions are useful.  Questions are how we avoid disasters.

“So,” Webber says, “why is it so hard for companies to embrace the art of asking good questions?  It’s not what you don’t know that will hurt you and your business. It’s what you don’t bother to ask that will kill you.

Asking questions can be dangerous.  Not asking them can be fatal.  Now, any questions?”

Creativity Central weighs in with another rule.  “Bad leaders don’t invite questions.”  I have seen this phenomenon at advertising agencies, colleges, financial institutions and hospitals.  Questions seem to threaten rather than intrigue poor leaders. 

Tom Monahan, in his terrific book, The Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy,” writes about one of his top creative tools:  “Ask a better question.”

One of the core ideas that have emerged from each of the BIF conferences is that top innovators have asked a provocative question. At BIF4, Dennis Littky asked “is the a smarter way to educate kids?” Debra Books, the Michael J. Fox Foundation co-founder asked how can we bring together the best minds and ideas to help treat and eventually cure Parkinson’s Disease?

At BIF5, the questions were equally as provocative.  How can education evolve to better meet the student’s experience?  Is there a better to (un)mass produce a car?  What value can an “independent” diplomat bring to the table?  Can an health insurance company authentically sell “wellness?”

Which brings me to Webber rule #52.  Stay alert. There are teachers everywhere.”

This is less a story about teaching the elephant to dance than teaching the pachyderm how to collaborate.

Helmut Traitler is the Vice President of Innovation Partnerships at Nestlé and he is doing what many have failed to do: re-orient a behemoth multi-national corporation around the proposition that “sharing-is-winning.”

Traiter's resume is impressive. He has published more than 60 scientific papers and 25 International patents. He received an Honorary Professor for Chemistry from the University of York, UK (1999).  He is gifted at applying science to innovation models.

But the story begins at BIF4. Last year, David Yaun, V.P. of Corporate Communications at IBM  told us about the mercurial experience of spearheading the computing giant’s Global Innovation Outlook Program. 

The idea, backed by IBM’s CEO was for the company to take the unprecedented step of opening up their annual technology and business forecasting processes to the world.

Yaun said, “The GIO is rooted in the belief that the very nature of innovation has changed in the early days of the 21st century. It is increasingly open, collaborative, multi-disciplinary and global. This shift means that the truly revolutionary innovations of our time require participation across multiple silos and organizations.”

Despite a lot of pushback and “are you crazy?” comments internally, the GIO has been a success. 

Open innovation, like open source, seems counterintuitive to larger companies.  Their competitive advantage is often (Like Apple) is about holding intellectual property close to the vest.  Open innovation is he deceptively simple idea that companies integrate external ideas and capabilities into their internal innovation strategy.

According to BIF’s Melissa Withers, “Until a few years ago, Nestlé, like most organizations with fully developed R&D capability, depended almost entirely on its internal R&D capability to drive its innovation agenda. “The only area where external innovation was traditionally used was in packaging, where we probably had 70% of all innovation were coming from outside,” says Traitler.

All this changed in 2005 when the team deepened its focus on open innovation.  Nestlé set out to expand its network of global partnerships and fully embed the “sharing-is-winning” slogan in its corporate strategy.

Innovation is not an option for Nestlé , it’s a necessity, reports Withers.  Nestlé’s growth targets hinge on the company’s ability to create an additional $5 billion in growth each year. The immensity of this figure speaks for itself because a significant part of this growth must be generated through innovation.

This explains why even during the recent economical crisis, Nestlé continues to spend more than $2 billion annually on R&D.

Nestlé's size was both an advantage and a hurdle to building momentum for a truly open innovation framework. To overcome these barriers the team has adopted a few rules of the road. The first: move fast. Then move faster. It’s important to demonstrate results and successes quickly.  Beyond the organizational hurdles open innovation advocates must clear, he cites an organization’s authenticity as a major driver of whether an effort succeeds or fails.

Taking the stage with Bruce Nussbaum, Traitler said, “open innovation” is a buzzword – “when people don’t know what they’re talking about, they coin buzzwords.”  Then, he gave an example of a recent innovation initiative at Nestle.

ice cream without keeping it cold and solid throughout the process of making it and distributing it?  This is not an inconsequential problem if the cost of transportation in cold storage vehicles and maintaining it through the final sale is freezing most of it’s profitability.

His question. “Can we make a foam that can ship warm then be cooled before selling?  Nestlé’s approach to open innovation is not to invite the world to participate and show competitors their strategy, but to selectively invite outside experts to add enhance their process.  The problem is given to outside experts in a disguised way and then revealed as Nestlé collaborates with them.

What intrigued me is what I have continually discovered with innovation gurus like Gerald Haman and Arthur VanGundy. The core of innovation is asking the right questions and inviting answers from diverse sources.”

You could feel the BIF audience raise a collective eyebrow with the idea of foam-based ice cream. But for an innovator, the question is a fascinating one.  What if you could save billions by how you create the product?  What if the product actually tasted as well or better than the ice cream we have today?

Pringles asked a similar question about stackable, “unbreakable” potato chips. 

So we’ve seen two elephants dance and collaborate in the past two years.  Big isn’t always better but it’s getting a heck of a lot smarter.

A few weeks before BIF5, I wrote a small catalyst note for an upcoming article. I wrote “Either/Or and Sometimes And” 

This was followed by a borrowed mathematical term “binary thinking.”

Basically, the vague thought was about how many companies approach innovation. It is an either/or proposition. Generally, they know two things about innovation from the media. One is innovate or die. And the other is that a high percentage of innovation efforts fail.

Both are right and both are gross misinterpretations of how innovation can work in a company.  The typical decision model focuses on alternate choices but I notice the simple word “and” is not used as an innovation tool.

All of which brings me to Jonah Lehrer. A 29-year-old graduate of Columbia University and a Rhodes Scholar, Lehrer is the author such books called How We Decide and Proust was a Neuroscientist.

Think of Lehrer as the Carl Sagan of the brain.  He has a remarkable ability to translate the complex functioning of the brain, as well as the latest research, into humanese. 

At BIF5, he took the stage and gave the audience a provocative “And.”  “We weren’t designed to be rational creatures,” Lehrer asserts. “Instead the mind is a messy network of different areas, many of which are involved in the production of emotion.  The simple truth is that making good decisions requires us to use both sides of the mind. For too long, we’ve treated human nature as an either/or situation. We are either rational or irrational.  Not only are these dichotomies false, they are destructive,” he adds. “Our brains are definitely pluralistic.”

At BIF, he talked about Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. In the early 1990s, Damasio began publishing a series of landmark papers describing the symptoms of patients who, after a brain injury, were unable to perceive or experience emotion. Most scientists assumed that such a deficit would lead to more rational decisions, since the patients were free of their irrational instincts.

Damasio found just the opposite: these dispassionate patients made consistently bad decisions. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; others started drinking heavily and getting into fights; most just spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. The takeaway? When people are cut off from their emotions even the most banal decisions become all but impossible.

While this research has led to a new appreciation for the powers of the unconscious - it's no longer seen as a bizarre Freudian underworld - this brain system isn't perfect.

According to Lehrer, there are lots of unconscious cognitive hiccups, isolating the "heuristics and biases" that cause people to do everything from overbid on eBay to not invest in their 401(k). “These flaws are rooted in a part of the mind that people can't control - the unconscious is often referred to as the "automatic system" - so intelligence is no antidote.”

Lehrer is like a good referee, he brought an appreciation for seeing the brain as a complex system with a host of checks and balances.  And that for truly effective decision making it’s not either or, it’s an “and.” 

A lesson for companies is not to see innovation as a go or no go.  It's about creating value whether it begins with a small team (Like Humana's wellness initiative) or a widespread innovation culture like GE or IDEO.

For some more insights into Lehrer, check out:

http://fora.tv/2009/02/19/Jonah_Lehrer_Inside_My_Mind