Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

The Baker Potter Method

This is a very simplified approach to Synectics taught to me by my first Creative Director in Los Angeles. 

Professorial Stuff.  Developed by William Gordon and George Prince, synectics was devised as a highly-creative approach to group problem solving.  The word synectics comes from the Greek (Oh, those Greeks) and means bringing forth together; the idea is that you can create links between seemingly unconnected things.

Dick and I simplified and adapted it for individual (and small group) use.  Like, lesson 1, this project is designed to stretch your creative synapses.  It can be used for virtually any problem you need to solve. 

1.  It begins with a Problem As Given (PAG).  This is the problem as given by stakeholders.  (Later in the Spring Training, I'll talk about problem reframing and how that technique can bring better results). Okay, so we have just won the Amalgamated Fruitcake Account and our PAG is how to double sales of fruitcake in the coming year.   [How can we double sales of fruitcake in the next year?]

Info:  When a research firm polled some 1,000 adults about what they did with fruitcake, 38 percent said they gave it away, 28 percent said they actually ate it, 13 percent said they used it as a doorstop, 9 percent said they scattered it for the birds, 4 percent said they threw it out and 8 percent said they couldn't’t recall. The emperor of the mail-order fruitcake, Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas, bakes 80,000 pounds of fruitcake per day during its October-December high season, for a total of 1.5 million fruitcakes which are then shipped around the world.               

2.  Next, you determine the Goal as Given  (GAG)  Wonderful irony.  The GAG order is to focus on what is expected from the session.  It be 100 ideas. It could be a full-blown solution.  Our GAG is to come up (collectively)  [50 ways to double the sales of fruitcake.]

3.  I wish...  This is the fun part, you begin every idea with "I wish..."   The wilder, the better.  Defer judgement on all of this.  Make it blue sky, emotional, impractical, weird, interesting.  I'll start off with some examples

•     I wish there were a federally mandated law that everyone had to eat fruitcake everyday.
•     I wish fruitcake cured cancer
•     I wish that fruitcake wasn't fruitcake
•     I wish that fruitcake was required footwear
•     I wish that eating fruitcake made you lose weight
•     I wish fruitcake reversed global warming
•     I wish we made fruitcake smaller by 1/2 -- so we would double sales by selling twice as many

4.    Select the most promising (or interesting) of the wishes and define it's problem or challenge  (I will choose two of them as examples)

I wish that fruitcake was required footwear.   The problem is that even the most resilient of fruitcakes wouldn't hold up well as footwear.

I wish that fruitcake wasn't fruitcake   The company has millions invested in an infrastructure designed for to make fruitcake, not economically feasible.

5.   What if?  (What could we do to change or adapt the wish to make the solution truly practical.)  Here are some starters...

 (Shoes) What if mashed up fruitcake made feet feel better (Like Johnson's footsoap?)

What if a famous designer put fruitcake into sealed plastic shoe mold so that you would be wearing fruitcake shoes.

(Non-Fruitcake) What if we created fruitcake lite -- fruitcake that isn't.

What if we created other uses for fruitcake.  Fruitcake doorstop?  Fruitcake pellets for pet food?   Does it have to look like a cake?

 6.  Solution    

Fruitcake lite -- a lighter version (like  raisin bread).  Ask some of the world's top chefs to create a lite version that people would like -- maybe it's packaged like English Muffins for all-year use. 

The benefit of the Baker Potter Method is that is frees you up to make a wish list.  For example, cure for cancer.  Maybe the ingredients in fruitcake offer an unusual synergy of anti-cancer fighters.  Maybe, you buy a fruitcake and we donate to the American Cancer Society.

The key to remember is that our problem and goal involve "doubling" the sales.  It should shape your solution thinking.  And sales doesn't necessarily mean consumption -- so the door is open on that.   [So give it a try, our goal is 50.]

 Real Life Example.  Dick and I led a session for Bank One involving a problem of how to increase sales of their Visa card.  Currently, they were using a discount shopping card as the lure -- and so people would activate their card and then receive the Visa card.  They also tried using the Visa Card as a lure and adding the discount shopping card.   My wish in that session was -- I wish that we only needed one card.  The solution was a single card called Super Visa.  It gave a tangible and emotional benefit and saved money.  It worked very well, won awards. But two years down the line, other banks complained to Visa about Bank One's monopoly on the trademark Visa name and it was discontinued.  What is amazing is that the solution was so obvious everyone had missed it.