Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

Let's go back 1999. Crown Prince Abdullah becomes the ruler of Jordan on the death of his father, King Hussein. Lance Armstrong wins first Tour de France. And most importantly Family Guy airs its pilot episode.

It's also the year that Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton wrote The Knowing-Doing Gap. Nearly a decade later a significant number of companies have amnesia. A lot of mangers read the book. A lot of managers ignored what they learned.

Their preface does a masterful job of setting up the premise. "We wrote this book because we wanted to understand why so many managers know so much about organizational performance, say so many smart things about how to achieve performance, and work so hard, yet are trapped in firms that do so many things they know will undermine performance."

In a nutshell: There are more and more books and articles, more training programs and seminars and more knowledge that, although valid, often had little or no impact on what managers actually did.

Nothing has really changed.

"One culpable party is the literature of knowledge management -- almost the cult of knowledge management -- that has grown over the past few years. Advocates of knowledge management as "the next big thing" have advanced the proposition that what companies need is more intellectual capital. While that is undeniably true, it's only partly true. What those advocates are forgetting is that *knowledge is only useful if you do something with it."

What does all this have to do with Square One? We often return to Square One because the human tendency is to treat talking about something as equal to actually doing it. Pheffer and Sutton tell a good story about David Kelly, CEO of IDEO -- one the world's great product innovation and design firms. "In firm after firm, he visited, executives acted as if merely hearing and talking about about methods for doing innovative work, eliminated the need to actually use these methods."

A critical act in Square One is knowing how you want act upon those ideas. Here's a challenge:

Send an email to inotivity@gmail.com and put action in the subject line. I will send you the 8 most powerful questions you can ask to activate your ideas.

Most of what I've learned about the knowing doing gap comes from Gerald Haman, President of Solution People. He walks the talk. His company became the premier innovation training firm in the country because he makes a powerful distinction between creativity and innovation. Creativity is coming up with ideas. Innovation is turning those ideas into something that creates value in the marketplace.

His 4-brain model (investigate, create, evaluate and activate) stresses the activation phase. I have called him a man with an over active imagination. He loves ideas. But he love ideas in action, even better.

Square One means you don't leave the square without creating an action plan. Just write a sticky note to yourself. Activate likes it's 1999.

P.S.

If you want to dig a little deeper, here are a few lines in an interview that Pheffer did with Fast Company

"If companies genuinely want to move from knowing to doing, they need to build a forgiveness framework -- a tolerance for error and failure -- into their culture. A company that wants you to come up with a smart idea, implement that idea quickly, and learn in the process has to be willing to cut you some slack. You need to be able to try things, even if you think that you might fail.

The absolute opposite mind-set is one that appears to be enjoying a lot of favor at the moment: the notion that we have to hold people accountable for their performance. Companies today are holding their employees accountable -- not only for trying and learning new things, but also for the results of their actions. If you want to see how that mind-set affects performance, compare the ways that American Airlines and Southwest Airlines approach accountability -- and then compare those two airlines' performances.

American Airlines has decided to emphasize accountability, right down to the departmental -- and even the individual -- level. If a plane is late, American wants to know whose fault it is. So if a plane is late, what do American employees do? They spend all of their time making sure that they don't get blamed for it. And while everyone is busy covering up, no one is thinking about the customer.

Southwest Airlines has a system for covering late arrivals: It's called "team delay." Southwest doesn't worry too much about accountability; it isn't interested in pinning blame. The company is interested only in getting the plane in the air and in learning how to prevent delays from happening in the future.

Now ask yourself this: If you're going to be held accountable for every mistake that you make, how many chances are you going to take? How eager are you going to be to convert your ideas into actions?