Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

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

Len Schlesinger, the newly installed President of Babson College in Massachusetts, taught at Harvard Business School for 20 years and has held executive positions at Limited Brands and Au Bon Pain. He has also written or co-authored nine books.  He says he's so productive because he has a short attention span.

His attention was clearly focused as he took the stage at BIF-5 to talk about innovation and education. Two words that aren't typically found in such close proximity. His charisma and passion are infectious. This upbeat sense of urgency has served Schlesinger well in his long career on both the academic and private sides of business. “At the end of the day, on the things that need to get done, my orientation is to get it done before it’s not interesting,” he says.

He commented about a huge shift he is seeing.  The shift from a knowing - doing model to a doing - knowing model.  It's a thought that resonated with the crowd of 300 innovators.  "There is a kind of information paralysis,"  he says, that focuses on learning by knowing."  The classic Yoda-like proverb  "to know and not to do is not to know" shows that it's not a new thought.  But the shift is in about how we need to be more ambidextrous in how we learn.

This thought was echoed earlier by Roger Martin, dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Martin, the author of four books on business innovation, talked about how our current
methods of educating college students aren't innovative.  
 
Two leaders in education.  Both with a healthy dissatisfaction with how things are.  

The uphill challenge Schlesinger faces now is to keep Babson financially strong in the midst of a recession and a changing educational environment. A decade ago, colleges and universities attracted new students with impressive new construction. But those days are gone, according to Schlesinger, and schools have to find new ways to stay competitive. Babson’s new Fast Track MBA, for instance, requires only 30 percent of face-to-face class time. It has been a major booster of the college’s enrollment and tuition dollars.

Just don’t show up unless you’re ready to play. Only “naïve organizations” try to get everyone on the bandwagon, but Schlesinger says you only need a large enough critical mass to get things done.

Schlesinger is doing.  And we're learning.

Where's the love?  

A few nights ago, the comedian Lewis Black raged against the machine and asked, "does anyone really love their health insurance company?"

Greg Matthews, Director of Innovation at Humana has a true Quixotic mission -- to change people's perception of what a health insurance company means.  As he took the stage at BIF-5, he flashed a slide on the screen that said if you boil it down to the pure essence "insurance companies like Humana are in the 'sickness and death' business."

No spin. Just the facts.  

But the C-suite at Humana asked Matthews and other executives to explore how Humana was perceived in the marketplace and how they could change that dynamic.  Reluctantly, Matthews, who was in Human Resources at the time, presented an alternative vision for the company: Health and Wellness.  He said, reluctantly because it flew in the face of logic for a traditionally conventional industry.

But Humana's reception was positive.  Matthews inherited a new job title and the task of building consumer percpetion of Humana as the health company of the future. His strategy is to leave the premium-claims side of health insurance to the financial gurus and focus instead on the purest side of the business.  “The future,” he says, “is going to be in creating and promoting health.”

The innovation team at Humana has augmented its social media platform to spearhead several programs that get people walking, biking, calorie counting, dancing—and while they’re at it—treating the environment respectfully.  So far, the experiment seems to be paying dividends, even for Matthews.  Since he started at Humana, he has dropped 20 pounds and became a runner.

His new role in leveraging social media has connected him to a growing community outside the company.  At the same time, the face of Humana is changing. Part of this new initiative is Humana’s Freewheelin’ bike-sharing program in Louisville, Kentucky, where the company employs almost 9,000 people. 

Humana’s employees tool around the city on shared bicycles while charting miles covered, calories burned and carbon saved.  The company has created a joint venture company called Sensei, Inc., a mobile wellness enterprise that delivers daily nutrition and exercise tips via cell phone and PC.  Humana is connecting to seniors with an annual Senior Games competition and some lower-key activities like casual dancing at the Humana Guidance Center in Las Vegas.  Seniors come in to the Center with health coverage questions and spend most of their visit fox-trotting to a Dance Town video game.

To attract Generation Z, the Humana team has linked its “Operation Planet Savers” (OPS) online game—a competition that gets kids out in the back yard on weekly “missions”—with the new Disney movie “G-FORCE.”  The company has also placed what Matthews calls “completely goofy” videos on YouTube that invite viewers click onto the Humana web site and take part in a “Healthy Games” idea competition.

Matthews is a rare kind of executive.  He is a practical unrealist.  He knows that health is about the ability to do things in life and that the spectre of illness and incapacitation (as well as the financial burden) is a shadow that clouds a "feel good" mission. But his goal is to plant the seed and deliver on the promise of how a health insurance company can focus more on health and less on the second half of their name.

That's more than innovative, it's healthy change for the better.

A few steps from the Trinity Theater, home to BIF's 5th Collaborative Innovation Summit, there was a moment worthy of a classic photograph.  John Rogers Jr, a retired Marine dressed in a green flight suit and Carne Ross, an ex-British Diplomat walked together sharing a story. These are just two of the unusual suspects that make BIF such a draw to top innovators.

John Rogers, left the Marines and co-founded a innovative idea for a car company. Called Local Motors, it is an open-source design company that is about to roll out its first automobile called the Rally Fighter.  The vision is to create vehicles in micro-factories using local resources.  

At 29, Carne Ross became head of the Israel-Palestine Middle East Peace Section for the British Government; completed foreign service tours of Germany and Afghanistan. When he was 32, he moved to New York to be head of Middle East policy for the United Kingdom's mission to the United Nations.  "I was the British lead on Irag, negotiating international law on hard-core issues of national security -- like how to deal with weapons of mass destruction and how to respond to Al-Qaeda after 9/11. He resigned and wrote a scathing account of his experience and his growing realization of the closed and undemocratic nature of the world's diplomatic forums.

Rogers and Ross both told their stories to a sold-out crowd of 300 at the conference. But to understand the significance of BIF, you have to look beyond the stage and into the lobby, the hallways and the street beyond the theater.  This is what Saul Kaplan, Co-founder of BIF and Chief Catalyst calls a mingling of the unusual suspects.  Innovators who normally wouldn't cross paths meet and exchange ideas.

Can a ex-British diplomat and a maverick car maker (Think Tucker) influence each other? They are both taking high-risk and innovative approaches to professions wedded to convention for decades.  If you ask Kaplan, he'd say the seed has been planted and let's watch and see what happens.

Pretty good for a short walk.

More about Carne Ross:

http://www.independentdiplomat.org/

More about John Rogers

http://www.independentdiplomat.org/

2 days.  36 innovators and thought leaders. October used to be owned by baseball and the annual plummet of Wall Street. But for the past five years, October has become the gathering of the best minds in innovation. Saul Kaplan, BIF co-founder and chief catalyst, opened the morning session with a great story about the genesis of the BIF format

He met with Richard Saul Wurman, the guru of information design, and he showed him his matrix of ideas for bringing innovators together. Wurman replied, "Saul, you've got a lot to learn about connecting emotionally with the community.  Why not think of it as a big dinner party and invite interesting and provocative people and let the ideas flow.  Toss that matrix away."

The core of BIF is innovators telling stories.  These stories inform, inspire, and ultimately become catalysts for other people's own creative and innovation journey.  Over the next few days, I will be blogging and sharing these compelling stories sans matrix.

Stay tuned...

Common sense often passes for an enviable degree of insight. Marshall Goldsmith’s remarkable book, What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There is a great example.  On page 42, there’s a deceptively simple 10-word sentence: “The higher you go, the more your problems are behavioral.”

A few years ago, I jotted down those 10 words and find it to be an accurate barometer of nearly every leader I have met. But what Goldsmith writes goes beyond common sense.  His book leavens common sense with his experience as one of the preeminent executive coaches in America.

He writes compellingly about the 20 bad habits that can sabotage a leader’s career – the egregious everyday annoyances that make the workplace substantially more noxious than it need to be. 

Goldsmith and his collaborator, Mark Reiter have identified those interpersonal qualities that can stunt the growth of a career.  Many leaders delude themselves about their achievements, status and contributions to the success of a project.

“But our delusions become a serious liability when we need to change,” he writes.  We sit there with the same godlike feelings, and when someone tries to make us change our ways, we regard them with unadulterated bafflement.”

Equally baffling the sheer number of managers that rise to leadership positions with these bad habits proudly in tow. 

But Goldsmith is not a finger pointer but a positivist. The subtitle of his book is How Successful People Become Even More Successful.  He has a coach’s approach to improvement. “Research and experience shows that the most powerful driver of successful behavioral change is a leader's partnership with stakeholders to obtain feedback, reflect, and act upon it. We therefore see the coach as a catalyst, not as the driver of the change process.”

I will list all twenty of the sabotaging habits at the end of the blog, but I want to highlight the three that I have witnessed most often. 

#16 Not Listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect. 

Goldsmith:  “When you fail at listening, you’re sending out an armada of negative messages.” 

Far too many managers are immersed in their own thoughts or busy formulating their next bon mot.  Frequently, they cannot recall the substance of a meeting but only how they felt during the meeting. 

#3 Adding too much value.  Goldsmith: “It is extremely difficult for successful people to listen to other people tell them something they already know without communicating a) we already knew that or b) we know a better way. 

“That’s the problem with adding too much value. Imagine you’re the CEO. I come to you with an idea that you think is very good.  Rather than just pat me on the back and say, “Great idea!” your inclination (because you have to add value) is to say,  “Good idea, but it’d be better if you tried it this way.”

“The problem is, you may have improved the content of my idea by 5% but you’ve reduced my commitment to executing it by 50%. , because you’ve taken away my ownership of the idea.”

Goldsmith isn’t saying executives have to zip their lips, but he emphasizes that the higher up you go in the organization, the more you need to make other people winners and not making about winning yourself.

Sometimes you have more to gain by not “winning” or demonstrating how smart you are.

#10 Failing to give proper recognition: The inability to praise and reward.

Goldsmith: “In withholding your recognition of another person’s contribution to a team’s success, you are not only sowing injustice and treating people unfairly, but you are depriving people of the emotional payoff that comes with success.”

Recognition is really about positive closure. For some reason there is a scarcity of kudos from the top.  In fact, I have met literally hundreds of employees who have told me that they would rather have an honest thank you than a bonus. 

Creativity in leadership, I’m convinced, has less to do with product, organizational and service innovation than it does with turning the lens toward yourself.  It is about identifying those habits in your personality and finding ways to change adapt or minimize them.

Recognize your sharp edges. Redefine what success means for the entire organization and not just yourself. Make the idea of continuous improvement relate to you and not just the processes of your company or organization. 

And yes, please read and absorb Goldsmith’s wise and wonderful book: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. 

The Goldsmith 20:

1. Winning too much
2. Adding too much value
3. Passing judgment
4. Making destructive comments
5. Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”
6. Telling the world how smart we are
7. Speaking when angry
8. Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t work”
9. Withholding information

10.  Failing to give proper recognition

11.  Claiming credit that we don’t deserve

12.  Making excuses

13.  Clinging to the past

14.  Playing favorites

15.  Refusing to express regret

16.  Not Listening

17.  Failing to express gratitude

18.  Punishing the messenger

19.  Passing the buck

20.  An excessive need to be me (Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they are who we are.”