Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

Innovation is one of those words that belongs in a series of Rorschach blots.  Its meaning generally resides in the individual. The act of defining it seems to confine it.  I think innovation far more flexible than that.

Innovation is perhaps the most durable star on the corporate ladder -- quickly out pacing such top ten hits as TQM, Lean and Six  Sigma. 

In a technology frenzied world -- is innovation becoming too lofty a science?  Many of the people in my creativity seminars see innovation as an process done by someone else.  It is something done by engineers and visionaries.  Personal innovation seems like an oxymoron.   Books on innovation are becoming increasing obtuse. (IDEO's Tom Kelly is a wonderful exception).

Scott Berkun's book "The Myths of Innovation" is a great primer on bringing innovation down from the Ivory Tower and into the minds of the rest of us.   I recently talked with the Markus Mettlerm CEO of  the BrainStore in Switzerland and we discussed the extremes of innovation in the U.S.  A lot of high end technical approaches (TRIZ) and the more typical un-facilitated brainstorming.

Gerald Haman of Solution People makes an important distinction between creativity and innovation. Creativity is primarily about generating and presenting new ideas. Innovation is about implementing those ideas and creating value the marketplace. I often use my favorite example to illustrate these ideas. Andrew Wyeth is one of my favorite painters  His artistic vision and virtuosity is about creativity.

But have you ever heard of his brother? Nathaniel Wyeth's most famous invention, one of the most convenient and readily recyclable items available for sale today, is the plastic soda bottle. That's innovation.

One of the goals in my workshops is to humanize innovation. It isn't forged in marble. It is not the mythic "eureka" that rules, but the tipping point of incremental knowledge and experimentation often by people on the fringe or upset with the status quo.  As Berkum reports, "The Internet required nearly four decades of innovations in electronics, networking an packet-switching software before it approximated the system Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web."

So, how do we put a human face on innovation? I think it begins by not putting innovation or the process of innovation on a pedestal. Google didn't invent the search engine. Remember Alta Vista? Instead, they improved and capitalized on the idea. Somebody saw a wine bottle and observed that it needed to be accessorized and now wine bottle jewelry is huge niche business.

The truth is innovation isn't glamorous.  It's long pizza-infused nights filled with both drive and disappointment.  It is Jobs and the Woz in the garage.  It's the You Tube guys sitting at a party discussing how difficult it is to share videos.  It's George de Mestral walking through the woods and wondering why cockleburs stuck to his pants and recreating nature in what became Velcro. Innovation is work. It is the nature of corporations to want apply processes, tools, methodologies and benchmarks to innovation. Many of them, like TRIZ and Haman's 4-step accelerated innovation process are terrific. Here's a slightly different point of view. Take Flickr -- it started as a collaboration of Vancouver programmers who were focused building an online game called Game Neverending. To make the game more interesting they added a simple tool that allowed players to talk, exchange messages and share photos. After some time had passed the photo sharing tool was a more promising building than the game itself. The innovation had nothing to do with their originally stated goal.

 

In the great pantheon of innovative ideas there are some (Like the integrated circuit) that are Nobel material. The Frisbee may not win a prize, but it created value in the marketplace. And for every corporate Google innovation, there's an individual with an equally compelling idea that hasn't been shared. My thesis? That we loosen the noose on the word innovation -- let it breathe for a while. Rather than become an innovation company,  become a company or an individual  who is motivated to solve a problem or has a vision of something that no one else sees.

Combine tools and processes and even outsource ideation.  But let's focus on growing ideas and let the
 marketplace decide whether it's innovative.

Randy Pausch did something truly transcendent.  He created art out of a grim diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.  This art isn't about aesthetics, it's about the power to move people.  His book "The Last Lecture" has become a best-seller but that's merely what he calls a "head fake."  In Pauschian language that means you're learning something you didn't think you were learning. 

His lecture was really a gift he elegantly bequeathed to his wife and children.  The internet made it a gift to millions who've read his book or watched the video of his last lecture.  The provocative question "What would you do if you knew you didn't have long to live?" -- is often just an intellectual exercise.  The truth is you can't really know until the cold heart of that diagnosis hits you in reality.  I know, because I've been there too.

The art of Randy Pausch is that he was able to tell a story that made people want to listen.  There are hundreds of thousands of people living with a cancer who have no audience but their families and friends.  To quote, Robert Bolt, "not a bad public that."  Most cancer patients need to talk to someone who isn't wearing a white coat.  And they have an intuitive sense that most healthy people don't want to hear their story. 

What he has done with humor and a presence of mind is to create art.  The art of living and giving back.  Simple truths that we already know but don't acknowledge because it's been oversold and undervalued. I am gratefu to Randy for showing us such a brilliant canvas.

I met Tom Bowen in Chicago this past winter.  If Tom has anything in abundance, it's humility.  He is not the kind of person who talks about his accomplishments, he would rather listen to your story.  But Tom is a hero and he probably won't like that fact that I call him that.  In the aftermath of 911, he was at Ground Zero helping with search and rescue.  He was called Father Tom because when his team found a body, he gathered them and said a prayer -- the ultimate respect you can pay to a soul.

A few years later, he faced a more personal tragedy. His son Ben was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor.  Tom wrote a blog to keep his friends and family informed.  St. Jude's Hospital filmed Tom, Ben and his family as Ben underwent a painful treatment. Ben died February 25, 2005.

Tom created art by developing a cancer network that is providing a resource for families with children diagnosed with cancer.  It is the first call you make when you need that kind of help.  At the end of this blog, I will leave a link to Ben's Story.  Tom isn't talking about how unfair life can be.  He's actively seeking a way to level the playing field by sharing his insights, his wisdom and his time.

Me.  I was diagnosed with cancer in 2003 and did not know how long I would live.  I finally had the opportunity to face the reality of what would you do?  Surprisingly, I handled it with a curious grace.  This is the honest truth;my first thought was "now I don't have to pay any more taxes."

But what has amazed me is that so few people have asked me what I learned.  Well, I don't have as large a podium as Randy or grand a mission as Tom, but I will tell you three things.

1.  No matter how many families and friends you have surrounding you, you become an island.  A think gossamer-like wall forms between you and the world.  When, the lights are turned off and your family falls asleep from exhaustion, you are alone.  And you to embrace that aloneness.

2.  Unfathomable new joys. I have never met a cancer patient that hasn't discovered a new joy -- something that they would never have imagined they would enjoy.  For me, it was Dawson's Creek.  When I was recovering in the hospital, Dawson's Creek would appear on the television when I was in the greatest amount of pain.  I was hooked from the very moment that Joey climbed up the ladder through Dawson's window.  Frankly, I'm still upset that Pacey married Joey.

3.  Make art.  I made mine --  literally, by learning how to draw and paint.  I ultimately sold four paintings which is four more than Van Gogh.   

Art is ultimately a way of managing the world around you. It helps you make sense of this unwelcome voyage.  So thank you  Randy and Tom and Ben and the millions of people who are living with life-threatening diagnoses.  But as I often tell people, the most life-threatening thing in the world is not living when you can.

 To read more about Ben's story: Click here:  http://www.bens-story.com/benshome.html

 

 

 

Last year, while browsing the shelves of an old book store near the University of Arkansas, I found a small paperback by the late, incomparable R. Buckminster Fuller called I Seem to Be a Verb. One of great lines in the book is "Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it."

I feel the same way about most offices. I once described them as hell with a floor plan. Well, I found a kindred spirit in Paul Graham -- an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb.

Years ago he wrote a wonderful article (which I am happy is floating around the internet) "What Business Can Learn from Open Source"

I am going to quote liberally from the original text because frankly, paraphrasing Graham is like fact-checking Dr.Suess -- it's impossible. What's important to me is that we have all inherited the trappings of what the corporate would should look like -- and forget to apply creativity to the environment and to how the work can best be accomplished. Enjoy.

"Another thing blogs and open source software have in common is that they're often made by people working at home. That may not seem surprising. But it should be. It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.

This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.

The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it's not just the way offices look that's bleak. The way people act is just as bad.
Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching beige cubicles they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether
it's "work safe."

The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. And you know what? The
company at this stage is probably the most productive it's ever going to be. Maybe it's not a coincidence. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net loss. To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you're supposed to be there at certain times.

There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can't measure their productivity. The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.

If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a
certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.

That may seem utopian, but it's what we told people who came to work for our company. There were no fixed office hours. I never showed up before 11 in the morning. But we weren't saying this to be benevolent. We were saying: if you work here we expect you to get a lot done.

Don't try to fool us just by being here a lot.

The problem with the facetime model is not just that it's demoralizing, but that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working. I'm convinced the facetime model is the main reason large organizations have so many meetings. Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little.

"...The other problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the
time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most
offices, with everyone else looking busy.

It's hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare it to. And that's one reason open source, and even blogging in some cases, are so important. They show us what real work looks like. We're funding eight new startups at the moment. A friend asked what they were doing for office space, and seemed surprised when I said we expected them to work out of whatever apartments they found to live in. But we didn't propose that to save money. We did it because we want
their software to be good. Working in crappy informal spaces is one of the things startups do right without realizing it. As soon as you get into an office, work and life start to drift
apart.

That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life are supposed to be separate. But that part, I'm convinced, is a mistake."

Thanks for stepping out of the circle Paul.

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?

So you’re at Square One.

It’s the rarified place where projects are incubated and launched. Rarified? Why such a lofty word for a project? The American Heritage Dictionary offers some insight – belonging to or reserved for a small select group or to make thin, less compact, or less dense.

The goal of this Square One series is about opening up [less dense] the possibilities of how to make smarter starts. This series is beginning of my new book -- Square One: The Art of the Smart Start.
Nothing exerts a greater gravitational force or influence over a project than the human factor. Bias, politics, motivation, personal agendas, ego and myriad subconscious hobgoblins are the major elephants in the room.

That’s the good news.

It’s good news because railing against the human factor is like shaking your fist at the rain. One of my favorite writers, Sheldon Kopp wrote a wonderfully insightful book called And End to Innocence – Facing Life Without Illusions.

“In addition to the chance blows to which life subjects everyone else, we add the needless suffering that comes from impossible demands that we be special, and that the world be just and fair.”
So shake hands with the human factor – the joy and the pain of all beginnings.
Smarter beginnings don’t mean easier beginnings. The human factor will determine just how difficult a project will be.

There are two basic questions you can answer that will help you with the handshake with reality. 1) How much leverage do you really have to influence the course of a project? 2) How motivated are you to influence the course of a project?

I have learned the leverage question the hard way. I have had the responsibility of managing a project but with limited authoritity to make key decisions. The answer to this question is critical if you want to successfully handle the human factor.

Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer is a good start “…accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

The second question is equally important. How motivated how are you? If you don’t have true leverage how much are you willing to invest in a project?

Here’s a true story about leverage and motivation. A friend of mine told me about an experience he had as a freelancer at a large advertising agency. He was standing next to the president of the agency, watching employees leave at 5 PM -- the official hours of the agency.
The president told my friend, “I wish they’d start acting as stakeholders in this agency.” My friend replied, “If you treated them like stakeholders maybe they would.” (Remember my friend was a freelancer – which means he enjoyed the privilege of not having or needing leverage or approval.)

Recap: You can’t successfully navigate Square One if you don’t know what you can control and what you can’t. Whether or not you’re comfortable (or engaged) in Square One depends on your level of motivation.

Are you ready to shake hands?

Square One is a lonely place.

It’s the uncomfortable sanctuary we return to after failed endeavors and other misadventures.  Like a busy highway rest stop, it’s not a place to linger. I may be in the minority, but I like square one.

The truth is most people don’t do square one very well. If they did, they wouldn't return to it so frequently. 

Yogi Berra supposedly said, “We’re lost, but at least we’re making good time.”  I think that sums up what most of us feel when we don’t stay at square one long enough. 
Recently, I asked a group of executives how they approached square one. 

10 executives, 10 different opinions on how to define square one.  But they all agreed who initiated the project set the framework for how a team proceeded.

Typically fewer questions were asked. Especially, the question “why?”  From minute one, people are in Yogi Berra mode – they are making good time and more importantly they’re not making waves.

A few years ago, I met a retired FBI agent.  I asked him if he ever met J. Edgar Hoover.  He said, “Yes, once.”  I walked into his office and shook his hand and left.  You didn't want do anything to get on his radar.”

Even the 9/11 Report can be summed up with two basic points, information was hoarded, not shared.  And nobody was asking the big questions.  Like “Why not?”

Try this experiment, next time you have Square One meeting – keep track of how many questions are asked.  Are you holding back your questions?  And if so, why? In the next entry, I will explore how many companies and individuals have used Square One thinking to achieve smarter and more successful outcomes.

And yes, you may get on the radar.  If that's a bad thing, we need to talk.  Any quetions?

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune of meeting some of the great people at The David Allen Company. I wanted to share a presentation that David gave to Google about how to succeed in a multi-tasking world by managing commitments and freeing your mind (or as David would say it, freeing up psychic ram) for productivity. If you haven't had the opportunity to read his book "Getting Things Done -- the Art of Stress Free Productivity," I recommend it highly.