INNOBLOG

Several weeks ago I attended the Open Innovation Summit in Orlando, Florida. You can read a transcript of live Twitter coverage from that conference here, and two very good wrap-up posts from Braden Kelley at Blogging Innovation here and here.

While at that conference I got the chance to meet and speak with Ric Merrifield, business architect at Microsoft and author of Re-Think: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation. I had interviewed Ric by phone back in the summer when the book came out, and meeting him reminded me to dust off the interview and publish it. He has a lot of interesting things to say to innovators, particularly about questioning assumptions. Here's the interview:

Q. Tell me about Re-Think.

A. The unifying principle of Rethink is the fairly simple notion that companies are so attached to “how” they go about doing everything from day-to-day activities to work that it can be very difficult for them to see really obvious opportunities for changing something, whether it’s innovation or cost-cutting or what have you. So, for example, they associate the route they take to their favorite restaurant – how they get there – with the outcome of arriving on time. So much so, that when somebody drives a different way, they say well, why are we going this way? But it usually doesn’t matter how you get there as long as you get there on time.

So framing it that way is a totally human condition. If you walk up to somebody at the fax machine and ask them what they’re doing, they’ll probably look at you a little funny and say “Well, I’m sending a fax.” And if you use conventional productivity tools and analysis you’ll often say, “Is sending a fax part of a necessary workflow or step in your job that you have to do to accomplish whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish,” and they’ll probably say yes. So if you’re doing a business requirements document, you’ll write down that sending a fax is a necessary step for whatever function that person does.

Whereas, I would go in and, not knowing anything about the industry, I can say definitively that sending a fax is not the requirement. The requirement is going to be more like “communicating the status of something” or “confirming an order.” If you then go back and say, “OK. What you’re doing is either communicating a status or confirming an order, or something along those lines,” and have a discussion about exactly THAT what, and note that HOW the person is doing it today is with a fax machine. The person will say “oh, OK, that makes sense.”

And what you’ve done there is disentangle this “what” from the “how” in a way that’s very non-threatening to the end user. I don’t know anything about their business, but I’ve led them to open up this opportunity to separate the “what” from the “how,” and then asked the question, “Is it really relevant to use the fax machine? Could you use email, could you automate it, could you outsource it?” All of those “how” questions could then emerge, and from there we can get into more value discussions, such as, “what would be the value to you of doing this differently? Is one of our competitors doing this so differently from us that maybe we should think about innovating in it?” And it goes from there.

Q: So I want to go back to the part where you get the people to focus on the “what” rather than the “how.” You did that by essentially asking them what they were trying to do. Does that work?

A. It does, as long as you can get to the “what” discussion quickly. It’s more important to start to get into the value and performance discussions, so you can find out where it makes sense to ask cost-cutting questions, outsourcing questions, innovation questions, which will also obviously inform strategy. “How” verbs have a very common thread to them, like faxing, emailing, phone, truck, all those things are what I call “trap” verbs. The “untrap” verbs, which are more like communicate, confirm, are lighter weight and don’t have any of the “how” baggage.

Another example: checking in at the airport is really encumbered with some language that doesn’t add any value in the sense that you’re talking about airlines and airports. The three “whats” really going on there are confirming an order, completing a survey, and doing some logistics if you’ve got luggage. When you sort of open that up, you go, wow, if we’re really looking at reservation surveys and logistics, you can look across a whole range of industries for best practices and best process steps and different technology opportunities, whereas you get a much, much narrower focus if you start by saying, let’s look within the airline industry for best practices. Which is not necessarily going to give you bad answers, but it can be really limiting. If something like innovation is what you need to do, a lot of the best innovations come from other industries and seemingly improbable places. Stripping this “how” language away makes it a lot more obvious.

Q. Can you say more about using this approach to innovate?

A. A lot of people don’t have a definition of innovation, but just throw the word around like everybody knows what it means. Innovation to me is changing something so radically that it doesn’t resemble what it was before. So, Netflix has an innovative marketing model for renting videos. They don’t have a store, anymore. The videos come through the mail, there are no late fees, all kinds of really innovative ways for people to have the video rental experience. Innovation can happen at the operating model level, in the case of Netflix, or at the very tactical level, like outsourcing the bank teller in the case of the ATM. That was really innovative. That’s a pretty tactical thing in the retail banking world. Same thing is true of airport check-in.

Nobody has something like continuous improvement on their to-do list in a given day. It’s not something you can check off. Innovation’s different in the sense that every time you evaluate a piece of work you should say, let’s look at it. What is the problem or opportunity? Is it too expensive, do we need to cut costs, and if so maybe innovation is a way to do that. I think a lot of people make the mistake of seeing cost-cutting and innovation as mutually exclusive. That’s a huge mistake because a lot of the biggest opportunities for cost-cutting *are* innovation. Again, it’s the “how are we going to get there?” discussion. If it’s innovation, what does that mean to us and how different does it need to be to accomplish the outcome that we need to get to? Either from competitive pressure, a response to competition, or acting on an opportunity that’s untapped at this point.

Q. So you’re looking at creating efficiencies, but you’re also looking at spotting opportunities.

A. Right. It’s “what outcome do we want to achieve overall?” And, does that require a minor modification in day-to-day operations to get to that, or does it require a radical shift in the work that will be innovative that would be so different than what was there before that we won’t recognize it? I talk about ING Direct in the book as having some great innovations. The fact that they eliminate the ability to write paper checks eliminates the entire department that handles bad checks. So that whole cost is gone in their model.

Q. So nowadays people are primarily focused on cost-cutting it seems, and your Rethink method is a definite way to do that. Where do people go wrong when they start cutting costs?

A. Especially today they’re going wrong in some big ways. One I’ve mentioned already is they think about cost-cutting and innovation as mutually exclusive, which is a big mistake. A second is that so many people have been in growth mode for so long that the muscles we’ve built up have been in keeping up with the growth of the business and we’ve sort of here and there done some cost-cutting, but have been too busy chopping wood to stop and sharpen our axe. We’ve allowed or been tolerant of a certain amount of fat and inefficiency to grow in our models just because we’re so busy keeping up we can’t also do this cost-cutting. When people go into it now they think, oh we can do some nip-and-tuck sort of cutting. But there’s so much fat that’s grown in organizations. Twenty to 40 percent of the operating budget is fat, either from unnecessarily repetitive and redundant processes or just unnecessary work. I tell people to expect to find that level of cost-cutting as an opportunity. If they’re not then they’re probably looking at it the wrong way.

The other piece that in this specific situation as we see organizations retracting and seeing flat growth at best, what that means is that instead of being in this growth mode where you’re trying to attract as many different segments of customers as you can, and you’re sort of trying to be all things to all people, organizations have to decide who is and is not their most valuable customer. And to do that you have to turn your back on some customers. That really means the management team has to sit down and say, who are we, what is our brand and identity, and how are we going to Lego-block that to a specific set of customers.
 

I’m participating in the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour for Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways To Spark Innovation During Times of Change by Jeremy Gutsche. You can read the previous review and interviews of the book here. Exploiting Chaos covers some of the same ground as Scott Anthony’s Silver Lining, specifically the idea that chaotic times breed innovation. Jeremy Gutsche graciously answered these questions by email:

Q: I was interested in your take on the pattern of disruption. What do you think is the one most important thing managers can do to spot potential disruption and innovate an approach to it?

A: The most important thing is to avoid being dismissive of radical business models and smaller entrants. In almost every example of big companies getting toppled, the little guy didn't stand up and start fighting on day 1... New entrants creep up the value chain by offering innovative products and services to customers that incumbents typically ignore. They build strong customer insight and maverick brands. They slowly get stronger until the day they make a big alliance that enables them to compete at a higher level and topple the bigger incumbents and their outdated business models.

There's an urban legend about boiling a frog that suggest if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, he'll hop out right away. In contrast, if you drop a frog into lukewarm water and crank up the heat, he'll be boiled alive. Like us, the frog is more sensitive to shocking change. We need to find a way to take the smaller entrants more seriously, and decide whether or not these are companies are in areas where we should be competing, or acquiring smaller brands that we can foster (while letting them have the space they need to grow). Don't expect to be shocked. Find a way to experiment with new ideas and blossoming new entrants.

Q: Is that different from the one most important thing a small company can do to spot potential disruption and take advantage of it?

A: If big companies need to act small, small companies need to act big. Especially in times of chaos. Disney, Microsoft, Hyatt, GE, Apple, Sun, and HP were all founded during times of economic depression. The reason why is that people still buy things, but they become more conscious of what they need and why. They experiment with new things. Consumer needs evolve. Fortunately for small companies, larger incumbents are typically too slow-moving to detect these changes and act upon them. They focus on their core business and attempt to preserve profit margins. By moving quickly, small companies can identify disruptive opportunities and experiment with the business models that exploit that satisfy evolving consumer needs.

Q: You say in the book “Visualize disaster and opportunity.” In order to do that, it looks like you need to visualize the mistakes and unexpected things, and rehearse a strategy for dealing with them. But what’s a good strategy for understanding exactly what to visualize? Is there a way to visualize what you’ll do if you’re completely blindsided?!

A: When the world changes, and outdated business models topple, it's typically not from being completely blindsided. It's something more similar to the boiling-frog analogy described above. The challenge, then, is to identify some of the plausible ways that your industry could evolve, or be disrupted.

In the book, I talk about the way that you cannot predict the future, but you can develop scenarios and capitalize on what happens if those scenarios come true. Here's an excerpt:

In the 1970s, Pierre Wack was planning for the future at Royal Dutch Shell. For nearly three decades, oil prices had been relatively steady, but now the world was changing. Demand for oil had increased, US oil reserves were drying up, Middle Eastern countries grew stronger, and most of these countries resented the West, especially after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Weaving this information together, Wack realized that Middle Eastern countries could spark an energy crisis. That fear led him to develop two potential scenarios.

The first scenario was based on the conventional wisdom that oil prices would remain relatively stable.

The second assumed an oil crisis, which he conveyed in detail with vivid storytelling. The potential impact was so severe that Wack’s managers were inspired to prepare for the worst.

In 1973 the world did encounter an oil price shock, but Royal Dutch Shell was ready. Once the weakest of the “big seven” oil empires, the company emerged as the most profitable and second in size.

In The Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz refers to Wack’s example as one of the first modern uses of scenario analysis in business.

By developing multiple scenarios, you can avoid the certainty of being incorrect, and instead prepare for disruptive change.

Q: Your book talks about ideation. The hardest part of that is building on ideas. What are your rules of thumb for building on ideas?

A: Basically, start off by realizing that there is no point innovating if you think you already know the answer. We tend to enter brainstorming meetings with pre-existing ideas - especially if we are senior - and then we listen to other ideas and in our heads we reinforce our original idea. Instead, you need to throw away your favourite idea and build upon the ideas of others. Truly successful ideation happens when we springboard off the ideas of others.

In another excerpt from Exploiting Chaos, here are some ways to prevent ideation from sucking:

Set the stage: Invite the best people, create a useful space, and review the rules.

Crank it up: Get people out of their boxes. Start with a challenge like how to sell more pantyhose to men. Let sparks fly: Structure (create very specific questions). Seek flexibil¬ity (push for range and variety in the ideas suggested). Keep it fun (create group energy and encourage humor).

Add some salt and pepper: Reshape the question. Take an idea and dive deep. Contribute a crazy idea. Encourage physical movement.

Challenge with specific problems: For example, if you are trying to sell more pantyhose to men, try to answer the question, “How do we rename the color ‘pantyhose brown’ to make it more masculine?”

Wrap it: Get people to vote for their favorite ideas. Circle the room to see if there are any important comments.

What would you suggest people do who are working for a company that doesn’t move quickly and doesn’t embrace the ideas in your book? How can they develop a track record as an innovator?

I would say that right now, more than ever before, people stuck in those companies can wave a crisis flag to push the company to try new things. Now, more than ever before, it is possible to use the external credit crunch to cut through red tape, try new ways, and enhance our knowledge of evolving consumer needs. 

This week's virtual book tour for Scott Anthony's book The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times has wrapped up. Thanks to all the bloggers who participated. Here's the final list of links to all the reviews and interviews:

Monday, July 20: Chris Flanagan, BIF Speak

Tuesday, July 21: Jeff De Cagna, Principled Innovation

Wednesday, July 22: Josh Kutticherry, futurethinktank

Thursday, July 23: Jim McGee, FastForward Blog and McGee’s Musings (review here; interview here)

Friday, July 24: Boris Pluskowski, The Complete Innovator 

Bonus:  Review and interview with Scott published today by Braden Kelley at Blogging Innovation

This week's virtual book tour for Scott Anthony's book The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times  continues. Here are links to all the posts that are up so far: 

• Monday, July 20:  Chris Flanagan, BIF Speak
   
• Tuesday, July 21:  Jeff De Cagna, Principled Innovation
   
• Wednesday, July 22:  Josh Kutticherry, futurethinktank
   
• Thursday, July 23:  Jim McGee, FastForward Blog and McGee’s Musings
   
• Coming Friday, July 24:  Boris Pluskowski, The Complete Innovator

This week Scott Anthony's book The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times will be featured in a virtual book tour. Five different bloggers will be running reviews of the book, as well as video and/or audio interviews with Scott. The schedule is below. The first review, by Christine Flanagan of the Business Innovation Factory's BIF Speaks blog, is already up! 

•  Monday, July 20:  Chris Flanagan, BIF Speak (http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/weblog/silver_lining_review)
• Tuesday, July 21:  Jeff De Cagna, Principled Innovation (http://www.principledinnovation.com/blog/)
• Wednesday, July 22:  Josh Kutticherry, futurethinktank (http://futurethinktank.com/)
• Thursday, July 23:  Jim McGee, FastForward Blog (www.fastforwardblog.com)/McGee’s Musings (www.mcgeesmusings.net/)
• Friday, July 24:  Boris Pluskowski, The Complete Innovator (www.completeinnovator.com/)

We've all heard companies give lip service to the idea that failures — course corrections — must be tolerated in order for innovation to happen. Our feature story this issue highlights the work of Rita Gunther McGrath, co-author of the newly released Discovery-Driven Growth, who asserts that failure must be more than tolerated — it must be welcomed and planned for. McGrath cites Procter & Gamble's A.G. Lafley, who famously has said that unless P&G experiences a certain failure rate from innovation efforts, not enough of innovation is happening, as an example of a good approach to failure. McGrath talks more about how to plan for and manage course corrections in this issue's feature story. Here's an excerpt (full story is here; book excerpt is here):

Q. My understanding from having read the book is that we seem to be synched up in this area of what we're calling “emergent strategy.” We've covered this in Chapter 6 of The Innovator's Guide to Growth, among other places, yet we don't often go into as much detail about how this works as you do. You've taken that one concept and detailed it.

A. Yes, I call that “strategy dynamics” — this idea that when the data doesn't exist, you need to be taking action before you can begin to understand what's going on. The whole strategic planning idea, where you're going to sit there and project out five years — in a lot of today's markets, it's not practical and it's not really going to get you anywhere. So it's the whole concept of you just realizing the right strategy as you go. We call it “discovery-driven” mainly to get the idea across quickly that this isn't about planning, it's about discovering.

Q. Can you give me the capsule description of what discovery-driven growth is?

A. Sure. Discovery-driven growth had its genesis in the recognition that existing planning systems make a lot of assumptions that are just not borne out in highly uncertain situations. So the book is really about ways that you can take strategic action, minimize your risk, and move forward, even without all the data that conventional planning systems assume you have.

Also in this issue is our monthly Disrupt-O-Meter, this one a look at the new OnLive gaming service (full story is here):

The brand-new gaming service OnLive has been surprising and delighting consumers and pundits since it was announced about a month ago. The service proposes a very different and novel way of delivering games — users stream the games over the Internet instead of running them on physically local hardware. In so doing, OnLive challenges the conventional wisdom that the Internet just isn't good enough to stream content like graphically intensive games at high resolutions without perceptible lag. If OnLive can deliver against this ambitious goal it may have substantial disruptive potential.

As always, thanks for reading Strategy & Innovation! Archives are free with registration here.

This post is the last stop on the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour for the book The Designful Company by Martin Neumier, who is also author of The Brand Gap and Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands. I'm glad I had the opportunity to read this book and talk with the author, because I have to admit to some skepticism about the entire design-thinking movement and the effort to make all innovation be about design. However, after reading this book and engaging in the following email dialogue with Marty Neumier, I now understand more about the entire point of design thinking than I did before. It all hinges on how you are defining design and how much latitude can be given to using that broader description to drive corporate innovation.

Here's the interview:

R: Clearly when you talk about “design” as a way of apprehending and seeing the world, you are not talking about the design of room décor. For those not already on the “design thinking” bandwagon (and not already designers), what is the working definition of “design” that makes it appropriate as a system and not an action?


M: In my view, design can be a system, an action, or the outcome of an action. For example, I work in design (the system of thought), I design things (the action), and the results are various designs (the deliverables). I especially like Herbert Simon's definition of a designer. Simon was a Nobel-winning social scientist who helped pioneer artificial intelligence. He said: "Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

My purpose in writing The Designful Company was to show that the discipline and the activity of design can be applied to more than "posters and toasters," or communications and products. It can also be applied to higher order challenges such as brand-building, decision-making, organizational structure, and management models.

R: You say that you can apply the principles of aesthetics to strategy and organizational change. How can aesthetics work for these things in a prescriptive way, rather than a descriptive — i.e., how can aesthetics be used to drive and guide strategy and organizational change, as opposed to being used to looking backward at those things and assign aesthetic principles to the results after the fact?

M: Nice observation. We normally "ascribe" aesthetic qualities to things we already believe are beautiful, don't we? But that's because most of us don't think like designers. We think like audiences who have little control over our experiences, except the control that comes from choosing. We've become a culture of shoppers. We expect to choose our solutions off the "solutions rack," instead of creating new solutions that weren't there before. When you start "designing" solutions, you bring along the need for aesthetics — concepts like contrast, rhythm, pattern, scale, simplicity, and efficiency — to inform your solutions, instead of noticing them after the fact. You become a maker instead of an audience member.

R: I'm particularly interested in the concepts of simplicity and efficiency. How can these be used to drive innovation at the organizational level?

M: It's easy to be innovative once. Most great businesses are founded on one great innovation. It's much harder to be innovative time and time again. To do that, you need a culture of innovation.

But what happens is that companies start building on their first successful innovation by adding more complexity — extra processes, controls, brand extensions, and so on — to bolster and commercialize what's working. This added complexity makes it more difficult to recreate the conditions that gave rise to the original innovation.

So what they need to do is to break down the silos, the complexity, and the rigid thinking so that they reclaim the simplicity that first allowed them to innovate. They need to become "designful" again.

R: There’s an ongoing debate as to whether a company culture must be innovative in order for the company to be innovative, or whether putting one innovation foot ahead of the other and pushing forward anyway can lead a company to develop an innovation culture. You seem to be in the first group here. Please talk about why you feel it’s important for a company to develop an innovation culture *before* trying to innovate, and talk about how they might go about doing that.

M: I'm actually in the second group. Realistically, a company can't wait until its culture has been fully transformed before starting to innovate. In my book I outline 16 "levers of change" that can be used separately or in concert to move the organization from a spreadsheet-driven company to a design-driven company. Of course, the further along the transformation curve, the easier it is to innovate.

R: I sense a tension in your book between asserting that everyone can be trained in design thinking and that you need real designers to be able to innovate. Are you saying that there’s a class of people who are designers and therefore able to do this, and another set of people who don’t have this talent and therefore are doomed to always need a designer to turn to for creative thinking?

M: No. I've found that most people are already design thinkers — they're just unaware of it. If designing is about changing an existing situation into a preferred one, then we're all designers. The only question is whether we can martial the principles and processes of design to apply them deliberately and effectively.

People don't easily acquire new skills, much less a new way of thinking. So the best way for a company to jumpstart a culture of innovation — at least in my experience — is to build a strong internal brand department that can work across silos to influence the rest of the company. The process starts with hiring the right people.

R: How would you go about training non-designers to think more like designers?

M: I'd use a "branded training program." I'd start a company-wide educational program that teaches rarefied skills in the areas of innovation, collaboration, communication, brand strategy, and brand behavior. I say "branded training" because the skills shouldn't generic — they should be aligned with the unique purpose and strategy of the business. The fact is, company can't out-innovate the competition unless it can first out-learn it.

My view is that anyone can think more like a designer by simply making it a priority. Like the zen master says, when the student is ready, the teacher appears

Here are links to the previous reviews, interviews, and podcasts on the tour: 

• Monday, April 20: Brand Autopsy
• Tuesday, April 21: The Marketing Fresh Peel
• Wednesday, April 22: Idea Sandbox
• Thursday, April 23: Principled Innovation
  

After the rush of reviews for The Innovator's Guide to Growth that resulted from the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour, we were pleased to see another review of the book published last week by Jim McGee of the FastForward Enterprise 2.0 blog. McGee reviews the book from the point of view of a technology industry innovator, which is a bit different perspective than that of most of the other reviews the book has gotten. It's worth looking at if that perspective is of interest to you. An excerpt:

Christensen and his colleagues are continuing to build a rich, systematic, theory of disruptive innovation. With roots in academic research, they are freely sharing their insights and their methods. The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is a solid workbook that will let you develop your own skill at doing disruptive innovation. Of course, the plan by itself won’t eliminate the need to gain the experience for yourself. But it’s a lot better strategy than to have to work everything out from scratch on your own.

This week the Innovator's Guide to Growth was featured on the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour. Five different bloggers reviewed the book and interviewed the lead authors, Scott Anthony and Mark Johnson. We'd like to thank all the bloggers as well as Paul Williams, the organizer of Post2Post, who blogs at Idea Sandbox.

Here's the wrap-up on who posted what when, with links:

Monday:  Gordon Graham of Broken Bulbs posted an interview with Scott Anthony about the book's potential application in a broad range of circumstances including small business, business schools, and in what industries Scott expects to see disruptive innovation in the future.

Tuesday:  Greg Daines of Ideanomics posted a review of the book and promises to post video of his interview with Mark Johnson soon. Meanwhile, he called Innovator's Guide to Growth "the best business book of 2008."

Wednesday:  Josh Kutticherry of FutureThinkTank posted Part One of an interview Scott Anthony (second part, including an audio interview, coming next Wednesday), in which he asks Scott about ideation and inspiration, and poses the $100 million question: "What would you do with your copmany if someone gave you $100 million to grow it?"

Thursday:  Idris Mouttee of Innovation Playground posted an interview with Scott Anthony about special corporate innovation teams, overshooting, targeting nonconsumers, and innovation metrics.

Friday: Gregg Fraley at Gregg Fraley Creativity & Innovation posted a review calling the book "the new bible for innovation managers and leaders" and praising its "it’s womb-to-tomb" approach to innovation management and process.

And, the book tour lives on past its allotted week, as well — next Wednesday, Oct. 1, Josh Kutticherry will post the second part of his Scott Anthony interview and Doug Stevenson (Fraley's partner in "The Innovise Guys" blog and podcast series) will post a review on The Innovise Guys blog. We'll also be watching for Greg Daines' video of his Mark Johnson interview, and will link to that when it's up.

Awake at the Wheel: Getting Your Great Ideas Rolling (In An Uphill World) by Mitchell Lewis Ditkoff (Morgan James, 2008)

The ability to create ideas is, curiously enough, both underrated and overrated. Underrated because we all get ideas, and we have probably all heard the famous Linus Pauling quote (paraphrased): "the way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.“ Overrated because it’s possible that we wouldn’t need so many ideas if we just knew how to nurture and build on the ones we have. Awake at the Wheel offers a forgettable, parable-based approach to ideation, but between the techniques – and there are true gems in that regard – runs a golden thread of information on how to care for and feed ideas:

“No matter our preferred approach [to ideation]…the challenge remains the same for all of us: how to honor, develop, and manifest our own ideas. … Our ideas are diminished, not because they are worthless, but because we do not know how to elicit their value. … Afraid we will be judged, or worse, fail, we discard them long before their time.”

As I said, I found the parable portion, set in the Stone Age, not terribly edifying. However, the book offers an extremely useful toolbox, which presents ideation and idea-building techniques in five categories – attend; intend; suspend; extend; connect. The idea of putting the ideas into categories is in and of itself instructive, offering information on how and when to use the techniques.

My favorite technique was “Happy Accident.” We’ve all heard about breakthroughs that were made while the inventor was trying to accomplish something else. Viagra, after all, was originally a heart medication. It didn’t work for its intended purpose, and yet the researchers had trouble getting the participants in the clinical trial to return the samples.

But how to consciously make such an “accidental” breakthrough? According to the Happy Accident technique – “The next time anything goes wrong with a project of yours, stop and see if the mistake offers any clues about new ways of proceeding.”

Similarly, the technique “Lead to Gold” offers a blueprint for changing bad ideas to good ideas: “Conjure up a really bad idea in response to the challenge [you are working on]. Write down anything good about this bad idea – any essence that is redeemable in some way. Using this redeemable essence as a trigger, generate at least three ideas you can do something about.”

If you’re feeling particularly creative or already have your own techniques for originating, developing, and manifesting new ideas, you can enter the Awake at the Wheel Tools and Techniques contest. If your technique is used in the book’s sequel, you could win $100. If it’s voted the best by readers, you could win $1,000. Now that sounds like a good idea to me! 

Last year on my previous blog IdeaFlow, I reviewed Jack’s Notebook by Gregg Fraley, a book with the intriguing subtitle “A Business Novel about Creative Problem Solving.” This week I had the opportunity to revisit the book, and Gregg, as part of the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour.

While telling the story of Jack Huber’s rise from under-employment to starting his own business, Jack’s Notebook takes the reader though the steps of the powerful yet sometimes elusive Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS), a meta-model for thinking and problem-solving that’s been around for about 50 years. CPS training is most commonly taught at the CPSI conferences put on by the Creative Education Foundation [note: I learned the process at CPSI five years ago; my IdeaFlow posts on various CPSI conferences are here].

Herewith, my conversation with Gregg about Jack's Notebook and creativity in corporations:

Q. It’s been 15 months since we last talked about Jack’s Notebook. What has the response been, especially from business readers?

A. As far as sales go, it’s been fair and remains steady. As far as what people say, it’s been great. There haven’t really been any bad reviews. As far as business goes, I had one Fortune 100 client who bought a copy for everyone in her department. I heard later on that one person had an epiphany as a result.

Q. Why do you think that was?

A. Creative thinking offers transformational possibility, both personally and for a business. My mantra is that creative processes and sophisticated methodologies are wonderful things, but creativity itself is where the rubber meets the road in day to day behavior. You could be an expert in TRIZ and still not be thinking creatively on a day-to-day basis.

I’ve got another story, about an engineer working on his PhD degree. He emailed me that he had started carrying around a notebook in which he did daily brainstorming and then convergence [note: the main two steps of the CPS process are divergence and convergence]. He told me it had changed his life, and he said that that daily work had helped him start his own business.

Q. When you do hear criticisms from business readers, what do they say?

A. One of the criticisms has been that this is not a classic business book. I actually agree with that. It wasn’t written that way. It’s not directly related to a specific corporate challenge, but more a fundamental business skill — creativity. And that skill will bubble up if you practice.

Q. Speaking of skills, when you work through CPS with corporate clients, what’s the place where they generally have the most trouble?

A. Definitely, in reframing challenges. Most people are resistant to reframing because they think they know what the problem is. Sophisticated business managers can be stumped by the tools and techniques that allow team to see things from a different perspective. And how you frame a problem has everything to do with how you solve it. Setting up “guardrails” can get people thinking the wrong way.

Q. In my experience it’s important to use something like guardrails to frame a problem in order to come up with the most creative solution within the constraints of the business objectives.

A. It depends on whether you are working on new product that’s simply a line extension, or on a breakthrough. For example, I worked with a company that was trying to come up with a new dessert, and all the ideas were simply variations on existing desserts. It wasn’t until we reframed the problem as “In what ways might I own the after-dinner occasion?” that we started coming up with breakthrough ideas.

Q. Oh — that would be a framing that’s similar to our JOBS lenses, where we work to understand what job the customer is actually trying to do, and frame the challenge in that way.

A. Right.

Q. So, how creative do you think business people have to be in order to come up with breakthroughs?

A. The right person can be incredibly meaningful. Look at Steve Jobs. Look at Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod and the iPhone. When you look at the iPhone and compare it to what Sony, Motorola, etc., have come up with, it just looks so much better — and that’s one guy. The average Joe Blow isn’t going to do that.

However, that doesn’t mean that the average corporate manager, if they stick to a process, can’t deliver meaningful incremental innovation. And I believe average people can do amazing things, with the right motivation and a good process. And passion means a lot. If you combine passion and motivation with a process, breakthroughs are definitely possible for anyone.

Q. Jack isn’t motivated or passionate at the beginning of Jack’s Notebook.

A. That’s right — he’s actually depressed. People get flat because of lack of hope. What motivates him is hope. And hope comes from thinking in a little different way. It goes back to reframing. If you ask the brain a question, it wants to give you an answer. If you give it an open-ended statement — such as, “in what ways might I _______”  — the brain will reconfigure it a million ways.

Recognizing you’re in a hopeless mess is often where problem-solving begins. Another common first step is recognition of fear and facing of fear. Sometimes rules have been around corporations so long, no one's left who knows why they exist — they’ve been around for years. And as a result, people get into traps and beliefs that could be changed, except for their fear of challenging the rules.

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One of the benefits to being scheduled toward the end of the book-tour week is that I can link to previous stops on the tour. The other virtual-tour-stop blogs have had varying focuses, so if you’re interested in Jack's Notebook you might want to see what’s been written about it from other perspectives:

• The Naked Idea (charities and nonprofits)
• Education Innovation (education)
• Marketing Fresh Peel (branding)