INNOBLOG

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.

---------------

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)