We Have Met The Enemy and He is Us (Walt Kelly)

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Many organizations do not recognize that they have an innovation problem.

Last year I attended an industry-sponsored event that included a dinner with “thought leaders” on the subject of innovation.

The event started predictably enough with statements such as, “our only problem is finding enough good people”, or “we have so many ideas, the problem is sorting through them.”

After several bottles of wine, the comments became more candid:

  • “Our management only allows us to innovate by modifying packaging, color or size of our existing product line.”
  • “How do we even start?”
  • “Where do you find decent ideas?”
  • “There are no good new product people anymore.”

One confided – “We lost a major opportunity simply because we could not figure out how to get a sample roll through the SAP system.”

There is a revolution taking place in innovation and product development, but many companies are wedded to the old way of doing things. Like the dinosaur, they will face extinction unless they learn how to innovate quicker at lower costs and shorter time to market.

Oblique Strategies

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obliqueI am a big believer in Edison’s “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration”. At Micrex, we eschew creativity enhancement programs, inspiration tools and their ilk.

Problem solving, however, is not without rules. We run trials of one kind or another almost every day. Failure is a big part of our world, and learning from these failures is how we capture value from the activity. As we have found many wrong ways to run trials, we have developed techniques for when things are not going well.

This summer I was introduced to a very special deck of cards, Oblique Strategy cards. These were developed by two artists (Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt) in 1975 to facilitate what is called lateral thinking. Education teaches us to problem solve by digging deeper into a subject. Lateral thinking, or a lateral strategy, is one that basically picks one up and suggests a new start. Each card has a thought or concept that is designed to move our thinking – laterally.

The first card I pulled from the deck was, “Do we need holes?” For what I was working on at the time – the concept was break-through. Use the links above to learn more.