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The One Best Way (Part 4): Creativity

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Looking closer at whether there is one best way to solve a particular problem: let’s look at creativity and bringing it into your company. Can it be taught? Probably to some degree. How to invent, be more creative, or develop new products has always been part art and part science.

George Bernard Shaw wrote in Man and Superman — “Bob: I’m so discouraged. My writing teacher told me my novel is hopeless. Jane: Don’t listen to her, Bob. Remember: those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”

While there are individuals and firms that claim to teach creativity, I suspect that if anyone really had the key, it would have been more remunerative to make inventions, than to teach others how to do it.

This is evident in the investment business. Investment advisors are everywhere, but few have their own success to show for it. The successful investor is generally unable or unwilling to part with his knowledge unless highly rewarded.

This is relevant when it comes to hiring consultants. While it is desirable to keep some tasks in-house, if you do not have creative capacity on staff, contracting out – bringing the creativity in – provides a cost-effective solution.

Going back to the original question: Is there one best way to add creativity to your company equation? No. It depends entirely on the industry, the company, the culture, the age, education, experience of the staff and the size. The charge led by “Here is how they do it at Intel” can be a disaster for the wrong company.

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.

Rumsfeld Matrix (Part 1)

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”Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — 2002, Donald Rumsfeld.

From this came “The Rumsfeld Matrix”.

Rumsfeld Matrix

Product developers and their managers have always had trouble dealing with uncertainty. The Rumsfeld Matrix illustrates both the “comfort” that comes from working in the lower left quadrant where all is known, as well as the complexity with working in the top right.

You can bet the “fuzzy front end” is not so fuzzy if you live in the bottom left quadrant.

More about the implications of this in future posts.

Methodology Gives Those With No Ideas Something to Do

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The title above was taken from Mason Cooley’s “City Aphorisms”. You have got to love it.

In brief – here is how large corporations approach product development. It begins with idea generation. This is the brain storming – the hard-to-define process aptly called “The Fuzzy Front End”. While there are scholarly works dedicated to just this portion of new product development, this is probably the least well-understood part of the process.

Ideas that successfully exit the “front end” will then go through a series of stage/gates before finally being commercialized as a new product. These stages are relatively easy to define and are usually well-understood by the host company.

As much has been written about The Fuzzy Front End as well as Stage/Gate, I recommend other sources for a more detailed explanation.

Despite the existence of this conceptual framework, companies have a very difficult time innovating successfully.

This blog will explore why this is and what can be done about it.