Bring Creativity and Innovation to Business

A cliche, that appears to be universally believed is, “Experience is the Best Teacher.” My father once told me he disagreed. He said, “Experience is not the best teacher. It may be a good teacher, but it is not the best teacher.” He then went on to explain that experience can extract an extremely high price. It is not only costly, it can inflict pain. And learning through experience is slow. Just think how long it would take you to learn something if experience is the only way you had to learn. Yes, experience can teach. And yes, you can learn. And the lessons you learn are not easily forgotten. But there are far better ways to learn then having to rely on experience. Learning from observation, listening, the experience of others are all much faster, less painful, and less costly methods of learning.

All this is not to say you should not learn the lessons experience is teaching you. By all means, learn what experience has to teach you. But don’t rely on experience along. Utilized all the other methods of learning first. Experience is perhaps the most inefficient and dangerous method of learning.

Innovation is hard. If it were easy everyone would do it. But why is it so hard. Managing innovation is what is difficult. Creating a culture that supports innovation is certainly difficult. Then nurturing an idea into a product or services that people love is hard. Innovation is hard because there are so many myths about innovation and consultants are selling snake oil. Innovation is not something that is taught in MBA curriculum.

Innovation can be approached from several sides. It can be approached as a process, a strategy view, and an organizational structure or even as a toolkit. Each approach can be a little different.  What works for one organization may not work for another. Creating a   culture that encourages and promotes is easier said than done. Developing a culture within an organization that encourages innovation takes time and many organizations have the will but lack the time. Those organizations need to look externally for help. Bringing an organization together overnight in order to translate product and service initiatives into sustained results is tricky. But here are 5 quick tips:

1. Challenging Assumptions.

This is a very difficult thing to do. Why? Because we make so many assumptions we do not even recognize them as assumptions. Most of them are correct but a great many are incorrect. The problem is we do not know which ones are right and which ones are incorrect. Because, if we knew which ones were incorrect we would change them immediately. So the first step to effectively challenging assumptions is to identify them. Start with the question, “What else would have to be true for this to be true.” More often then not you will discover that your idea is not a fact but an assumption and therefore something to be challenged. No good ideas will be seriously looked at without overcoming the assumptions that are held by an organization or industry. These exist in service industries such as banking, health care and hospitality as well as products industries such as, consumer electronics and personal care products. It is usually easier to start challenging your own assumptions by looking at industry level dogmas. Challenge everything!

2. Involve the End User.
It is a lot easier to be creativity if the creativity is not trying to solve a problem of provide a purpose. The purpose for any business or organization is the customer. If an innovation fails eventually to provide value to the end customer then the innovation fails. Any organization that believes it can provide value to a customer without involving them in the process is deceiving itself. Most consumers are intelligent and can contribute so much to the creative process. While it is true that often time people may not be able to voice their needs and desires in a manner that makes sense to you, your job is find creative ways to understand their needs, values and behaviors. Then you must figure out how to include them in your process.

3. Build an Innovation Team.

At the executive level innovation requires guts. Not everyone is cut out for it. But without executive support the needed resources will never materialize. Businesses that are vibrant yesterday may not be vibrant tomorrow. So the executive must be courageous enough to take dollars away from yesterday’s businesses and give them to tomorrow’s businesses even though they are as yet untested. That takes guts. The majority of executive just are not capable of making innovation happen.

The innovation team needs to be made up of people from across different functions and business units. The team needs people not only will a range of skill set of also a range in temperaments. In addition to the nature instinct to put people on the innovation team who are idea people i.e. those who are abstract thinkers, the team will need those who study the facts carefully, people who are strong organizers, and finally those who have strong people skills. Start with a small team and gradually expand to add more people. At some point, you will be ready to make this an organization-wide.

4. Innovation is a Business Process
As with any business process innovation efforts should be managed. It cannot be done in a box. Develop metrics to tack the activities that make sense. I would warn against metrics that measure only results. Innovation is a process and as such you want to insure the process is active. The effectiveness of the process can be measured by the desired results. When you do get either a big or small win, ensure you communicate it across the organization. Innovation is a team sport. And every team needs it cheering fans.

5. Utilize Techniques to Improve Success Rate

It is not uncommon to hear people claim that innovation project have failure rate of about 98%. That is most likely because they are not approaching it in a systematically. Define a system that is sustainable with in your organization. Should involve problem identification and definition, and early communication. Utilizing techniques and tools such as open innovation your success rate should be high. It is true that failure is part of any innovation process, but improving the chances of success is also part of an innovation strategy.

One of the most useful and important tools in a magicians arsenal is misdirection.  Misdirection is generally misunderstood by the layman. Misdirection is not making you look at something while the magician is doing the sneaky stuff elsewhere. While that is the popular conception of misdirection it is woefully inadequate. Misdirection is letting you see what you anything you want to see. in fact you see so much that it is difficult to decide what is important. Because choosing what is important is difficult the magician “helps” you decide. Of course his directing you to what is important is in the wrong directions.

Your customers, employees, and co-workers often will misdirect or confuse you. Unlike the magician their misdirection is usually not intended. The misdirection is the result of mistrust. They believe that if they are open and honest with you, you will cheat them. So they believes they must be cautious. The obvious solution is to build trust. But that occurs over time. So what do you do in the mean time. You can easily misjudge the importance of a thing. So how do you guard against misdirection?  How can you tell what is truly important? Waiting until the trick is over or the contract is signed is too late. Because what is thought to be unimportant it is not remembered. Why should it be? You thought it was unimportant.

During a magic trick the magician moves relentlessly through the routine making your mind both process what just happened and at the same time try and keep up with what is currently happening. All that information is difficult to process. Unlike a magic trick, we can stop an customer, employee or co-worker and test what we believe is important. This allows us to identify potential problem areas before they are agreed to

The best tool I found for stopping the misdirection is to simply rephrasing what the person said, in your words, with your inflection, and your understanding. Then asking the simple question “Is that correct?”

Try it I think you will find its work magic for you.

There is a lot of buzz around creativity now. Business school have MBA concentrations on it. This may seem strange to many who think creativity just happens. Not true creativity requires nurturing and care. It is easy to squelch. And it is done all the time. It is squelched most often because it is not understood. Like so many things that are not well known there are several myths that surround creativity. Here are 6.

1. Only certain people or types of people are creativity. This is absolutely untrue. We are most likely to think there certain jobs attract creativity types and certain jobs do not.  Jobs like product development, marketing and advertising have creative people while accounting does not.  The reality is, nearly all of the research in this area agrees, anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing creative work. Creativity depends on things like: experience, knowledge and technical skills; and intrinsic motivation i.e.  people who are excited by their work are often creative.
2. Money Motivates Creativity. Experiments show that bonuses and pay for performance can actually have a negative impact on creativity. The reason is that when people believe that ever move they make is being watched and will impact their paycheck they be more risk averse. But money can be a demotivater. If people feel they are not being fairly compensated they will also have reduced creativity. Again the research indicates that people put far more value on an environment were creativity is supported, valued and recognized.
3. Time Pressure Increase Creativity. Often people will say they are more creative when they are under pressure. The research indicates just the opposite. They only think they are more creative. They are not. In fact the research indicates not only are they not more creative while under the time pressure. Creativity is reduced for the next two days.
4. Fears Force Breakthroughs Again the research indicate that the emotional state we are in effects our creativity. In fact it can often be a predictor. If someone is happy, joyful, feeling loved etc. The next day they will be more creative.  If that person feels anxiety, sadness, anger, etc. The next day they will be less creative.
5. Competition Enhances Creativity. It is widely held that competition between 2 of more teams will produce more creative results. The facts are that it is collaboration not competition that increase creativity. Once the competition begins information is no longer shared. And without the sharing of information ideas are not debated and refined.
6. Streamlining or Right Sizing Forces the Organization to be Creativity. There are some concrete reasons why creativity is reduced. Line of communication between organizations have be severed and need to be rebuilt. Teams have been destroyed. And need to be regenerated. But there are also the less tangible areas. When people feel fear they are less creativity and less productive. The worse of all situation is knowing the cuts are coming but not knowing how each individual is effected prolongs the anxiety.

The research sited here was conducted in 2004 by Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School

How do you become more creative? The answer is simple. Are you ready? Practice! Yep! That’s it. Sorry no magic spells with this one. You just have to keep trying.

There is a great debate as to rather or not creativity can be taught. If something has been done then there should be no doubt it can be done. I believe creativity can be taught because it has been taught, thus proving the thesis. The debate is really over rather some people are naturally more creative than others. It is the classic nature versus nurture debate.

Creativity is an art but that does not mean that it does not have rules and guidelines to follow that allow us to be better at it just as all other forms of art do. There are technique and tools can be taught to allow people to be better than they were before. And some people learning the skill is easier that with other people. But the skill can still be and has been taught.

There is some innovation training available but after learning how you will not suddenly be creative. After being taught how to play the clarinet, I could actually make music with the instrument rather than just annoying squawking noises. But it was only through practice I became any good at it. Practice also plays a important role in being creativity. Like other art forms you improve the more you try. I was never, what you would call really good at playing the clarinet. I was just too lazy to practice the amount of time that being good required. But I was pretty good. Today, however, I can barely play the instrument at all. Why? I have not practiced in a very long time. Playing a musical instrument is a perishable skill. I lost the skill of playing the clarinet by not continuing to practice the clarinet. I still know what to do, I just can’t do it. I have the knowledge but not the skill.

When you start practicing being creative, the probability is you will not be good at it. That’s ok! When you start playing a musical instrument you aren’t any good at it either. The only way to become good is to stay at it. It is work but I believe you will find it the most fun work you will ever do.