Idea bubbles

One of the questions I am often asked in seminars and by my clients is “how do you get your ideas?’

I’m glad you asked too. I’m just assuming this as presumably you are reading because as you are a little curious. Most of my rent is actually paid by providing the answer to that very question and showing people how they can plug into their own creativity.

For my sins I have always been endlessly curious, I always want to see what is on the other side of the hill and desperately avoid giving what I call “car key’ answers. You know that feeling of mild panic when you can't find your car keys? When you find them, you stop looking don't you? Most people answer questions in the same way and work on the basis that the first answer is the correct one. They don’t push on to look at the alternatives, the outlandish, the bizarre, the more creative solution. Some people are good at sport, singing, maths. I'm blessed, or cursed if you like, by being a thought nomad. My school reports didnt; ever suggest that this would actually be a good thing, but i can't complain and the journey it has taken me on and count myself lucky that it has allowed me to meet such an interesting bunch of people along the way.

This part of my persona has got me into trouble on several occasions, caused some amiable ( at least on my part) frictions with other colleagues who are content to paddle their canoe with everybody going in the same direction, at the same speed. There is nothing wrong with that. Its is comfortable. I’m just not comfortable with comfortable. It doesn’t float my boat. That's not to say I seek the uncomfortable for the sake of it. That would be daft and I’m not that. Bewildered and deluded maybe. My other pet hate is waste, wasted talent, wasted time, wasted opportunity. I’ve always struggled with the balancing act between the two. Sometimes you have travel up a dead end just so you and others don’t go there in the future. Ask Mr Edison( If you could). That my frustration is now my mission in life - to show the people paddling the canoe how much fun it is, how rewarding and just how fulfilling getting out of their comfort zone can be. Then they really would be able to exploit their talents and experiences and enjoy their 37 hours a week plus the commute. And take it home with them to their relationships, their children, their hobbies.

I know for some people the coming up with a new idea it seems insurmoutable. It is difficult to get the creative juices fully flowing. Our current educational system, seemingly at every stage, fails woefully to train us how to think sideways, upways or downways. It doesn’t help that in any creative process we are asking ourselves, and others, to move out of the comfort zone. You almost always have to move out of the canoe flotilla. Being out on your own, the fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of a whole bunch of stuff, can build mental barriers that are almost impossible to breach. But I firmly believe that anyone, and I mean anyone, even the most cynical sceptic, (providing they can fog up a mirror), can be trained how to be creative. No really... even accountants. You just have to know how to plug them in to the mains.

Not every technique works in every circumstance. A case in point is the brainstorming session; one of the most used tools to effect creative thinking. Over twenty years in this business have failed to leave me convinced of their true effectiveness in most circumstances where they are poorly executed and only serve as the starting point for the innovation process that should follow. Few see the connection. We had a brainstorming session It'll be alright then, then. Despite the fact that there may be a 'no judgment’ rule, in good brainstorming sessions anyway, you just know that at the next coffee break somebody will be whispering: "Did you hear what he said? How stupid is she?" They work for certain projects for certain groups, copywriting and ad campaigns come to mind, but only with a great facilitator and they are a rare bird indeed. I’ve lost count of the truly painful mind numbing sessions, that I've had to chew my tongue through,that have created enough flip charts to kill a small forest. They have their place true but I’m not a fan for other more practical reasons too, there are much better techniques but we shall save that for later posting

My own trick, which seems to improve my personal ideation productivity at least initially, involves working alone. Not that I’m antisocial. Just the opposite actually, according to teh resluts of my latest character personality assasination/anaylsis questionaire. Please never put me in an open plan office if you want quick answers. My “place” is my study at home, I kick off my shoes and grab a very strong coffee and then pace about the room for an hour, or more, often all afternoon, humming. This foible, I find, tends to drive people mad in an open office. Others, I know, need a hot shower and to get dressed up, and , sad as this sounds I know, may even have to put a tie on! Some will drive a car, walk the dog, do the ironing, or jog. Mundane repetition has been shown by psychologists, studying the bleeding obvious, to clear the brain; providing a sort of colonic irrigation for the head. Just a word to the wise here. Don’t, as a friend of mine did, ever suggest that the ironing would be 'therapeutic' for his partner and ‘free up her creative energies’ or you may find that the flying iron can leave a nasty mark.

There are lots of places and tricks we can use, and what works depends on individuals and the organisation and its social software. Somethings we do unconciously are actually the triggers. I read in one academic paper that smells can do it too. Interesting to observe the test programme for that I think.

Over the fifteen years I worked in New Product development I’ve gathered a few tools along the way to help my colleagues and me smash through hurdles. There are a dozen or so techniques for fueling creative thinking, which I’ve found consistently work really well, but the first and most important part of any creativity exercise is figuring out what is the right question to ask in the first place.. The killer question as Phil McKiney calls it.

But how do you figure out what the key questions should be? Glad you asked.. again. One of the key tools that has consistently helped extract myself and my team out of a pile of whatever is a methodology called TRIZ, (This is pronounced ‘Trees’ by the way, I give you this information just so you don’t look like the clot I did for three years when you talk about it!) A Russian gentleman developed this technique about 50 years ago. He obviously had too much time on his hands, as he reviewed hundreds of thousands of patents looking for common threads. We must thank him sincerely (Through a medium) for his efforts though as Mr Altschuller identified 40 inventive principles. Along with these his matrix and contradictions principles form the basis of the key tools and have lead directly to some huge steps in technology I won't bore you with here. The current database has now reviewed over 2.5 million patents. If you want more information then google TRIZ after you have raed this and I’ll wake you up in the three months it takes you to read every paper written about it. It looks and is damn confusing when you start off, until some kidn soul takes you by the hand and shows you the way. Luckily for me I found one such person. It isn’t the most accessible of tools and, to be frank could do applying some of its own problem solving power to some creative self PR.

However, over the years it has been modified and simplified somewhat and developed into the systematic inventive system, a series of tools for those tricky problems, in new product development, problem solving, inventin and innovation. It is particularly effective at deveoping and strengthening patents. It has been getting a much higher profile with the CEO's as they can now more easily evaluate and develop their company's most valuable asset, its IP.

Although developed initially by and applied largely to engineering problems the same principles can be applied to any aspect of Marcoms, CRM, new product and service development and is even being applied to conflict resolution in the MIddle East and other theatres. Maybe Mr Blair and Mr Brown need some edification in its delights?

There are five key Tools to help you. Although the idea behind each Tool is quite simple (the Tool of Subtraction, for instance, simply asks that you subtract some element from an existing product), actually using the tool can be tough, since it requires that we think in new and unintuitive ways. That is the hard part. Our natural resistance to doing truly unintuitive things - moving outside our comfort zone- creates a mental obstacle, which makes it hard to get the most out of the Tools. To solve this problem, a set of Principles was devised which we use alongside the Tools. The Principles help the user of a tool get into right head place for using it and, hopefully, becoming more innovative. Unfortunately it is not a substitute for talent. It enhances those who have it, but it does often make those who may ordinarily struggle at least stand out from the crowd.

No point just talking about it. Let's see how it works in practice using one of the tools, the Tool of Subtraction, and the Principle that they call the Path of Most Resistance (PMR).

Imagine you're a mobile telephone manufacturer and you're trying to come up with a new product. What sort of innovations comes to mind?

Most, if not all, of your ideas probably involve either adding something to the phone, or enhancing a feature that already exists. Can you actually get a phone without a camera? At the risk of being accused or becoming one of the Grumpy Old Men I have to admit that this drives me slightly nuts when I go into one of my defence industry or R&D clients. For security reasons you often cant take your camera phone on site so you have even more forms to fill in and check outs and check ins often take longer than the meeting itself. I digress.

When we try to create things, our usual mindset is to add something to the existing product. It has to be faster, smaller, have more buttons, more functions - it's the easiest way to go about it, and we naturally follow the path of least resistance. To use the Tool of Subtraction - to take something away from the product - is not intuitive, and not as easy. It requires us to follow the Path of Most Resistance - to do the least intuitive, most uncomfortable thing - at least temporarily.

As we move forward, we continue to use the Tool and the Principle together. Let's start by subtracting what seems like the most essential element of a phone- the screen. We will most likely want to rush to replace the missing screen with something - a monitor, or LED, let's say. But since replacing the missing component is our intuitive response, and we're trying to follow the Path of Most Resistance, let's try, at least for the time being, to leave the screenless telephone as is. Let's ask ourselves if there could be any possible use for such a product. Well of course there is, they didn’t used to have screens until a few years ago anyway but then maybe we have forgotten and revisit some of the basics.

In fact, there are some interesting possibilities for our screenless telephone:

A communication and entertainment tool for the sight impaired
A telephone you can use just in the car
A phone you can take into secure areas, (yippee!) You know some libraries and museums are banning camera phones to protect copyright and pirate photocopying!
A low cost onsite telephone system for employees
A phone you can build into other appliances and equipment, or a car.

Sound far fetched? Wrong answer. If you are looking for a real example of reduction just look at the Motorola Razr phone. I’m not sure how true this but it is a story doing the rounds in innovation circles in the telecommunication business as I write. It was originally canned by the Motorola execs as they thought there wouldn’t be a market for a phone that had less functions than the competition. The only reason we, and seemingly every other body in the universe are walking around with them now is because one engineer ignored them, used his budget to rapid prototype in China and then presented it to the board only after he had shown it to two or three major potential carriers. I for one, can easily believe it. On a roll now, just applying one simple change took it into the stratosphere. Praise the soul who asked the next question “What if we make it pink? We will double the potential market”. Actually one of the 40 TRIZ inventive steps on your checklist is, 'change the colour'.

A product that may at first have seemed ludicrous turns out to have several uses.

The value of using a Principle like the Path of Most Resistance is that it forces us to think differently than we normally would. But you might have noticed that once we were pushed past our initial resistance, it was fairly easy to come up with uses for a screenless telephone. The Tool and the Principle working together make it easier to be innovative.

Let's return for a moment to our screenless telephone. If we continue to follow PMR, we can push this idea even further. Once we see that the product has potential users - the blind, the security conscious and drivers - we may want to consider how else those users can use the product. Will the driver, for example, use her screenless phone outside the car? Will the blind person's sighted family be able to enjoy it? Yes - but only if they can see, and not just hear, their programs. Which of course requires a screen. Our natural inclination might be to search for the best possible screen to which we could attach our screenless TV, but PMR will direct us to look for at solution that already exists in the product's immediate environment - like a PC. This can be the basis for a sort of PC TV, which is easy to implement by installing a card into the PC or plugging your phone into a laptop or the DVD TV player in your kitchen for wireless video streaming and video conferencing . Or….. you get the idea.

In this case, the user of Subtraction is guided by the PMR Principle, to maximize the tool's effect. Similarly, all the Principles support the use of any of the five tools. Just for fun I can tell you that the other tools are;

Attribute Dependency
Division
Multiplication
Task unification

But they are a whole other bag of monkeys! To be continued…

However, please don’t overlook the most important tool. What we in the innovation business call the ‘Idea Capture Device” but, you may know as simply a notebook. You never know when the idea will come and if you don’t write it down as soon as it arrives, you risk loosing it forever. At my last count I've got over 200 notebooks, but them I'm an idea Junkie.

Next Blog issue, "capturing the moment and couple of tricks to help".