Fredrik Härén's Blog, page 11

Expand your personal frontier by applying the art of the possible. (Episode 121)

Interview with Larry D. James, Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer at The Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

 

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Larry D. James has one of the coolest jobs on the planet. Or let me rephrase that: He has one of the coolest jobs in the solar system.

Larry is Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer at The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) – a research and development center associated with NASA that focuses on the design, development, and operation of robotic space missions. Their innovations are out of this world.

One of their many, many amazing projects was to build the first flying vehicle on another planet. They were the ones who developed the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.

To fly something on another planet – a planet that has an atmosphere that has 1% of the pressure of the atmosphere on Earth – is a crazy challenge but JPL pulled it off with a smile. And the helicopter flew over 70 missions (way pass the initial goal of 5).

Larry summed up what draws some of the smartest people to work at JPL when he said: “If you want an exciting career where you aorganizationn organization that takes on big challenges for the whole human race, then this is a good place to be.”

I asked Larry to share with me what we can learn about developing our own creative abilities from such an extremely innovative organisation.

At JPL there is a culture of always wanting to go further. Larry calls it “The Art of the Possible.”

They aim to tackle problems that have never been tackled before and aim to answer questions that have never been answered, by focusing on how to make them possible.

The Art of the Possible is about having a mindset of focusing on making the seemingly impossible possible.

Larry told me, with a smile: “Here we like to ask two questions when people propose an outrageous idea. First we ask: “Does physics prevent it?” Then we ask: “Is it illegal?” If the answer to both is “No” then our next response is: “Let’s figure it out!”

The Art of the Possible is such a refreshing mentality in a world where so many people focus on why things cannot be done.

When asked how to live in accordance with the Art of the Possible Larry said: “First raise the bar for the kind of questions that are being asked. Then do a check to make sure that these questions really need to be answered. (to make sure you are not going down a futile or unnecessary route) and finally ask yourself: How can I get the resources to make this happen?”

The mission of JPL is to “expand the frontier of science and to better understand our earth and the universe.” With a mission like that you can see that people get inspired to think beyond what is.

But the mindset of the Art of the Possible can be applied to anyone and anywhere, according to Larry. “To make the seemingly impossible possible, we need to expand our personal frontier. Creativity is about wanting to go further.”

“Expand your personal frontier” – what a beautiful approach to life.

Where are the borders of your own creativity, and what are you doing to expand beyond them?

These are the questions we should ask ourselves on a regular basis to make sure we are pushing our creativity to its full potential.

To paraphrase another creative space man: “To Creativity and Beyond!”

The post Expand your personal frontier by applying the art of the possible. (Episode 121) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

The extremes of being The Creativity Explorer. (Episode 199)

Yesterday, I stayed in a suite at the Conrad in Dubai as I was there to deliver an opening keynote speech for IT security experts from the region.

Today, I did a pro-bono speech on Zoom from my home in Sweden for a class of Afghan girls attending a secret school. (I blacked out their faces on the screenshot as they could not risk being seen attending a class.)

The two worlds could hardly be further apart.

And that is why I LOVE being The Creativity Explorer!

Sweden and Afghanistan are on totally opposite sides of the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world. UAE and Afghanistan are on totally opposite sides of richest countries on earth (UAE is #7 and Sweden is #20, Afghanistan is not even on the list of the 190 richest countries.)

It’s by exploring creativity from all sides of the human spectrum that I get to build a holistic picture of human creativity.

If you are looking for a speaker on creativity who has studied the subject from all kinds of perspectives, you know who to contact.

ps. For the Afghan girls, I spoke about the need to have “imaginations” – a made up word that stands for the act of imagining what you need to do to achieve your dreams. (“Dream = I want to go to America”. An imagination: “How do I get to go to America”.)

People should not just “have dreams”, they should have “imaginations” where they are actively looking to solve the obstacles to their aspirations.

What is your “imaginations”?

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Would love to know your thoughts. Do comment on ​LinkedIn​.

The post The extremes of being The Creativity Explorer. (Episode 199) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Innovation Slipping. (Episode 120)

Interview with Arturo Martinez Torres, Innovation & Technology Leader at Grupo Quimmco.

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Innovation Slipping is the insidious, slow and barely noticeable decline in innovation over time as a company gets older and more established.

When a company is founded, it’s often buzzing with innovation, but then processes are set up, procedures get cemented, and inertia sets in. Pride in past successes blocks the urge to find new ones.

 

And slowly, innovation slips.

But Innovation Slipping is reversible, if a company really focuses on getting back on the innovation track. Here are three things you can do:

1)  Change from having a financial focus to having a transformational focus.

Less about measuring what has been done and more on looking forward to what we could or should be doing.

2) Change from an “operational mindset” to an “innovation mindset”.

A well-oiled machine is great, but organizations are not machines. There needs to be a space and a place to try new things out, to experiment and to, yes, fail.

3) Change from thinking of “an innovative organization” to thinking of “an organization of innovators.”

Organizations do not invent anything. People do. Focus on how you get the most creativity out of your people and how to best support their creative potential.

It’s possible to reverse the effects of an organization suffering from innovation slipping, but to do that, you need to be aware of a crucial observation: You slip when you are not paying attention.

A person not seeing the wet spot on the floor – or the banana peel  – is the one who slips.

And an organization that will suffer from innovation slipping is an organization where the leadership is not paying attention to what’s happening to their innovation.

Innovation Focus is the antidote to Innovation Slipping.

****

This observation was inspired by a conversation with Arturo Martinez Torres, Innovation & Technology Leader at Grupo Quimmco.

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Undeterring – The act of being undeterred. (Episode 119)

Interview with Brian J Smyth, Managing Director and Global Innovation Lead, Communications, Media and Technology at Accenture.

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We need a verb of the adjective undeterred. A word describing “the act of not being deterred or the process of persisting without discouragement.”

 

May I suggest the word: Undeterring.

 

It is not an established word in standard English dictionaries or usage, but it should be.

We could use it to describe a team of innovators, like this: “The team’s undeterring spirit led to a breakthrough, ultimately making the innovation a success.”

Undeterring spirits are what people who are trying to push new innovations and technologies need every day.

Why do we need the verb? Because a verb is a word that conveys an “action, an occurrence, or a state of being” and we need more people to take action to make new technologies and innovations come true. We need to encourage the act and that state of being.

A person who has an undeterring spirit is Brian J Smyth, Managing Director and Global Innovation Lead, Communications, Media and Technology at Accenture. Part of his job working in The Dock, Accenture’s global R&D hub in Dublin, Ireland is trying to get companies to understand, get interested in, try out, and adapt new technologies such as AI, VR and AR, and he constantly runs into people who are skeptical, negative, uninterested or uninformed about the potential of new tech. He, of course, also runs into loads of people who are interested, passionate and curious, but for those people you do not need the undeterring spirit

His job is to turn around the skeptics.

 

To get them to see the opportunities.

To do that you need to be undeterring.

Brian shared how, in order to get people onboard, you need to:

a) Make them see some value.

Brian: “You have to understand that people have so many current problems and tasks on their to-do-list that it’s very hard to get them to put potential new solutions on top of all those tasks. You need to show them that it’s worth it.

b) Give them the confidence to interact with the new technology

Brian: “The unknown can scare people. Have a grand vision, but when showing a new technology start with showing solutions that are close to existing products and services that people know and understand. If the leap is too big, people will fail to make that leap.”

And then realise that innovation is never a straight line. Keep pushing, keep evaluating what is working and tweak what is not. It’s hard to get others to see what you see.

Brian said that he is “attracted to the greyness that is the unknown”. He is energized by “the challenge of opening the eyes of people to the winds of opportunity.” The skepticism fuels him.

But Brian is not a rabid contrarian. He wants to help people. Or in his words: “I want to help uncover the clouds that stop people from seeing the future and their important role in shaping it.”

He has: An undeterring spirit.

Do you?

The post Undeterring – The act of being undeterred. (Episode 119) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Be your own Chief of Creativity. (Episode 118)

Interview with a Chief of Staff to the Managing Partner.

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What can we learn about creativity from a Chief of Staff? That was my reason to book a conversation with a Chief of Staff to the Managing Partner at a professional services company in Ireland who has been with the company for almost 10 years.

 

The role of a Chief of staff has become legendary thanks to the characters Leo McGarry and CJ Cregg in the epic TV series “The West Wing.”

 

As Chief of Staff you are the eyes and ears of the person you are assisting (be that the President of the United States or Managing Partner of a company). You are also the gatekeeper that filters out who and what gets through, as well as the person who is expected to be one step ahead of the person they are working for and have all the relevant information and briefs ready. In the words of my interviewee: “I make sure the MP has all the information he needs to make decisions and have informed conversations and that those conversations are happening at the right time.”

 

I begin by asking: “What is the most valuable skill for a Chief of Staff?” and they replied: “To build trust and to galvanize people toward a common goal or purpose. People come to me with lots of different information that they want me to share with the MP and my job is to filter that and only give him what he actually needs. So I need people to trust that I can make that decision.”

When I asked what the best part of the job was, the reply was: “That (as Chief of Staff) you have a seat at the table but without the accountability or ownership of decision – there is a beauty in that.”

The beauty is the freedom that comes from having access to all the information but without having to make the final decisions. That allows you to take a contrarian role, to think broader or wider – to put things on the table that weren’t there.

 

A big part of the job is to “collect, share, and sift information.” By being at the top of the information pyramid, or the spider in the middle of the information web, if you like, it’s crucial that a Chief of Staff knows how to decide what information is “need to know” vs just “nice to know”. Not only to know what to filter away, but also to be able to catch that piece of crucial information that needs to get through.

With so much information flowing towards you how does one decide what to let through?

They explained: “You are not just skimming the information, it needs to be deeper than that, but at the same time you need to be aware that you cannot afford to go down any rabbit holes and get lost in detail.”

When I asked what this technique is called, the interviewee stopped and thought for a second and then burst out laughing: “Snorkelling! I am an information snorkeler!”

And that is an analogy that I instantly understood. The ability to be totally immersed without going deep.

The way to do that, according to the interviewee, is to have the confidence of not needing to know it all and the ability to know whom to ask when you need to find something out.

I think snorkeling is the perfect analogy also for how to approach information when we are creative, so I ask them for what makes a good “snorkeler”.

The reply was: “Be aware of the purpose of your pursuit, the why…and then trust in your ability to get the right information at the right time from the right people.”

The position of Chief of Staff requires someone to be confident, agile, purposeful and to be someone who values the importance of relationships built on trust and respect – “building and then maintaining trust is an ongoing commitment. The most important thing I hold is the trust of my boss.”

The job demands a person who is hugely organized, who knows how to build relationships, knows how to read a room, and how to judge and evaluate information and think on their toes. Someone like my interviewee.

Be inspired by how a professional Chief of Staff works with information.

 

Have the approach of “Snorkeling through” information in order to quickly and efficiently understand which information you need for your creative project and which information you do not need.

 

Be your own “Chief of Creativity”.

The post Be your own Chief of Creativity. (Episode 118) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Lesson from my Montblanc wallet. (Episode 117)

Interview with Benjamin Goh, Regional Marketing Director at Montblanc.

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Contrary to popular belief, the most important customer for a company like Montblanc is NOT the person who buys a Montblanc piece to make an EXTERNAL statement about how rich, successful or fashion conscious they are. Those customers are also important, but they are not the most important.

 

The most important customer is the person who buys a Montblanc product to make an “INTERNAL statement.”

An “internal statement” is when someone buys a product – not to communicate to others who they are or want to be – but to remind themselves about who they are.

A person like that might not even want to become an ambassador for the brand. They did not buy their item to stand out, but to remind themselves to be outstanding.

It’s a statement not to others but to oneself.

 

Montblanc knows this. On their site you can read this text; “Just as every Montblanc product is the result of our master craftsmen’s souls and their stories, the final heirlooms will subsequently become part of your unique tale, creating an invisible bond between our soul and yours.”

I own a Montblanc wallet and have done so for years. But I do not use it to communicate anything to anyone else, even if some people might think that I do. I use it so that every time I use it, I will remind myself of what kind of person I am and what kind of person I strive to be. At Montblanc, they “believe that everyone can leave a mark.” And it is that message that they stand for that I want to remind myself of too.

It’s an internal statement only meant for myself. It’s a target audience of one, but it’s a very important audience, for me.

In a world full of “influencers” trying to influence others what to think, buy or do, the really impactful thing to do is to focus on the people who are trying to influence themselves to be better.

What internal statements are you making to yourself?

This text was inspired by a conversation with Benjamin Goh, Regional Marketing Director at Montblanc.

The post Lesson from my Montblanc wallet. (Episode 117) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

The Meaning of Meals. (Episode 198)

This episode is inspired by a conversation I had with a Mexican chef as research for my upcoming book, The World of Creativity.

 

You can learn a lot about life from Martha Ortiz and she learned a lot about life from food.

Martha grew up in a family where the father was a famous doctor (he did the first kidney transplant in South America) who read a lot, and a mother who was an artist and a cook. The two biggest rooms in their home were the library and the kitchen.

 

Her parents would have big dinners with artists, intellectuals and other interesting people as guests and little Martha would sit at the table and listen.

It was there she understood that people having meals together is one of the most profound, collective, creative and inspiring things that humans do.

Later in life she became a chef herself, opened her own restaurants on two continents and became a judge on the television cooking competition Top Chef Mexico, amongst many other things.

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Martha is passionately conscious about the effect that eating good food together with other people has on us. A person cooking food for herself to eat in solitude has nothing in common with a group of friends coming together to share a meal. The first is about nutrition. The second is about life.

Or, as Martha calls sharing a meal: “It’s a celebration of life! The magic of life!”

Something happens when we share a meal. We all know this. The joy, the togetherness, the sharing. The exchange of humanity.

Or as Martha said it: “Everything happens at the table. Love stories, family drama, business deals. Everything.”

It is the sharing of food with people that makes it magic. And perhaps that is the clue to the magic of all creativity: that it’s shared with others.

Sitting at home and writing a poem that no one else will read is a creative act. But creating with others, or sharing your creativity with others, is a much bigger creative act. The first is about mental nutrition. The second is about life.

We can go so far as to say that creativity is sharing. And life is about sharing our creativity.

 

𝑭𝒓𝒆𝒅𝒓𝒊𝒌 𝑯𝒂𝒓𝒆𝒏, 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑪𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝑬𝒙𝒑𝒍𝒐𝒓𝒆𝒓

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Idea Deliberation (Episode 116)

Interview with Ankur Dasgupta, Vice President of India APJ Marketing at NTT DATA.

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One of the most common mistakes people make in the creative process is to judge the merit of an idea purely based on the first mention of the idea. Often, they have made up their mind about the idea just seconds after hearing about it. They either love it, hate it or are indifferent to it, but they forget, or jump past, the important phase of “Idea Deliberation.”

An idea is just the tip of a metaphorical creative iceberg. The true essence of an idea is much more than just the idea. Until you deliberate on the idea, that is, “to think or talk seriously and carefully about it”, you cannot understand the thought process behind it, the potential it carries, and the future it holds.

Idea deliberation is the art of asking “why?” when you hear an idea. Creative people know that you do not fully understand an idea until you have heard the thought process that led to it. You must develop a curiosity to learn more about it. The ‘why’ often leads you to what the idea wants to accomplish and tells you if that is in your or your organization’s goal sets.

A mathematics teacher will mostly ask students to explain how they came up with the answer so that he or she can determine whether they understood the given problem enough. Similarly, to appreciate an idea or its potential, one must explore it at a deeper level to understand its foundation as well as its promise.

Next time a person presents an idea to you, fight the urge to decide what you think about it, and instead withhold your judgment and engage in deliberating upon it to try and fully understand the reasons why the person with the idea believes in it, how they came to the conclusion that the idea should be implemented and why they think it’s a great idea.

Make it a habit to deliberate on an idea before deciding what to think about it. You, the idea, and the person presenting that idea to you deserve it!

***

This text was inspired by a conversation with Mr. Ankur Dasgupta, Vice President of India APJ Marketing at NTT DATA. He is based in Bangalore.

Mr. Dasgupta told me about how (About 15 years ago) in a brainstorming session at the company he works for, a person presented an idea that they should create extra-curricular activities for the employees, such as encouraging hobbies, trainings, up-skilling opportunities, and even competitive events like Hackathons. He asked, “why?”, and the person shared his thoughts about how the company would benefit from high employee retention, how more employees can be encouraged to stay on with the company by increasing the engagement level in the company and how it is connected to a sense of self-appreciation, and how employees can mitigate risks of becoming redundant by keeping ahead of changes in the tech landscape. Just as extra-curricular activities in schools play a huge part in shaping who a child becomes in school, similarly an adult will develop not just based on their tasks but also what he or she does outside of work. A company that understands that and helps develop, facilitate or empower those aspects of an employee’s life will have a better chance of keeping them with the company. Therefore, these engagements were a great idea.

The idea deliberation exercise during the brainstorming session brought forward more reasons why the idea was good and what challenges could emerge if the organization decides to implement it.

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The creativity sweet spot between obvious and random. (Episode 197)

Question: On a scale between 0 and 100, where 0 is totally obvious and 100 is totally random where would you put a good idea?

The, perhaps surprising, answer is 70.

I got this number from Rafa Jiménez, whom I met in Mexico City. Rafa is the founder & CEO of Seenapse and Rafa has been thinking about AI for creativity since 2014, years before thinking about AI became trendy. His tool, Seenapse, helps creatives to become more creative by using an AI tool specifically developed for helping people get better ideas.

When tweaking their model they realised that when the AI generated obvious answers, people, obviously, found them uncreative. But when the model generated totally random answers the users equally found them uncreative. It turns out that the most valuable results the AI created was when they asked the algorithm to create answers based on 70% obvious and 30% random.

To do that the model, of course, needs to know what you already know and Seenapse does that.

It’s easy to think that the less obvious something is the more creative it is, but the more you think about it the more you realise that creativity is about being “surprisingly familiar”.

It’s the same with a good joke. A story that is totally predictable is not going to be funny. But a story with a random ending that has nothing to do with what the rest of the story was about is not funny either – it’s just weird.

But a story that ends up right outside of the expected outcome, a story that ends in a way that makes sense, but not in the way you expected it to be presented, is the very definition of funny.

Creativity is not about random randomness, it’s about taking people out of their expected world while still letting them feel connected to what they already knew.

In whatever you create, think about your audience and ask: Is this 70% obvious?

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Digital Transformation is dead. Long live Process Transformation. (Episode 115)

Interview with Carina van den Berg, Director Global Finance Sustainability & Operations at SKF.

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What we call things matter. And if we talk about “Digital Transformation,” we are focusing on the tool (digital products and services) instead of the solution (better processes).

So yes, I am saying that for the last 25 years or so, businesses have been focusing on the wrong thing.

Companies shouldn’t be talking about “digital transformation”, they should be focusing on “process transformation”.

Sure, often process transformation includes digital solutions, but often they do not.

One department that has understood the need to focus on more effective and better processes is the finance department of the global bearings and seals company SKF.

Carina van den Berg, Director Global Finance Sustainability & Operations at SKF told me: “We have created what we call a “Finance Development Office” which is a transformation office filled with process experts dedicated to questioning, developing and transforming our processes.

Carina agrees that the phrase Digital Transformation can be distracting. Carina: “(In business) we talk way too much about ‘digitalisation’ and not at all enough about process development. (Leaders) should think much more about how we can get the job done better. This does not mean we shouldn’t digitalize. But the solution might be more education, better communication, clearer rules, or another million things that have nothing to do with anything digital.”

I asked Carina for three things to think about when it comes to Process Transformation.

In summary, she said:

1) Stop and reflect

With all the everyday work that has to be done it’s sometimes hard to understand what processes are actually not optimal. The whole idea of having a Financial Development Office is to have a place where experts get to evaluate and study existing processes as well as test out new ones. Their job is also to pick up suggestions for improvement from people working with existing processes.

2) Ask yourself: “What could we get rid of?”

It’s so easy to add a new process, system or procedure, but which of these can you take away?

Carina told a funny story about how some of her colleagues were swearing over a report they had to put together and Carina just told them: “Who are we doing this report for? Will anyone actually notice if we do not do it?” So they just didn’t do it and no one noticed for months….

I am not saying we should just stop doing our work – and neither is Carina – but we should question all the processes we have to study if they are really needed.

One of my pet peeves when traveling was all these tiny “landing cards” that you had to fill out when you landed in a new country in countries like Singapore or Malaysia, and then suddenly one day they were gone! A victory for the mindset of questioning which process could be removed.

3) The third advice for Process Transformation that Carina mentioned was: See the whole picture.

A process might make sense from your perspective, but processes often affect others as well. A finance process might affect the sales organization or procurement. Is your process optimal for everyone involved?

Carina shared the example of how the procurement organisation had noticed how efficient the finance department was at handling the invoices that they asked finance to handle the invoice process from start to finish. And by doing that the finance department got a holistic understanding of that process which made it possible for finance to make the process much more efficient.

The word “process” comes from the word “proceed” as in to carry on and to move forward.

In everything we set up within our companies we should ask “Is this process moving us forward and is there a better way that could move us forward more efficiently?”

At the SKF Finance Development Office they have a saying which goes: “What does good look like?”

Carina adds, with a smile, “We are not looking for ‘perfect’ the world is way too messy for perfect, but we are looking for a way of making what we do in the best way possible. To make it as good as possible.”

If you want your company to be effective, develop effective processes; and if you want effective processes make sure that people are focusing on questioning and evaluating old processes and imagining new and much better processes.

Make sure they are thinking of Process Transformation.

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