Fredrik Härén's Blog, page 9

Live your life. (The Creativity Explorer. Episode 209)

Many years ago, I had a 90+ old neighbour who, after a life working as a hairdresser, still had clients.

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I asked her: “I love this, so you are never going to retire?!”

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She replied: “I haven’t taken on new clients in decades, and my old clients keep dying off, so I have fewer and fewer clients each year. When my last client dies, I will stop.”

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At that time, she had just two living clients left…

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But she kept her at-home-salon open for those two old clients.

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She told me that having one leg left in her professional life made her feel more useful and energized. And she loved cutting people’s hair.

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This story is a reminder to me (and you) not to accept how people or society expect you to live your life. (In this case: “You work, then you retire!”).

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Live your life.

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(I wish I had a photo of her, but I do not, so I asked ChatGPT to make one for me. The photo is AI generated, but the story is real.)

 

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The post Live your life. (The Creativity Explorer. Episode 209) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

In praise of the small ideas. (Episode 207)

At the breakfast at Hindsgavl Slot castle yesterday, they had homemade honey from their own bees, salami from animals on the farm, apple juice from their own apples and marmalade from their own strawberries.

 

The castle is impressive, the height of the auditorium is stunning, the tech of the hotel is perfect, but it was these small details of homemade food at the breakfast that I sent pictures of to my wife, and that I will remember.

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In my speech for the Danish meeting industry (Danske Konferencecentre) I pushed for how meeting venues should invest more time in these small, but powerful ideas instead of chasing the “big innovations”.

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(I also loved how the castle had saved a place where you could see the 12 (!) layers of paint and 5 layers of wallpaper that the walls at the castle are made up of.)

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As I ended my speech: “Small ideas can make a big difference.”

 

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Agree?

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What other small, but powerful idea have you seen at a hotel recently?

The post In praise of the small ideas. (Episode 207) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

The forgotten art of being able to scepticize. (Episode 133)

Interview with Frank Ferro, Director Insights at PostNL.

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In 1924 Miguel de Unamuno wrote: “Sceptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.”

One hundred years later this message is more important than ever.

The root of the word “sceptic” comes from the word “spek- meaning “to observe”.

To be a sceptic originally did not mean to be negative, it only meant to have an open mind and a broad view on a topic and to look closely at it.

And to “scepticize” is the act of being sceptical. It’s an actual word from the 1600s that, sadly, never caught on. We should bring it back. Because scepticizing has never been more important than now.

With stronger and stronger tools, such as AI and algorithms, what we humans can create is becoming more and more powerful, but with all new technologies there are also numerous potentially dangerous, negative or unwanted side effects.

Whenever we invent something new we need to be able to also identify these unwanted and unintended consequences, as well as the great ones.

To do this is a skill. A very important skill.

We often talk about the need to be able to say “What if…?” in order to be able to find new potential.

But we also need the ability to say “Yes, but what if…?” – in other words have the ability to see the less positive scenarios.

Doing this is not to be “negative”; it’s to be creative enough to see multiple scenarios.

It’s extra important when it comes to new technologies since the ethical aspects of them have not been discussed before.

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This text was inspired by a conversation with Frank Ferro, Director Insights at PostNL, the postal company of the Netherlands. At his department, they develop powerful algorithms that affect millions. He told me about one time when the fraud detection team had developed an algorithm to identify customers who were underreporting the number of letters they were sending in order to pay less in postage. The solution was a great way to identify unethical customers. But Frank scepticized the solution and asked: “If the algorithm can detect companies that are underreporting the number of letters they send, can it also identify companies that are over-reporting the number of letters they send?”

The others in the team looked at him with confused faces. “We have never thought of this.”

Frank explained that wrongly overcharging customers was unethical, and if the algorithm could help them stop that it would be the right thing to do.

 

The trick to scepticizing, according to Frank Ferro, is to have the ability to withhold judgement. To take the time to reflect on as many alternative scenarios as possible in order to observe what you are working on from as many different ways as possible.

Scepticizing is a highly creative act.

One we should encourage more people to engage in.

The post The forgotten art of being able to scepticize. (Episode 133) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Do not take calculated risk – take calibrated risk. (Episode 132)

Interview with Nils Kjetil Vestmoen Nilsen, Digital Innovation Manager at Schlumberger.

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People like to talk about the need to take ‘calculated risks’ in business.

But calculated risks are an illusion. The meaning of the word “calculated” is “done with full awareness of the likely consequences.”

Raise your hand if you think it’s possible to have “full awareness of the likely consequences of where your business is going right now? (and if you think it is possible, then what is the risk?)

No, instead of chasing the mirage that is “calculated risk”, we should aim to take “calibrated risk”.

The meaning of the word “calibrated” is “carefully assessed, set, or adjusted.”

Now that sounds a much more relevant approach to taking risk, to constantly and carefully assess, set and adjust your actions towards the perceived risks out there.

I learned about “calibrated risk” from Nils Kjetil Vestmoen Nilsen, Digital Innovation Manager at Schlumberger, an energy company. They work with technologies to support exploration, drilling, and production of oil and gas, as well as with renewable energy.

Nils job is about helping to digitalise the oil and gas industry. While the industry was very early in using big data and AI there is always new frontiers to aim for. Right now a moonshot project they are working on is “the self drilling oil rig” as well as projects to return CO2 back to the ground. At the same time they are introducing smaller changes to their clients.

Talking to me about “calibrated risk” Nils told me: “Calibrated risk is about balancing the different kinds of risk you are taking. Some big, hairy goals and some moonshot ideas, but also some low hanging fruits and low risk projects.”

Taking calibrated risk is not about going “all in” on one “big idea”. Instead, it’s about going “all kinds of in” on a mix ideas with different levels of risk.

Nils told me: “(When you drill for oil) you are always in uncharted territory. No-one has been where you are going, so there is no way of having full awareness of all the likely consequences. Instead, we have to constantly adjust. That means we also have to have an arsenal of innovation projects with different levels of risk, as well as different potential reward.”

Take no risk and you play it safe but you might be over run by the competitors.

Take too much risk and you might hit the jackpot, but you might also totally miss the mark.

So take calibrated risk where you create a platter of innovation initiatives of various risk, some low risk, some high risk – and always calibrate them by assessing and adjusting them to what’s happening.

The post Do not take calculated risk – take calibrated risk. (Episode 132) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Humanizing colleagues (Episode 131)

Interview with Thomas Djurso, Country Manager for Cognizant in Denmark.

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Here is a refreshing approach to building a team: Make people connect with each other as humans, not just as colleagues.

And no, I am not talking about infrequent kick-off meetings that happen way too seldom, or an after-work, which is usually some friends at work going out on a Friday.

I am talking about deliberately and consistently connecting people who work with each other to help them better get to know each other as human beings.

The man who pointed me towards, what we can call “Humanizing the team”, was Thomas Djurso, Country Manager for Cognizant in Denmark.

Thomas told me how he got the local 25 salespeople together on a kind of “speed-dating” with the purpose of getting to know the other person – as a person. Not as an expert or a professional.

“What do you do on the weekends? What are your hobbies? What brave things do you like to do”, and so on.

Thomas explained that getting to know the person behind the role builds closer relationships, stronger bonds, and deeper trust.

Thomas has these meetings on a regular basis.

When you hear about the reasoning behind it, and about how successful it is, you have to wonder why not every team does things like this more often.

Thomas: “If I know who someone really is we can make even better business together. It’s about breaking down professional barriers, and you can really connect with someone when you find something that you have in common. Connecting with another person is the spark that starts the fire of curiosity!”

Because people know each other they are more inclined to help each other, and a bonus effect was that they got a better understanding of who they were themselves after sharing personal things about themselves with others.

People went from being “Mr. Johansson who is a data scientist”, to “Bob, who plays saxophone in a jazz band and is a fantastic data scientist and uses his improvisation skills to develop new IT solutions.”

And the more people connect on a human level, the more connections are made.

Connections build connections. If you know that someone, for example, is playing in a jazz band in their free time, you can have the idea to bring that back to your next kickoff.

And it’s working. Employee satisfaction at Cognizant Denmark is very high. People who work there are not “just colleagues”, they are more than that, because they have connected on a personal level.

Yes, people connect all the time at work, but seldom is this facilitated in a conscious and deliberate way. It is this idea of turning human connection into an active activity that makes the difference.

How could you build more human connections in your teams?

The post Humanizing colleagues (Episode 131) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

The Creativity Suite. Episode 130: Six degrees of Creativity.

This episode of The Creativity Suite is anonymous.

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Here is a question for you: If knowing the right person to make your ideas happen is so valuable, and if knowing how to correctly ask them for what you need is crucial for innovation, then why are we not spending more time helping people develop their network and mastering the art of the ask?

 

I chose to call this text “Six Degrees of Creativity” as a twist on “Six Degrees of Separation,” the idea that everyone is connected to everyone in no more than six connections. The more I interview creative people, the more I understand how important a person’s network is for ideas to happen.

 

Six Degrees of Creativity implies that every person is a maximum of six degrees of separation away from making their best idea happen if they just use their network in the right way.

 

The person who inspired me to write this text is the Head of Marketing at a multinational company based in Dublin. When I interviewed their work and how the company works with making ideas happen, they said: “We are really a people business. When we tackle a problem for our clients we look for the best combination of skillsets from within the organisation. It’s almost like a formula where we ask ourselves what kind of minds do we need to solve this problem?”

 

With way over 500,000 highly skilled people around the world, the company really can pull together a team with the optimal skillsets.

 

 “It’s when you add the right people (to a group) that the magic happens. There is a power in being collectively clever, original and inventive”, they said.  

 

But with so many competent people to potentially connect with, the skill becomes knowing who to ask and how.

 

They told me how, at their company, they have a culture of being able to ask questions.

 

“I have access to global teams, loads of different content experts in a vast number of areas, but you need to know where to knock.”  

 

Knowing who to ask and when is like being an air traffic controller of ideas balancing who to ask, about what and when.

 

But it’s not enough to be able to know who to ask for help/input at the right time, you also need to know how to ask.

 

Let’s call that “the art of the ask”.

 

A person who is constantly asking everyone, who is asking for the wrong thing from the wrong person or asking at the wrong time is soon going to shrink their network as well as dilute any credibility they might have.  

 

Knowing when, who and how to ask is about understanding context, consequences, and communication.

 

A well phrased question or request at the right time to the right person is a gift. Done wrong it’s an annoyance.

 

It might just be the difference between your idea becoming a success or never being realized.  

 

So practice the art of the ask, both how to ask and knowing who to ask. Because the art of asking is a skill that can be taught, and considering how important it is for your ideas to become a reality , it might just be the most important skill you can practice.

The post The Creativity Suite. Episode 130: Six degrees of Creativity. first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Blue Ocean Strategy is good, but Blue Sky Strategy is better. (Episode 129)

Interview with Dawid Sold,  Managing Director of G4S in Serbia.

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When the book Blue Ocean Strategy came out in 2004 it became a big hit with companies.

The book is built around a metaphor of the “blue ocean” and “red ocean”

In the red ocean, “companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. Products become commodities, leading to cutthroat or ‘bloody’ competition. Hence the term red oceans.”

Instead companies should aim for the blue ocean which is “an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential to be found in unexplored market space.

It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant.”

Great concept, but here is the flaw: It focuses on the company and its competitors. Not the customers!

Now, let me instead introduce you to Blue Sky Strategy. Here you are focusing on using creativity and innovation to create demand by uncovering new opportunities that the customer doesn’t see.

Your focus is not on you vs your competitors. Your focus is on you and your customers.

In Blue Sky Strategy your job is to “clear the clouds of ignorance for your client.”

Clouds of ignorance are areas where customers do not see solutions that could be good for them because they are not aware of them. In this metaphor, the clouds symbolise how the customer’s ignorance is “clouding” their judgment.

I learned about Blue Sky Strategy from Dawid Sold,  Managing Director of the global security solutions provider G4S in Serbia. In a previous job he was working in logistics and created a solution that would help customers (who normally shipped their products by truck) to instead start shipping with containers.

The customers were “clouded” by the idea that shipping by truck was the best solution, but Dawid and his team were able to open customers’ minds to a new solution (containers) that they were just not considering before.

Do not spend your focus, energy and attention on what your competitors are doing or how you are doing compared to them.

Instead, spend your focus, energy and attention on your customers’ potential needs, their unseen potential and the customers’ untapped opportunities.

Innovation with a customer focus. Not a competitor focus.

Innovation with a focus on solutions that the customers are not aware of yet.

Help your customers to see clearer by removing their clouds of ignorance.

Apply The Blue Sky Strategy.

The post Blue Ocean Strategy is good, but Blue Sky Strategy is better. (Episode 129) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Do Diligence (Thoughts on creativity, inspired by Korea: Episode 206)

This message is inspired by the word that stuck with me after interviewing creatives in South Korea: The word was “diligence”.

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Some people look at the economic success of South Korea and say: “It’s because they work so hard.” Or because they “work so much”. Some even say: “It’s because they work TOO hard, or TOO much.”

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Sure, some South Koreans work way too much – they even have a word for working oneself to death: “kwarosa.” But the message of this text is not to be inspired by those who work too much but to be inspired by those who work diligently.

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To be diligent is to have “the quality of working carefully and with a lot of effort.”

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And according to Etymonline.com the “sense (of the word) evolved through time from ‘love’ through ‘attentiveness’ to ‘carefulness’ to ‘steady effort’.”

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So the original meaning of the word diligence was “love”.

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Being diligent is not about “working hard.” It’s about putting in a lot of mental and emotional effort into what you are creating because you profoundly care about what you are doing.

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If you ask me, the vast majority of creative people are diligent.

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Not necessarily hard working, but diligent. That’s what make them so creative.

They put in a lot of effort into what they are doing.

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The next time you feel that a creative project you are working on is not going the way you wish it would be going, then ask yourself: “Am I really being diligent with my work on this project?”

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My trip to Korea inspired me to try to be more diligent myself.

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So remember to do diligence.

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This was inspired by a number of creative people I met while in Korea, especially a meeting I had with Amy (Jungyeon) Wee, founder of ACRES International.

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Would love to know your thoughts. Post your comment on LinkedIn.

The post Do Diligence (Thoughts on creativity, inspired by Korea: Episode 206) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

How many creative thoughts per day? (Episode 205)

Question: How often per day would you say you have a creative thought?

1-10 times per day? 11-100? 101-1000? 1001-10,000?

For this survey, my bar for what constitutes a creative thought is quite low. I am not talking of “painting a painting” or “coming up with a breakthrough invention.” I am talking about simple everyday creative thoughts. (But I am also not talking about “Oh, I am going to have coffee for breakfast,” especially if you usually have coffee for breakfast.)

Examples of what I am looking for: Changing queue at the grocery because you realize that the one you are in is slow. Solving a tricky problem at work. Seeing a beautiful move in a chess game. etc etc.

How many times per day would you say you have that “positive mental boost” that only comes from having a good idea that somehow makes you solve a problem in your life?

I would love to hear your estimate.

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Post you comment here.

The post How many creative thoughts per day? (Episode 205) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Episode 128: The Understander is always right.

Interview with Tore von Würden, Country Director Denmark/Norway/Iceland for Amgen.

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The idea that “the customer is always right” is outdated. The customer often does not know what they want. How many mobile phone users would have said that they wanted the iPhone before it was launched, just to take a famous example.

And to quote Steve Jobs: “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.”

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But if it’s not the customer’s job, then whose job is it?

It’s the job of “The Understanders.”

I learned about “The Understanders” during a conversation with Tore von Würden, Country Director Denmark/Norway/Iceland for Amgen. (Amgen is, with its 33,000 employees, one of the largest independent biotechnology companies in the world.)

An Understander is a person within an organization who best understands the customers and their needs.

Understanders can be in sales, customer support, in the front-lines or in the back-office. It’s not a position, it’s a mindset and a skill.

A skill of being the best at understanding what the customer really wants. It could be argued that there are no more important people within an organisation than the Understanders.

Tore told me how they had identified a nurse within Amgen Denmark who was an Understander. Pernille, as she is called, has – according to Tore – this unique ability to connect with patients.

Because Pernille had worked both as a clinic manager as well as actively working with hematology patients for decades, and because of her personality of always wanting to connect with patients, Pernille came up with a way of compliantly changing how the patient’s treatment was conducted. Instead of the patients having to come into their doctor 2 times a week for 2-hour sessions each time, they now only need to come in once a week for a session that takes just one hour. Better treatment and a huge time saver for the patients.

I asked Tore to describe the traits that people like Pernille – the super Understanders – have. He said:

“First: They are great at focusing in on the customer. They somehow always find a way to spend time with the customers. They take the time. And they do not just listen to them, they are genuinely interested in customers, their lives, their problems and their ideas.

Second: They have the ability to rephrase what the customers are saying, what they are trying to say (and what they are not saying!) into a message that makes sense. They know how to synthesize the message.

Third: They also understand the company’s perspective. They know how to take the insights from the customers and put them into the context of procedures, processes and strategies of the company. Profound customer insights without deep understanding of the company is pretty useless.”

When I listened to Tore speak about the profound interest in the customer that Understanders have, I realized that the classical sales slogan of “ABC” should not stand for “Always Be Closing”; it should stand for “Always Be Closer”.

As in: always try to get closer to your customer.

Or as Tore put it: “That’s the beauty of the Understanders, they do not need to be doing any selling, they are so close to the customer that the sales come more or less by themselves.”

One of the most valuable aspects of Understanders is their ability to, in Tore’s words, “bring in the narrative of the customers.”

Understanders can tell a better story of the customer because they understand them better.

A great illustration of just how valuable Understanders are for a company is how Amgen’s competitors have three sales reps covering Denmark. Amgen has just one: Pernille.

Tore: “She can walk in at any hospital and instantly gets to talk to the right person. Because they want to talk to her. They feel that she understands them.”

That’s the magic of Understanders. They make people feel understood.

And that is more valuable than virtually anything else.

The Customer is not king.

The Understanders are kings and queens. Because they understand the customers even better than the customers understand themselves.

Who are the Understanders in your organization? Identify them. Support them. Promote them. Keep them.

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Fredrik Haren, The Creativity Explorer

The post Episode 128: The Understander is always right. first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.