Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 17

How to Create Better Ideas Faster

The four F’s of effective brainstorming.

Have you ever tried to get your team to brainstorm a breakthrough idea for a product or service only to find the process mostly yields extensions of existing ideas?

Research on creative thinking gives us these four simple suggestions that will greatly aid in generating great ideas in a short period of time:

Fluency: Whoever said one good idea is better than a thousand mediocre ones probably never invented anything. More is better. One of the inhibitors to creative thinking is your voice of judgment that kicks in when you think too long about the viability of your idea. The key is to generate ideas a faster than you can evaluate them. This will produce some unusual and impractical ideas that will serve as triggers for novel ideas that work.

Practice: Give your team a quota of at least 100 ideas in 15 minutes for each challenge. Post them on the wall for all to see. Use these raw ideas to trigger new ideas that are both novel and viable.

Flexibility: Steve Jobs remarked, “Creativity is just connecting things.” Creating a breakthrough idea may simply be a matter of reapplying an idea from one situation to another. For example, to improve their patient experience during hospital stay, a medical center sent their doctors to live in a posh hotel one week and their own hospital the next. The center simply applied the practices of the hotel to the hospital to completely transform the patient experience.

Practice: Ask your team to look at the challenge from the point of view of successful companies outside of your domain or setting. How would [Company X] approach this opportunity? How did [Company Y] solve this problem? The farther away from your own industry you get the more novel the ideas will be.

Freedom: Power dynamics don’t change just because a team is brainstorming off-site. The boss is still the boss. Even subtle forms of authority can stifle creative thinking. Whoever stands by the flip chart or white board writing down the ideas is either the most powerful person in the room, because they can edit all responses, or the least powerful because they act as a scribe for others. You can’t change power dynamics so it’s better to organize your teams and brainstorming session to manage them.

Practice: Divide and conquer. Break your team down into sub-groups and have them brainstorm in different locations. Staff each sub-group so that no one can dominate or stifle the others. Make sure that everyone writes and every idea is heard. Recombine these sub-groups in a sequence so that truly original ideas have a chance to develop before being evaluated.

Flow: Most of us have experienced a feeling of effortlessness and timelessness when doing something creative like painting. Researchers call this our flow state: when we are the most creative and “in the zone.” Some people are creative in the morning while others at night. Some people are most creative when listening to music while others need contemplative silence. The key is to find a time and place where team members typically enter these flow states.

Practice: Ask team members when and where they are most creative. Plan your brainstorming session around these preferences. Give teams sufficient time to get into a flow state but don’t expect it to last longer than an hour.

Getting bigger and better ideas is only the beginning. Next, you need to find the courage and minimal resources to create a wide array of experiments and prototypes and sustain the momentum all the way to commercialization.

What is Innovation?

When asked to define the legal definition for obscenity, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously quipped “I know it when I see it.” For most of us the same applies to a working definition for innovation. We have a general sense of what it is but we know that under cross examination of the evidence it probably wouldn’t hold up.

Think about what you take to be the most innovative organization in the world and why: Apple, Genentech, any stalwart global brand, obscure NGO or fashionable start-up or will do. Contained in your answer is your belief and confirmation bias that reveals what you really take to be innovation:

New Technology
Services and Solutions
Experiences
Processes and Methods
Valuable Outcomes
Fashion and Design
Social Good
[Your Bias Goes Here]

The challenge of defining innovation is finding a common denominator: attributes, functions, outcomes or other discernible differentiating characteristics. Would your definition for innovation work for a mature tier two automotive supplier, a young fashion designer that makes stylish handbags and a marketing services start up? If it does, it’s probably a nominal description like “useful novelty”. Oh, that’s helpful. It only includes everything.

When examining any number of the annual beauty pageants of the “most innovation companies in the world” it becomes clear that relatively few of these organizations are on multiple lists: Google and Apple being the obvious exceptions. More so, when looking closely at how these companies innovate they bear little resemblance to each other and are indistinguishable from the competitors in their segments: strategies, metrics, culture or types of people for example. The same holds true even when considering the size of the enterprise: large, mid and small cap companies.

So why does a common definition of innovation matter? Because if you don’t share a common description of what innovation is and how it is created you have little chance of achieving it with the other members of your organization. This is particularly true for the entrepreneurial firm that is rapidly growing into something bigger and presumably better. Sure everyone is working on innovation but since they all have their own interpretation of just what exactly that means they are not working toward the same outcome. So they go their own way in the hopes that it will all sync up in the end. It seldom does.

The late Marshall McLuhan, University of Toronto professor and cultural guru, suggested a functional definition for innovation that is easily recognizable by anyone in any type organization.

An innovation…

Enhances something: Think about how Google was a late entrant into the search biz but lapped the field with its simple approach
Eliminates something: Think about how Charles Schwab eliminated the need for stock brokers by connecting the back office of the trading house directly to the customer
Returns Us to Something in Our Past: Think about how the desire to have home cooked family meals has lead to the proliferation of underground dining and slow food restaurants
Over Time Reverses into Its Opposite: Think about how e-mail was going to set us all free but instead enslaved us with its ubiquitous and overwhelming demands

It is assumed that the more potent the innovation the more it embodies the four attributes and vice versa.

McLuhan understood that innovation was specific to the situation that gave rise to it or destroyed it. So he focused on its effects and not its causes. He warned that a one size fits all approach with its simple checklist would do more harm than good and lead to a form of intellectual and creative myopia.

Innovation has a transformative power for brief period of time when it produces the ability to create or destroy value. After that it becomes the standard, the norm and the ordinary. Like milk, it has a shelf life and goes sour over time.

So if you know innovation when you see it, chances are you didn’t really see it and you probably don’t know it.

Empowering Innovation with Jeff DeGraff

Did you know that innovation is the only value proposition with a shelf life? And with the commoditization of most linear processes and technologies, innovation is essential to stay competitive in our volatile, global economy. However, unlike many business processes that can be strategized and managed, innovation must be encouraged, allowed to emerge, and nurtured through implementation. Tune in and learn how to empower innovation with the “Dean of Innovation”, Jeff De Graff. Listen as we unveil common corporate messages that hinder innovation. Understand why variation and diversity and important to facilitate innovation. Gain insights into the use of the Competing Values Framework, including how to create positive conflict. Learn about the Innovation Genome model which connects value propositions with culture, competency and leadership through four quadrants and a shared language.

Jeff DeGraff Interview on the Bitrix24 Blog

Jeff DeGraff was recently interviewed by Bitrix24 in an article titled “Want Innovation? Embrace Constructive Conflict, Says Innovation And Creativity Guru Jeff DeGraff.” Below is a preview of the interview. Read the full interview here.

There are a lot of different techniques for personal creativity. But how do you create a creative organization?

The keys to producing a creative organization are culture, competency and momentum.

First, culture is by far the most important element and the hardest to develop, establish and maintain. The reason is that culture is not a thing in itself but an attribute of leadership and work practices. This is why the removal of the leadership team of an underperforming firm is the first step in any credible acquisition. Look for where your organization has a successful creative culture and give these leaders a greater voice.

Second, competency comes in many forms and is always domain specific. For example, the creative competencies of medical device company and a fashionable restaurant have little in common. However, there are four aspects of creative competency that are shared across all organizations. These include the ability to form a shared creative vision, goals, processes and values. The ability to sync these up across boundaries, regions and fields of endeavor is essential for an organization to move fr om ideation and opportunity to implementation and value creation.

Talent matters most. Enlist deep and diverse domain experts with great range to serve as organizational emissaries. Third, momentum is the main reason most creative initiatives fail. They lose energy as they try to overcome organizational barriers and boundaries. The key is to hedge your bets with a wide array of relatively small, inexpensive and short term projects like a venture capitalist. This way you can proof the concept before trying to gather the resources to bring it to scale. In the process you will overwhelm the defenses of the bureaucracy. Take multiple shots on goal to quickly discover what really works and what doesn’t and make real-time adjustments.

Innovation: Hide Inside Trojan Horses

Whether Greeks bearing gifts for stalwart King Priam of Troy or a malware computer virus masquerading as a can’t miss offer, the Trojan horse has come to represent a manipulative strategy of trickery and deception. Virgil’s tale of conquest and woe reminds us that things are seldom what they seem and that most people, save the neglected prophetess Cassandra, see only their own reflection in its surface. Aeneas extols the creative maneuvers of the clever and disparages the unwitting acceptance of superfluous orthodoxy by the foolish as the greatest of walls are breached by myopic pride.

Every citadel has gates to keep the foreign element at bay. They are patrolled by passive-aggressive sentinels who keep ever-vigilant watch for deviants and interlopers. They use catch phrases like “we need more data,” and, “we don’t have the time or money right now,” or that show stopper, “we need to send this to committee to get authorization.” Translation: NO, NO, NEVER. In a mature organization, for every one role there is for creating value, there are four for maintaining it and still five more for overprotecting it with the slow constricting coils of bureaucracy and knavery that leave petrified victims gasping for support. Yet, these custodians of the old way and barriers to the new can be outdone by those who can use the force of this beadledom to hide the unconventional and experimental in plain sight.

Rocks star executives, all shoes and haircuts, victoriously parade big money projects through the gilded streets of the biz. Unbeknownst to the uninitiated, invisible innovators hide in the belly of the beast implementing their new practice or process or person all in the name of the holy project. But all must remain undetected until there is something good and glorious to show and offer up to the Caesars as their own. The trick to getting what is needed to grow is to connect it to what others want, and using the momentum to pull the resources, time and support though the convoluted system.

Skulking and crouching are the accepted tactics and mannerisms for innovation ninjas that move with force undetected in the darkness. Resources, opportunities and sacred access are gained when we subvert officialdom with its own tangle of rules. Like Aikido masters, we reverse the force that naysayers and reactionaries use to subdue us to neutralize them. The squeaky wheel gets the grease but not the goods.

Though we are pulled forward toward the new and the good our brutish past follows our evolutionary tracks closely. As old Darwin noted, nature is red in tooth and claw. Given the events of the day, might we include human nature as well? Ignoring this most unpleasant observation is the real deception, for indifference bring injustice and suffering.

The modus operandi of most organizations from families to multinational corporations is political and contentious. Dissonance can be heard at the dinner table and the negotiating table alike. These forces of conflict can and should be used in our good service to produce the generative energies of growth. However, when one of these forces holds sway over all others, most organizational mechanisms and practices are employed to maintain their continued dominance.

To free up resources and encourage the will to grow, the established order and decorum must be turned back upon itself to nurture and nourish our opportunities for reinvention. The key is not denying it but working through it to get beyond it. To innovate, we must both see our situation for what it really is, and see our promising endeavors for that may truly become. To advance a foreign idea in a world of guarded provincial walls may require that we temporarily hide ourselves and tag along with the powers that be. Better to be a prudent passenger who reaches his destination with ingenuity intact than the mythical lone hero who has lost his way along the way.

Jeff DeGraff on “Small Business: Smart Solutions”

Jeff DeGraff was recently a featured guest on the radio show “Small Business: Smart Solutions.” Listen to the full interview here.

Innovation: Master the Art of SODOTO

Ornithologists report that New Caledonian crows fashion twigs into tools for collecting and extracting insects from the hollows of trees. What is more remarkable is that these birds pass their inventions along tox others in the flock. With each succeeding migration and generation, improvements are made and progress becomes discernible. Even in the animal kingdom, the ability to search and reapply know-how is a key attribute that moves a species from survival to prosperity.

Just as the guru tutors the novitiate so does the goldsmith his apprentice. The same is true for officers and engineers and in all fields where the mastery of craft is a matter of certification. The greater enlightens the lesser. The maxim is “See One, Do One, Teach One” or as the sensei might say “SODOTO.”

See One: At this stage real data emerges through observation and sense making (Emerge)
Do One: At this stage ideas converge with actions, and direct feedback from experience and supervision alerts us to what is working and what isn’t (Converge)
Teach One: At this stage our knowledge and experiences allow us to expand our conception of the practice and formulate new ideas and ways of doing things that can be codified and taught (Diverge)

For example, a medical student may be brilliant but typically possesses no direct experience when treating a patient. So after two years of intensive study, they are assigned to shadow a physician on their daily rounds. Assuming the physician and the student’s professors deem them to be competent and able, they are advanced to the level of physician. Here they will spend the next two to five years in residency working appalling hours while plying their trade beneath critical eyes. From this point on the road narrows as some will advance to attending physician or department head where they will have responsibilities in the training of residents and medical students. The development path to becoming a doctor is a circle of intellectual rubrics and combat education.

Sociologists call this sequence of organizational behavior “diffusion” because it suggests that ideas disperse throughout creative communities. Despite our most populist longings, brilliant scientists and talented artisans display an annoying tendency to produce the same in their understudies. The University of Chicago Nobel Laureates in Economics and the Juilliard School of Music are cases in point. It appears that we do indeed become the company we keep.

The road to developing competence starts with distinctions of expertise. All dynastic organizations communicate and advance the “institutional memory” of that group for without it they would cease to function as such. This is why we instruct our youth in our religious beliefs, the facile use of our language or the tenets of our laws. Without their good continuation, the wheel of our civilization stops with us. Our growth requires that we dangle somewhere on the Great Chain of Being hoping to advance to the next level.

Pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey, initiated the Progressive Education movement that would be the foundation for reform in teaching methods in the United States and Western Europe after the War. He believed that we “learn by doing” because “failure is instructive.” It is in the practicum of the science fair that secrets that cannot be contained in the written page become enlivened and relevant to us. Dewey also thought that the continuity of experience was essential to our growth, for without it we could neither evaluate the consequences of our actions nor compare them to our own hypotheses about how our world functions. To know something is to be able to act on it, engage with it, and to translate the subjective into observations about the objective. Without such participatory knowledge we are amiss with superstition and folly for we cannot make the leap from me to us to it. As the sisters admonished, we are not the sun and the world does not revolve around us. Self-knowledge certainly begets Group-knowledge. Man is indeed a social animal, but then again, so are crows.

Innovation: Old Crops, New Soil

Did you know that some of the largest chapters of agricultural groups like the Future Farmers of America are in urban centers? This may surprise you: some of the biggest breakthroughs in farming aren’t happening on farms—they’re happening in big cities. The popularity of urban farming—or “vertical farming”—brings new challenges to an old industry.

What many people don’t realize is that small-scale urban farming is at the forefront of innovation in the biotech industry. The set of skills and knowledge required to make plants grow in unlikely and difficult city environments—from abandoned buildings in Detroit to navy yards in Brooklyn—has inspired a high level of creativity and growth: new types of seeds, hybrid organic fertilizers and even sophisticated algorithms for crop rotation.

Who has the deep domain expertise when it comes to this burgeoning field? This may also surprise you: today’s inner-city kids—many of whom have joined local FFA and 4H chapters—are a generation of practical scientists and will likely become future leaders in agricultural and biotech industries.

Looking at the urban farming phenomenon can teach us about how and where innovation happens:

Innovation happens in the most mature industries. The sectors that seem most traditional are often the ripest sources of creativity and growth. Think about all of the innovation we’ve seen in recent years with things like beer and coffee. You can’t get more traditional than farming, and yet the avant-garde changes happening in agriculture are astonishing. New innovations in old industries are something to watch for.

Innovation happens in materials. We often just look at the end product and not the raw materials we use to put that product together. Breakthrough innovations almost always depend on innovations in the raw materials used to make a product. Remember that it’s game-changing discoveries in metallurgy and glass manufacturing that makes the newest aircraft and smart phones possible.

Innovation happens when you get your hands dirty. To make those groundbreaking discoveries and to reach those lighting ideas, you need to run tons of on-site experiments. Get out there and try as much as you can with the resources that you have. Don’t make neatness your goal. Dig some holes, bend until your back aches and shovel some manure. Innovation grows in muddy trenches.

The agricultural enterprise is an apt metaphor for innovation itself. There’s a season for innovation—the right time to act, when the external factors like the market are working for you. And when you do scatter the seeds of your ideas, you need to nurture them in order to ensure the best returns for your crops. This way, the next time the season for innovation comes around, you’ll be even better prepared to take action. Think like an urban farmer and take your idea to the most unlikely—even difficult or hostile—place—and see what happens. Your yield just may surprise you.

Jeff DeGraff on “The Second Stage”

Jeff DeGraff was recently a featured guest on the radio show “The Second Stage.” Listen to the full interview here.

Can the “Commies” Innovate?

The headlines about the economic fortunes of the 1% and the associated political maneuvering to influence and manipulate our world view are disturbingly reminiscent of those in the early-twentieth century when mega-corporations called “trusts” ruled the day. This is exactly what French economist Thomas Piketty’s recent wildly best-selling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, tells us is happening again, but this time on our watch. Piketty narrates the dark story of high-efficiency capitalism and what happens when resources are concentrated and powerful groups take control of the market and the supply chain. It’s an indictment of the state of our world that’s set off both controversy and celebration. Many young and dispossessed people are inspired by Piketty’s neo-Marxian call for equality while those of us who have found our way through the Capitalist jungle are defending the benefits of a laissez-faire economy.

Recently, some high profile political and business leaders have assured us that that China and Russia are places not conducive to innovation. This is something on the order of Cold War Version 2.0. But even back in the day it would have been unimaginable to suggest that the so-called “commies” can’t innovate. The Soviets for example, were admired for their technological ingenuity and the intellectual prowess that drove large scale growth so quickly after the Second World War. They were undone by their military adventurism and their inability to create a sufficiently adaptable economic system for the emerging global economy. As for China, they have a history of innovation that remains unrivaled by any civilization ancient or modern: compass, gunpowder, papermaking, printing, banking, furnace, iron, irrigation and an endless list of what we still take to be the essential elements of a modern society.

I grew up during the Cold War, when we were conscripted as children into the space race and driven to develop superior scientific and design acumen because we knew we were so far behind: Sputnik, material science, holography, space stations, the plasma propulsion engine and yes the nuclear submarine and intercontinental ballistic missile. The Hunt for Red October became a best seller because it was entirely plausible that the “commies” possessed innovative technologies that we did not. Now here we are, twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in a bout of collective amnesia, we’re saying that China and Russia are hostile to creativity and we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

In his May commencement speech at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Vice President Joe Biden said, “I challenge you, name me one innovative project, one innovative change, one innovative product that has come out of China.” Perhaps he missed the executive briefing on recent breakthroughs in biotechnology, chemical engineering and software systems development.

On numerous occasions, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has noted that the US will remain the number one economic power in the world for the foreseeable future because creativity and innovation are suppressed in China. Given the number of doctorates earned by brilliant Chinese nationals at top US and European universities and the massive migration of research and development centers by the world’s top companies to China these reproaches appear to be out of touch and misplaced.

This is simply underestimating the game plan of the other players. There is a dangerous kind of arrogance in assuming that you have all the best cards. Any hand overplayed can be trumped.

Sure, capitalism is a great system. Arguably the best to date. But where do we go from here? Any cursory view of history reveals that all sustainable economic systems need to grow and morph into better and new forms. In other words, even capitalism is in need of some innovation. Purebred ideologies are detrimental to innovation because they discourage alternative ideas that drive hybrid forms of thinking and the new practices and products they produce. Opposing beliefs, when engaged constructively, extend beyond simple combinations to create something entirely new.

While it’s easy to disagree with some of the premises and conclusions of Professor Piketty, he has started a much needed dynamic conversation about the function and future of our economic system. Instead of redressing old wounds, it may be more productive to use his insurrection as an opportunity to consider innovative alternatives. But that would require that we acknowledge that “commies” can indeed innovate, eh, comrade?