Insight & Innovation by Simon de Haast
Ideafarm :: innovation and creativity catalysts
Landline 021 423 9328
Cell 083 326 3496
Email simon@ideafarm.co.za
Web www.ideafarm.co.za

Given at Innovation Station workshop as part of the Small Business Week 2005 expo
With acknowledgements to reference material noted at end of document.

My goal in this afternoon’s session, is to give you new thinking frameworks and tools to re-perceive your business and the opportunities, within and around it.

During the panel discussions, the objective is to give maximum opportunity for the various sector leaders to promote the clever stuff that’s happening in their areas, while offering up opportunities for cross-pollination across sectors to occur, and giving you the chance to investigate how these opportunities can impact your business positively.

We will also, during the course of the panel discussions, open up to the floor for any Q&A at various intervals.

The key theme this afternoon is creating possibilities. Everyone knows about the glass half-full/half-empty thing.

Of course accountants would argue that the glass is too big in the first place!

But here’s another take on it.

People that consider that the glass is half-empty are focusing on the intangible, invisible stuff. You can’t touch, feel, experience half-empty. It is purely a mental construct.

However, if one prefers to think that the glass is half-full, the focus is on the real, tangible stuff. You can touch, feel or experience the half-full portion.

Especially if it gets thrown in your face :)

So, with possibilities thinking, let’s focus on the stuff that we can work on, do or create. Let’s not revert into worst-case scenario thinking, worrying about potential impacts or imagined consequences of ideas before we’ve finished with the idea generation.

Also, borrowing from Appreciative Inquiry, let’s not dwell on what’s missing in our business like access to funding, but try see how effectively we can use what we’ve got eg. skills, talent or market access.

But before that, let me tell a couple of stories about innovation.

Firstly, let’s talk about what innovation is about..I know there’s a bunch of wordy definitions out there.

This is my take on the topic: innovation is a process or culture, of seeing new connections between old and new stuff. Innovation happens in areas of technology, as most people associate it with, but more importantly it also about challenging the status quo, whether it is how consumers are understood, how staff are employed, or businesses are structured.

IDEO is a San Francisco design firm that has absolutely mastered this art form. They say that innovation begins with an eye, and rightly so; deep insight and understanding about a problem, customer behaviour, or the opportunities that a piece of technology can open up, are the starting points for creating value out of these insights.

A guide that can be used here is to remind oneself that a customer values the outcome of a product or service, not the thing itself. For example, a DIY customer ultimately wants a hole in a wall, not a drill.

Coming up with the ideas is only half the story. One commentator takes about innovation as being ideas in action. The action part is key, and this is what most people struggle with. The key to action is not to be a perfectionist: making an idea real can achieved by creating rough prototypes or simulations – the key thing is to remember that the doing process is far more important than the early look and feel.

And it's the company that actually implements the new idea successfully, not the one that does all the hard, creative work above, that makes all the money from the idea. The value isn't realized until customers actually start paying (enthusiastically) for the innovation.

But this is a topic that is another whole seminar.

So this innovation thing is about seeing stuff differently. Let me offer up a couple of anecdotes to reinforce this.

This one is from my own experience. A couple of months ago, I was driving along De Waal drive, and the South Easter was really howling. As I carried on, I notice that my bakkie canopy was shifting and moving, and became quite concerned that the next thing I was going to see, was my canopy flying off into Woodstock somewhere, flattening a poor drug dealer or something. This anxiety continued on for a minute or two before I realised, with blindingly obvious hindsight, that my canopy wasn’t moving at all, but rather, my rear-view mirror was vibrating on a loose mounting.

Wow, all that anxiety and misinformation thanks to a faulty lens.

We get so caught up in our immediate world that we forget to check whether the lenses we’re using are doing their job properly. Catch yourself next time you encounter a situation in your business, that, at first glance, seems to be clear cut and ask yourself “what aren’t I noticing about this situation, what aspects could be different this time.”

I’m sure you don’t need me to remind you how, during the course of business growth and expansion, our initial external focus gets sucked into managing the internal aspects of running and administering a business.

Before long our immersion makes itself felt with increased stress levels, dropped customer opportunities or competitor manoeuvring. Marshall McLuhan, the guy that gave us the “medium is the message” and the “global village” phrases once said: “I’m not sure who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.”

Also, looking outward at your competitors isn’t always that useful either.

If you're defining your business in terms of your competition, you're living in the “echo chamber” [Seth Godin]. Companies and organizations don't grow fast at the expense of existing competitors. They grow fast for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with whether your service is 5% better or your product is a little more convenient.

By reacting to competitor positioning, you have little control of your firm’s destiny. Try this exercise:
- Get a piece of paper and a pen.
- Write the word “REACTIVE” on this piece of paper.
o This is the mode most businesses are in.
o To shift to a more PROACTIVE mode, all it takes is some letter jumbling.
- Take the letter “C” in the word you’ve just written and move it to the front.
- What do you get: “CREATIVE”.

So you see, it all depends on how you “see” things :)

So how does a business owner get to see differently, to create the space to sense the water around them, to become aware of the environment of the business?

You can do this by looking at your business with lenses borrowed from other industries, areas of knowledge or unrelated domains. Ask the question: how can I describe my business and its operations/processes/problems in terms of this other ‘world’ I’m borrowing from.

An example: someone in the distribution business could ask the question-“what other things ‘get’ distributed…hang on, DNA gets replicated and sent around genetic structures according to certain rules and instructions from RNA. I wonder how a genetic scientist could describe my business in these terms. And in doing so, help me make new connections on how I could do things differently in my business.”

The other benefit of getting a naïve expert, as it’s called, into your business, is that dumb questions will follow. Except these questions won’t be so dumb, as they will expose deeply rooted assumptions and conventions that you have long since forgotten existed and take for granted. In that sense then, these rooted assumptions are the boxes we place ourselves in, and to break out of this default thinking, we first have to become aware of them, much like the fish, being acutely aware of the water once it is on dry land. Except that surfacing assumptions and conventions about a business or industry is safer.

There’s a great twist on a common saying that really describes innovation well: vu ja de. This is the ability to see old things in new ways. The following anecdote describes this well:

A statistician, Abraham Wald, was asked to do some research on where to put extra armour on Allied warplanes during World War II. The British and US air forces were concerned because many planes were being shot down. To find out where extra armour could be best applied, Wald put a mark in every bullet hole in the airplanes that returned from battle. He found that two major sections of the fuselage - one between the wings, and the other between the tails - had far fewer bullet holes.

He decided to put the armour in these places, where he saw fewer, not more bullet holes.

Why? Since the planes were hit randomly, and the ones he analysed had not been shot down, it stood to reason that it was the holes he wasn't seeing - in the planes that _weren't_ returning - that needed extra protection.

So how do these stories help you in your business, to see new opportunities?

Well, the first thing, is that they serve as timely reminders about the danger of immersing yourself in the internal side of your business: if you’re doing the books, get a bookkeeper. Fiddling around with your network and Pcs? Get someone whose business it is, to do the IT support.

Get creative in finding ways to afford this “outsourcing” – barter your skills maybe.

But these are merely stepping-stones to rekindling the external focus you started the business with.

A way to break-out of the thinking habits that you have collected is to apply some structured thinking tools to aspects of your business that concern you, or areas you need to grow.

Because our minds cluster information based on similar past experiences, over time we develop deep rivers of knowledge in a particular area. The human brain is evolved to spot patterns, not the absence of patterns. In fact the root of the word “information” comes from pattern. Think of this a one large filing cabinet.

This is especially so where we are specialists in a particular area. Our ability to preconceive in new ways is diminished, because we dip into our existing rivers of experience. Much like a mountain stream, this river gets deeper and deeper, the more we hang out in the same knowledge space. Our filing cabinet has very few folders, but the contents of which are very thick with content.

To develop new ideas then, requires us to river jump, to develop new streams of knowledge and insight, without the constraints and anchors of prior knowledge or experience.

The more diverse stuff we read, experience, or practice, the easier it is to generate and draw upon new these new streams. When we open up the filing cabinet, we have a wider range of folders to choose from, to guide our thinking.

So, do stuff you haven’t done before.

Stuck with an engineering or manufacturing problem? Spend a morning at the aquarium looking at the amazing way nature creates interfaces and symbiotic systems.

Go to the bookstore and browse through a magazine you’d never normally read. The idea is to look anywhere for new concepts or triggers – increasing your store cupboard from which to make these all-important connections.

Keep a bug list: we always come across really poor design, services or products that really suck. Note these experiences in a journal. This becomes fodder for innovation. Keep asking, “Surely there’s a better way to design this?”

Don’t stress that an idea that you may get is ridiculous or outrageous. The key to being creative is not to judge too soon. Think of these as “intermediate impossibilities” – thinking gateways to highly original and effective new products or services.

Specific thinking triggers that you can take away with you today are the 4 R’s of fresh thinking: Re-expression, Revolution, Randomness, Related worlds.

By Re-expressing a concept or problem, I mean to examine the vocabulary used in describing it, and then to change the words used, or unpack the meaning behind those words.

Revolution relates to examining the conventions that drive a particular business model or industry, and challenging why they exist; maybe it’s time the rules were changed.

Randomness is simply opening a dictionary and selecting some words at random, and then forcing connections between your problem or challenge, and the random word. This helps break your pattern of thinking into new spaces.

Related worlds is a particularly powerful source of innovation. I alluded to it earlier when I spoke about going to the aquarium. Find another industry, thing, or domain that has similar characteristics to the challenge at hand.

For example, if you’re busy trying to redesign a photocopier, and one of major problems identified with the current models is that paper feeds get jammed or blocked, thereby making the unit useless until serviced (if a major jam).

Well, what else gets blocked or jammed. Rush-hour traffic gets jammed. But only at certain times. Also, our noses get blocked when we get colds. But hand on, only one nostril at a time gets blocked for some reason. Applying this to our photocopier feed problem, why not create two paper feed channels so that if one gets jammed, we can at least use the other channel until we can get a service call. Ok this is a simplistic example, but you get the picture.

You can tie multiple triggers together.

If you want to design a savings account that has a unique approach, start by examining the language used by consumers of savings accounts and re-express what is said. One of the phrases that are sometime heard is that people like to “park funds” for a while in a savings account.

So let’s unpack this term ‘park’. What other ‘related worlds’ park. Well there’s the world related to parking one’s car: we’ve got parking meters, traffic cops, car guards, and being towed away. There’s also the leafy park we take our kids, walk our dogs, and lie under trees. Unpacking to the extreme, there’s even South Park, the foul-mouthed animated series, along with its various bizarre characters and storylines. Remember what I said earlier about intermediate impossibilities!

What these exercises do, is to offer up alternative lenses to view the issue at hand, giving you more stimuli for fresh ideas. By reconnecting these alternative worlds to the original issue at hand, ie. designing a new savings account, you now have a much broader palette to draw upon. Forcing connections between these related worlds helps one to break out of default thinking traps.

I’d like to end off with one more story that illustrates the hazards of having a limited perspective on ones’ business environment, a perspective that is conditioned by how we conceive of the reality around us. Another way of putting this is realising that there’s a world of difference between what we know about our business and our customers, our conception, and what we think our customers think about our business, our perception.

There was a man who, during wartime, would come to the country’s border with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. The border guard looked at the man’s papers and all was in order for him to cross. But the guard was certain the man was smuggling some sort of contraband in the wheelbarrow. So the guard took a shovel, poked around in the dirt, but found nothing. The man was allowed to cross.

The next week, the man once again comes to the border with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Again, the border guard found that the papers were in order and dug through the dirt, but still found nothing. And again, the man was allowed to cross.

Week after week, it was the same story: Man approaches the border with wheelbarrow full of dirt. Guard finds nothing of interest and the man crosses.

At the end of the war, the guard sees the man and asks him: “Look, I know you were smuggling something across the border, but I could never find a thing hidden in the dirt. What were you smuggling all those years?”

The man answered: “Wheelbarrows.”

[References]
Allan D., Kingdon M., Murrin K., Rudkin D., How to Start a Creative Revolution at Work, Capstone, London, 2000
Federman, M., How to Determine the Business You’re Really In & Other Tales of McLuhan Thinking, Innovation and Integral Awareness, McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto
Kelly T., & Littman J., The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, HarperCollins Business, London, 2001
Majaro, S., Creativity in the Search for Strategy (in Crainer 1999), Prentice Hall, 1999
Sutton R.I., Weird Ideas that Work, Penguin, London, 2002
Von Hippel E., The Sources of Innovation, Oxford University Press, New York, 1988
Walsch, N.D., Conversations with God Book 1, Hodder & Stroughton, London, 1997
Zander B., and R.S., The Art of Possibility, Penguin Books, London, 2000