Problem Finding - The Most Important Part of the Innovation Process
My favorite analogy for problem solving is this: you’ve got a gun and you’re trying to hit a target. The target represents the problem you’re trying to solve. The gun represents innovation. You represents YOU. By aiming at the problem with your gun of innovation you hope to hit the bullseye with the right solutions.
Sphere: Related Content7-Step Guide To Crushing Innovation In Its Tracks
Is your organization just too damned innovative? Do you suffer from exquisitely sustained product lines, great branding, and excessive profits? Do your people bear the burden of creativity, happiness, and motivation? Do your customers endure the drudgery of a one-of-a-kind experience? Do your collaborative partners curse your name as they share in your great success? These simple steps will help you kill innovation more effectively than a bludgeon to the head.
Sphere: Related ContentIDEO’s Ten Faces Of Innovation
Finally, a book that connects innovation with personality and creative style. Tom Kelley of IDEO describes in great detail the different types of people it takes to staff an innovative organization. This describes each of the ten types in great detail. Which are you? I share traits of both “Collaborator” and “Cross-Pollenator.”
Sphere: Related ContentLet’s Put ‘Open Source’ To The Test
I’m vacationing in Colorado this week. As I was hiking in Ouray, I had an idea. I want to make this blog more interactive and useful. Instead of just posting opinions on innovation, I’m going to try and kick-start some REAL innovation. Let’s start putting our collective creative thinking resources to use, and make open source innovation work for all of us.
Sphere: Related ContentDegrees of Innovation Effectiveness
After thinking a great deal about the IDEO and Doblin information I’ve presented, my views on targeted innovation are entering another evolutionary stage. Again.
Innovation effectiveness is becoming more of a science. Effectiveness is rising as we learn more about what works, and what doesn’t, at the macro level. So what is the role of creative thinking in the science of innovation effectiveness?
Sphere: Related ContentPrototyping Your Way To Innovation
While reading my books on IDEO I am constantly reminded of how important prototyping is to innovation process. Prototyping takes on a far more general meaning in a culture of innovation. It doesn’t refer only to the first draft of a new product - it could be anything from a new process to a new philosophy.
In my line of work the word ’strawman’ has a similar meaning but carries a bit of a more negative connotation. A strawman is something to be ‘knocked down,’ something to be beaten up and replaced with a better version. A prototype is better than that - a concept that represents the best current understanding of the task at hand, something to go forward with and tweak as we go along. One of my challenges moving forward is to replace the concept of ’strawman’ with the concept of ‘prototype.’
Sphere: Related ContentTwo Vastly Opposing Views on Brainstorming, Pt. III
IDEO loves brainstorming. Doblin hates brainstorming. Who is right? Who is the most wrong? Let’s start smacking them together and see what ends up on the floor.
Sphere: Related ContentKeirsey Temperament Assessment - Free, Powerful, and Revealing
During my last session at the Advanced School for Innovators we were reminded of another personal inventory tool that’s just as useful as Myers-Briggs (MBTI) and KAI - the Keirsey Temperament Assessment.
When you go to the Keirsey assessment page the first thing that you notice is that, unlike KAI, you can take the assessment over the internet. The second thing you notice is that, unlike KAI and MBTI, the Keirsey assessment is free. This makes it a lot more accessible than the other two. The website has a wealth of information on interpreting the assessment results.
Unlike MBTI, which assesses personality into one of sixteen broad types, the Keirsey assessment places you into one of four possible temperaments (descriptions taken from the Keirsey webpage):
- Guardian: Guardians pride themselves on being dependable, helpful, and hard-working. Guardians make loyal mates, responsible parents, and stabilizing leaders. Guardians tend to be dutiful, cautious, humble, and focused on credentials and traditions. Guardians are concerned citizens who trust authority, join groups, seek security, prize gratitude, and dream of meting out justice.
- Artisan: Artisans tend to be fun-loving, optimistic, realistic, and focused on the here and now. Artisans pride themselves on being unconventional, bold, and spontaneous. Artisans make playful mates, creative parents, and troubleshooting leaders. Artisans are excitable, trust their impulses, want to make a splash, seek stimulation, prize freedom, and dream of mastering action skills.
- Idealist: Idealists are enthusiastic, they trust their intuition, yearn for romance, seek their true self, prize meaningful relationships, and dream of attaining wisdom. Idealists pride themselves on being loving, kindhearted, and authentic. Idealists tend to be giving, trusting, spiritual, and they are focused on personal journeys and human potentials. Idealists make intense mates, nurturing parents, and inspirational leaders.
- Rational: Rationals tend to be pragmatic, skeptical, self-contained, and focused on problem-solving and systems analysis. Rationals pride themselves on being ingenious, independent, and strong willed. Rationals make reasonable mates, individualizing parents, and strategic leaders. Rationals are even-tempered, they trust logic, yearn for achievement, seek knowledge, prize technology, and dream of understanding how the world works.
Each of the four main temperaments has four subtemperaments. Each is explained in detail on the assessment page linked above. This page explains the relationship between Keirsey and MBTI.
My temperament is Rational. I can see a lot of the archetypal rational characteristics in myself, but also a few from idealist and artisan. My main rational trait is pragmatism, and I’m drawn to strategic planning as are many rationals. I also place a high value on competence, my own and that of others. But as a musician I have some artisan traits, and as a thinker I have some intuitive traits of the idealist.
Regarding the relationship between my type and temperament, it doesn’t seem to match. My rational temperament should indicate a type ENTP, whereas I’m an ESTP. The page I linked above claims a 75 percent corrrelation, but in my case the Form Q portion of my MBTI assessment indicates I’m right on the border between S and N anyway.
Take the Keisey assessment and read up on your results. It will tell you a lot about yourself and how you relate to others.
Sphere: Related ContentTwo Vastly Opposing Views on Brainstorming, Pt. II
In my first installment I discussed IDEO’s approach to brainstorming and how they incorporate it into their innovation processes. Now let’s take a look at someone who thinks brainstorming is a waste of time.
Larry Keeley of Doblin is a well-known innovation educator and consultant. Doblin has researched innovation extensively and discovered a great deal about what does and doesn’t work. Keeley’s unique perspective evolved over 20 years of field experience and forms the basis for Doblin’s innovation strategy. His pragmatic philosophy is reflected in Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation. He believes that rather than waste time and effort on producing ideas that most likely have no value, people should focus their creativity on adapting the strategies proven elsewhere and combining their Ten Types in creative ways. A good overview of his philosophy can be found in this video (90 minutes):
Keeley believes in innovation effectiveness, which he now considers an emerging science until itself. His firm has gobs and gobs of research data on why innovation fails. At about the 15 minute mark of the video he launches into a dry, witty diatribe against brainstorming - which he portrays as a process in which management generates tons of ideas which never are put into action. He later says that brainstorming is ‘dangerous’ and produces far too many useless ideas. His data suggests that innovation fails (over 95 percent of the time) because people don’t do the most simple things - copy what the industry leaders are doing, and focus their creative efforts on the things that matter:
- Make money in a novel way
- Connect to the rest of the world
- Create lots of beneficial alliances with other companies
- Make a spiffy, memorable brand
- Focus on customer experience
Is there a place in Keeley’s model for novel ideas? Not really. Part of this is born from paranoia - the risk associated with implementing novel ideas, and the fact that the market punishes failure. He cites evidence that successful companies focus 98 percent of their effort on sustaining their existing products and services. Instead of generating tons of ideas for new stuff, Keeley recommends that upper level management focus on one or two ideas that combine the Ten Types in novel ways, then shepherd the ideas to fruition. Doing this, Keeley claims an effectiveness success rate of 35-70 percent. Thus Keeley’s approach uses extremely high-level strategic concepts to create a new perspective on what constitutes ‘doing things right,’ and as such should be a fundamental component of every business endeavor.
In my final installment I will smack the two opposing views together and see what breaks.
Sphere: Related ContentTwo Vastly Opposing Views on Brainstorming, Pt. I
To become a better innovator I try to assimilate and integrate different points of view on innovation and the creative process. One of the traditional cogs of innovation is the practice of brainstorming, the group ideation technique invented by Alex Osborne in the 50s. Contrary to what you might think, brainstorming is a well-defined process with specific rules and procedures. The goal of brainstorming is not to generate ideas - it’s to generate NOVEL ideas, using thinking tools that force you to change perspective and collaborate.
I recently found two vastly opposing views on brainstorming from two very respected sources - each forming the basis of a unique creative philosophy. I find their views illuminating, as it helps focus on what makes brainstorming work, and what makes it fail.
On the pro side of brainstorming is IDEO, the nationally reknowned design group. Brainstorming is integral to the IDEO way - “the idea engine of IDEO’s culture.” In the book The Art of Innovation, there is an entire chapter devoted to IDEO’s brainstorming philosophy. A 60-90 minute brainstorming session jumpstarts every project. I found a couple of notable things in their approach:
- They often don’t begin a session until the team researches the problem at hand. Field investigations and fact finding precede ideation. This serves two purposes - better problem understanding, and better quantity/quality of ideas.
- They cover the walls and tables with paper and include toys to amuse and cheap materials to make rough prototypes.
Other than that they conduct fairly tradition ‘Osbornian’ sessions. The sessions are remarkably short and focused, probably due to the field work, and springboard them directly into the rapid prototyping phase. Their tips include:
- Focus on a well-honed problem statement
- Defer judgement (a component of all effective brainstorming sessions)
- Number your ideas
- Build and jump - transition to other focus areas when discussion tapers off
- Prepare the space for lots of ideas
- Warm-up groups that aren’t used to the process
- Use lots of visuals - mindmaps, diagrams, etc
They also discuss several ways to effectively kill brainstorming sessions:
- Letting the boss set boundaries - eliminates wild ideas
- Taking turns speaking
- Using only ‘experts’
- Doing it off-site
- Making it too serious
- Taking notes instead of giving ideas
The results of their proven process are undeniable: IDEO tops out at one of Top 20 most innovative companies in the world every year. If ‘Do What Works’ is your mantra, you couldn’t find much of a better model than IDEO.
Which makes it doubly surprising that perhaps the most ardent ‘Do What Works’ disciple in the nation, Doblin Inc., hates brainstorming with a passion.
Next: why Doblin hates brainstorming.
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