FROG BLOG

Creative fire extinguishers are a normal part of our human nature. Change can be uncomfortable. New ideas can cause disaster. It’s natural to want to find ways to avoid disruption.

It would be nice to develop an organization that would drive these tendencies out, but that won’t happen to these deeply ingrained habits. For each habit you break a few others will pop-up. Creative Fire Extinguishers don’t exist because we have developed bad habits. They are here to serve real objectives of stability that exist for individuals and organizations.

So how do you keep Creative Fire Extinguishers under control? Know them. Understand them. Channel them. And then provide support for ideation and creativity to help overcome them.

Truth is ideas should have to survive a rigorous review. There are bad ideas. There is unnecessary disruptive creativity. The point of controlling Creative Fire Extinguishers is to make that review process as balanced as possible, focused on stated issues - not hidden agendas or misunderstood motivations.

I’ve summed up the ten Creative Fire Extinguishers we’ve gone through here:

#1 - “Did Something Like That 12 Years Ago”
#2 - The Fire Hose
#3 - Expect Customers To Be The Visionaries
#4 - Pursue Everything
#5 - The Universal Buy In
#6 - Efficient Use Of Time
#7 - Wasting Time
#8 - Everybody Knows
#9 - Ignore The Little Things
#10 - Expect Everyone to Just ‘Get It’

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Change rapidly becomes personal. No matter how great an idea is for an organization as a whole, there are always going to be individuals who interpret implementation as a threat or as a waste of time. There are also going to be individuals who simply don’t ‘get it’ — at least at first.

You may want to just ignore them or wish them out of the way. But this is a critical target group to understand. They are customers for your idea. You need to understand their motivations and fears and develop elements that address their needs. In many cases their concerns might help you focus development of your idea in a way that more clearly identifies and defines the advantages that will make the sale.

It is dangerous to assume that those who don’t rapidly latch onto an idea are slow or simply wrong. Understanding their issues can smooth the way to your idea’s implementation.

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During the creative process opportunities have to be ranked and evaluated so that decisions can be made about where to expend resources. The danger here is in creating a ranking system so simplistic that critical small ideas never receive focus.

Determining market size and sales opportunity is a natural part of this process. Developing filters to help managers make quick decisions streamlines this process and helps focus human capital. Large organizations often create a cut-off point - “No ideas under $20 million.”

The difficulty with this simplistic approach is three-fold. First, truly breakthrough ideas are very difficult to size correctly. Second, sometimes strategically you’re better off firing 5 small shots at a market than one cannonball. Third, it reduces motivation for employees to explore ideas of anything less than obvious potential.

I’ve addressed the difficulty customers have in comprehending their need for breakthrough products (CFE #3) and therefore your ability to size a market, so I’ll just address the strategic issue here.

Strategically there are three primary reasons why multiple smaller markets may be better for an organization:

• Obviousness - If the huge idea is obvious then competitors are already gunning for the same space. Your chance of success is probably being over estimated. Smaller ideas may allow you to surround competitors and pick off more profitable sales.
• Definition - Your organization seems to be bubbling with exciting, creative apparently tiny ideas but only has a few big, kind of boring opportunities to choose from. Do you go with big and boring or small and creative? Your company is defined by the products and services it delivers. Your employees are motivated by the results they see. The strategic power of defining yourself through creative, unexpected solutions can lift your entire business.
• Resources - This one is pretty obvious - but you might be surprised how often it is missed. You just can’t seem to find that big $20 million idea that makes sense. Hmmmm, four $5 million ideas can provide the same level of growth!

Employee motivation concerns is also of key importance. A thumbnail target used by the president of a company quickly becomes the only evaluation tool used by your staff. Small ideas have no chance of gaining traction because every management level knows they have no hope of being funded. What’s the danger in this? Seems efficient? How many huge ideas jump out of the cosmos fully formed. Focusing on the need for only huge ideas will stop the development of creative huge ideas!

In other words: Most big ideas start off small. If you kill small ideas too efficiently - no more big ideas.

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There is no greater enemy to uncommon opportunity than common knowledge.

Years ago as head Easter Bunny for spring specialty products at Hallmark I was asked to redefine the business in a way that would start it growing again.

As I put together what we knew about consumer behavior at Easter I came across an interesting tidbit that had been foundational to our thinking in the past and, to be honest, was a roadblock to what I wanted to do in the future.

Everybody knew about this interesting tidbit. In their minds it was a fact. The tidbit appeared in business and marketing plans for as far back as my files went - without providing a source. I asked our librarian (oh, the benefits of big companies!) to see if he could dig up where it might have come from.

He searched quite a bit and finally found a reference to the tidbit in a Hallmark research summary. It referenced as a source an industry magazine ages old. The magazine article had been based on, keep your hats on, information provided by the Hallmark PR department. The Hallmark PR Department didn’t have a record of where the tidbit may have come from, but it sure made a lot of sense….

So in the end we had years of business plans that had in various ways relied on this tidbit presented as fact. It was accepted as fact because it had been referred to in many legitimate documents. It wasn’t questioned because it seemed to make logical sense. How true was the tidbit really? It didn’t matter. For me the lack of underpinnings allowed my team to move past its limitations.

So, beware of what everybody knows. Often you’ll discover that few people know why they know what everybody knows. And that makes what everybody doesn’t know an opportunity!

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Every improvement in productivity seems to carry with it the risk of waisted time. In today’s world, interruptions have become enemy number one to effectively letting your creative juices flow.

Our desk used to have two primary sources of interruption. The visit and the phone. And really only one source of outside distraction, the magazine. Often we had to physically remove ourselves from our desk and head to the coffee machine to really avoid work.

Now the machine that many of us depend on to get things done also provides multiple sources of distraction that one could argue are job related (IM, email, surfing, feeds…) and not job related (games, shopping, music, video…) not to mention the interesting distractions of viruses and breakdowns. Since many of these items can be set up to be intrusive, the ability to get a half-hour of uninterrupted think time becomes next to impossible. And yet justified because so many of the interruptions involve moving work along.

So now I’ve set you up on a teeter-totter - CFE #6 is being too productive and CFE #7 is wasting time. Where’s the balance? It is in that uninterrupted thought time. Maybe half-an-hour, maybe half-a-day. It’s the time to let your brain get ahead of all the problems being thrown at it and find a better way of catching and handling them.

Wrapping up - a great way to kill creative fire is to distract yourself every minute of the day with things that can wait till later.

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In the name of efficiency we are slowly driving fuzzy time out of our day. Fuzzy time is difficult to value because it is hard to attach creative end-product to such ‘unproductive’ time. As corporate managers have become better at measuring the time it takes to do a job, the more fuzzy time gets diverted to the employee’s supposedly personal time.

So you want to kill creativity? Maximize measured productivity.

How can we protect fuzzy time? How can we make sure it doesn’t get swallowed up by other chores pulling at employees?

Through a combination of rewarding creativity and allowing more individualized control over scheduling you can actually empower an employee to lighten up and think more about what they are doing.

Of course, CFE #6 automatically puts you on the teeter totter with CFE #7, Waisting Time. (Ahh… encouraging creativity. It’s not easy, but at least it’s fun!)

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Similar to CFE #4 in that it pushes decision making responsibility away from an individual and towards a group is the wonderfully inclusionairy Universal Buy-In.

And your manager says, “Go Ye Into The Corporation And Implementeth Thy Idea With The Voluntary Help From All Such Departments That Are Touchethed By Thy Idea Or Hear Of Your Idea Or Simply Who Speaketh Loudly and Catcheth My Ear And Wanteth To Add Imputheth Into Ye Idea That I Liketh So Much.”

If you hold a powerful creative spark this may be all the go ahead you need to drive a great idea through the organization. Most of the time, it is simply a great way to freeze things the way they are.

Driving change with the voluntary help of various support groups means that if any group decides not to participate for any reason your project is dead. Driving change requires enough management support to help individuals get over their minor objections and on with change. Bureaucratic momentum is usually against change and for frozen processes.

Support your firestarters. Allow disagreement and conflict, but push participants to find solutions before attempting to kill the idea - Let them know you want the creative fire to melt through the ice.

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In every organization there is an individual who is supposed to have final say about interesting tidbits like ideas that will determine the future of your company, the universe and everything (My apologies to Mr. Adams.) Often this process is broken in several ways.

• The leader keeps a bucket of sand in his office for emergency head dunking. (Although Ostriches don’t survive this way, it is popular with management.)
• The leader has an idea list that will be gotten to when the day-to-day stuff is running perfectly. (This is a unique way of never saying never while always meaning never.)
• The leader is a group of people who listen to presentations and don’t really say yes or no, stop or go. (Often this is tied to meting out budget dollars in such a way that all comers can keep moving forward ever so slowly until a project derails of it’s own weight.)

The last is my favorite. The group leader can feel good about itself because so many new ideas are percolating and failure can always be attributed to circumstances. The problem here is that great ideas are starved for resources by less great ideas. If nobody prioritizes then the organization can not reach it’s potential.

Building a creative organization and encouraging creative fires does not mean that along the way you don’t put out one or two here, add fuel to one over there and wait and see on some others. In truth the more you encourage creative fires, the more fires you will have to put out. The art is in putting out fires that don’t meet your strategic goals in a way that encourages the fires that do.

In an organization where creative fires are allowed to run amok there is never enough fuel for the truly break out great idea.

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Customers tend to come up with - and understand - incremental improvements. Important, but potentially a trail straight towards a cliff. Radical new concepts tend to fly under the radar, accepted by a few early adopters or as a solution to a niche problem until suddenly it makes sense in a wider context.

So what happens when you let customers control your product development? They get what they want from you until the radical new solution is matured by somebody else. THEN THEY LEAVE, WONDERING WHY YOU WEREN’T MORE INNOVATIVE.

So Creative Fire Extinguisher #3 is expecting your customers to be the visionaries. If you allow innovation to be driven from outside your organization, then at some point you will find your self so far behind the curve that your future is at stake.

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A blast from a fire hose will put out almost any creative fire. In some organizations it becomes second nature, “New Idea! Find The Flaws!”

The water hose is turned on full bore, showering the fire starter with problems and opening up flaws. The fire starter ends up defending their small spark of a fire, rather than gathering fuel and building it.

Give an idea time to gel before pouring water on it.

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