Creative Fire Extinguisher #8 - Everybody Knows
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!
No commentsCreative Fire Extinguisher #7 - Wasting Time
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.
No commentsCreative Fire Extinguisher #6 - Efficient Use Of Time
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!)
No commentsCreative Fire Extinguisher #5 - The Universal Buy In
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.
No commentsCreative Fire Extinguisher #4 - Pursue Everything
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.
No commentsCreative Fire Extinguisher #3: Expect Customers To Be The Visionaries
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.
No commentsCreative Fire Extinguisher #2: The Fire Hose
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.
No commentsHow To Smother Creative Fire
Creative fire is a funny thing. It is the natural human condition to look for creative solutions and innovations. However, the natural tendency of existing organizations is to avoid creative fire because it shakes things up, rattles the bones.
So, rather than espouse on all the ways you can encourage fire starting in your organization, I think it will be more useful to discuss all the ways an organization smothers creative fire. Stop throwing water buckets and the natural tendency will be for creativity to flourish.
Creative Fire Extinguisher 1: “Did something like that 12 years ago and it didn’t work.”
I just heard this one a day or two ago. I’m not sure anyone would say this is a good way to kill an idea, and yet, we all do it. We’re creatures of our own history and not repeating mistakes is a crucial element to survival. In the business world this poses a problem. First - 12 years is an eternity. 6 months can be an eternity. Many ideas fail for no reason other than they were ahead of their time. Second - ’something like that’ is a red flag. Maybe the elements that are different were all that kept you from succeeding the last time. Third - ‘it didn’t work’ is not an adequate description of what happened. Did nobody buy it? Did it blow up? Did the VP of sales hate it?
Ideas that come up over and over again often indicate there is a need to be satisfied somewhere. The concept put forward for satisfying that need may be completely wrong, but that does not mean the core opportunity does not exist. Ask yourself, why are we seeing this idea again? What other ways can we satisfy the need? What is the underlying opportunity?
What creative fire extinguishers have you run into?
No commentsClue Quotient and ON FIRE
Looking for creative fire starters brought back to mind a study done by the Chicago Economic Development Council
The scary part is that for the majority of the organizations in that top 25% only the leadership was actively concerned about innovation. That means that innovation was being driven from the top down, probably seen as unnecessary or worse by the majority of the organization. Consistent, incremental and even groundbreaking innovation often comes from the bottom up. Your employees who are working with customers, working with tools, working with procedures are often in the best position to imagine improvements.
More importantly, creative fire is a state of mind. If innovation is regularly improving a companies performance and generating rewards at all levels, then the organization will be more accepting of radical innovation that may be necessary to create a new competitive landscape.
In other words, your creative fire will burn brighter if everyone is searching for fuel not just a few.
The Chicago Economic Development Council is at www.edcchicago.org.
No commentsStrategic Fire
What is fueling your company’s desire for innovation? Is there anything even smoldering?
Great inspiration for most companies can come from within. The ideas tend to be lying around all over the place, little different from deadwood waiting for someone to light a match.
So who lights the fires of change in your organization? Are they rewarded for their efforts even if the fire doesn’t catch just right? Do you limit your creative fires to small, safe rings surrounded by hundreds of buckets of water?
As a boy I loved anything to do with fire. Burning leaves, campfires, fireworks, even special effects when my old plastic models looked a bit sad on the shelf. Over time I was taught over and over how dangerous fire can be. Can’t burn leaves. Can’t blow up models. Can’t have fireworks.
To often that is the way people who spark are treated in any organization. Can’t, don’t, ahhhhhh water… We teach them that creative fires must be controlled, allowed to burn in safe little zones.
Soon the sparks fly less and less. The joy of a creative spark disapears and the fear of the work or the hassle or the damage it can do to a career takes over.
Gather up your fuel. Teach your people to spark. Enjoy the Strategic Fire.
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