Heads-Up! on Organizational Innovation

Von Oech's "Whack" 25 Years Later

It seems like yesterday that I picked up a book on creativity and said, “Wow! I wish I’d written this book.”  It was fun, practical and wise.  Actually however, it was twenty-five years ago and the book was Roger von Oech’s, A Whack on the Side of the Head.   The fact that it has sold a zillion copies in 17 languages and spawned the extremely popular “Creative Whack Pack” card deck only added to my writer’s envy.  However, after meeting Roger in online chat rooms and later in person, I’m convinced that no one but Roger could have written this book … his mind is a labyrinth of curiosity and questions and he has deeply explored subjects that I had never heard of until I met Roger … one tongue-tangling example … rhombic triacontahedrons... something Roger calls “geometry’s most beautiful shape” and forms the basis of his new “Ball of Whacks,” a three-dimensional, magnetic creativity stimulator that fascinates people of all ages. 

As you read Roger’s book, you’ll find examples and stories unlike any other business or management book you’re likely to pick up.  Where else would you read that if you’d lived 5,000 years ago you would have had a different North Star?  When Paul Williams of http://idea-sandbox.com asked me to participate in the virtual tour for the 25th Anniversary Edition of Roger’s book, I was delighted to have the opportunity to ask Roger some questions that had been lurking in the back of my mind.
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Q:  Roger, think back to before your book was written.  There were very few books on creativity, much less on the practical application of creativity.  And none of the existing books had achieved any level of general popularity.  What were you thinking?  Why did you write the book and what were your expectations for it?

A.  Back then, most "creativity" books were fairly boring. I felt that a book about creativity should be fun, informative, and interactive. That's what motivated me to write "Whack." When I began writing it in 1981-82, I had already been doing creative seminars with corporate America for five years. Thus, I had a pretty good sense of what ideas would resonate in a book. In addition, I picked up a lot of stories and examples from seminar participants. These helped to give the book additional vitality.

"Whack" was originally self-published (the big publishers turned it down). After it sold 30,000 copies in about four months, I was able to do a deal with Warner Books. They did a first printing of 110,000 copies and sent me on a 27-city book tour in 1983. It's been a consistent seller ever since. I'm particularly excited about this new 25th Anniversary Edition. I hope it reaches a new generation of creative thinkers!

Q:   When did your interest in creativity and the principles of creativity begin?  Is there a particular event or person in your life that fostered that interest?

A.  Ever since I was little, I've been interested in ideas and how people get them. I'd have to thank my parents for giving me support and encouragement when I'd try some "odd-ball" project. That helped give me the self-confidence that every creative person needs. Having a creative teacher every couple of years or so also helped.

Q:  You’ve said one way your thinking has changed over the past twenty-five years is your increased appreciation for constraints and limits in stimulating creativity.  I’ve found this to be one of the hardest areas for people to deal with and they often push back with the cliché, “Think outside the box.”  How do you get people to focus on constraints and limits in a way that stimulates creativity rather than shutting it down?

A.  I think anyone can write "free-verse" poetry. But to write a 14-line sonnet with its rhyming rules really forces one to look more deeply for ideas. Similarly, new products with no "real-world" constraints probably aren't going to go very far.  A new idea or product has to conform in some ways to existing manufacturing or distribution protocols. These constraints force the innovator to think and look more deeply for opportunities.

Here's an example from an outside area. The other night I watched Roman Polanski's 1962 film, "Knife in the Water." One of the DVD's special features had an interview with Polanski and his screenwriter. They both said that by forcing themselves to stick with Aristotle's "three unities for a good tragedy" (all action takes places within 24 hours; all action occurs in the same place; limited number of characters), they had to think more deeply about plot and character rather than taking cheap cinematic shortcuts. They felt these limits helped to produce a better film. I agree with them.

Q:  There are lots of techniques and tools for stimulating creativity these days but most people find a few that are most powerful for them.  When you start a new project or want to really open up your creativity, what tool or technique do you find yourself using over and over again?

A:  I use this simple strategy: "Look for the second right answer." That's become my mantra over the years. This technique allows me to play with a problem or idea until I find something I'm really passionate about.

Another strategy I try to follow is: "Don't fall in love with ideas." I find that when I'm working on a project (writing a book, designing a product, etc.) and if I'm "in love with" a particular part of it, that's a sure sign I'm not looking for alternatives. "Kissing" ideas "goodbye" is a great technique to open up your thinking. As Mark Twain put it, "One of life's most over-valued pleasures is sexual intercourse, and one of life's least appreciated pleasures is defecation." There's a real joy to "letting go," and this certainly applies to ideas.

Q:  You’ve expressed a continued fascination with the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, even to the point of writing a book about him (“Expect the Unexpected”).  If Heraclitus were with us today and thinking about all of our challenges such as global warming, international conflict, and financial imbalances, what would he say?

A:  He'd say something along the lines of: "Stop whining. Don't be so arrogant to think that your problems are unique. There will always be conflict. The universe runs on conflict. Human beings have always been faced challenges and they always will be. Use these challenges to come up with some new approaches."

Q:  What’s next for Roger?

A:  I'm currently in the midst of designing a followup product to the "Ball of Whacks." It's close to being finished. I'm working with my Chinese manufacturer on the tooling right now. It's been a kick to enter into a whole new business (creative mind manipulative tools; http://creativewhack.com ). I've learned a lot more about manufacturing, dealing with the USPTO, distribution, etc. It's been quite a learning experience. Plus, the Ball of Whacks has helped me reach a whole new audience.

I'm still doing some speaking and seminars as well. When you post this, I'll be in London working with a client. That's one of the neat things about my work: it allows me to meet a lot of interesting people around the world.

Thanks Joyce for the opportunity to share a few of my ideas with you. Best wishes to you and your many readers!
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Roger von Oech

Pulling the Wagon

Here’s a thought for the new year delivered by a light-hearted commercial.  The next time you think you’re pulling the wagon yourself, you might remember this young Clydesdale..  And if you’re in an organization thinking about “compensating and rewarding” innovation, you might ask whether the compensation should go to those in front of or behind the wagon. 

Wishing you and yours an abundantly innovative and joyful coming year.  May 2008 be the year the world wakes up to the possibilities of peace and finds new ways to resolve our differences and heal our planet.

Best wishes ... Joyce Wycoff

Productive Thinking

From: Joyce Wycoff

With all the talk about INNOVATION going on today, there's still relatively little talk about THINKING.  And yet, thinking, creative, rational, strategic, collaborative thinking is the foundation of innovation.  Tim Hurson's new book "Think Better" is an important addition to the innovation literature.  Tim has kindly given us some chapter excerpts to whet your appetite.  We highly recommend that you check out the entire book.

When you read the excerpt from Chapter 3, think about "fossil ideas" that are lurking in your life and in your organization.

Better Thinking (your company's future depends on it ... and so does yours)  by Tim Hurson

From Chapter 1 ... Why Think Better

To create the future, you have to be able to imagine it. Productive thinking is a way to help you do that. It’s not magic. It’s a disciplined approach to thinking more creatively and more effectively. You can actually train yourself to think better. The more you practice it, the better you’ll get. The better you get, the more opportunities you will have to make a better world, a better company, a better life.

The power of productive thinking lies its potential to increase your chances of finding, developing, and ultimately implementing unexpected connections. Although I’ve been helping people and companies discover unexpected connections for years, I am consistently astonished when they appear  ... sometimes in an instant, sometimes after months or even years of searching. They seem to be in limitless supply: an infinite number of AHAs waiting to be discovered.

From Chapter 2 Monkey Mind, Gator Brain and the Elephant's Tether

There’s an interesting biological yardstick called the RMR, which stands for resting metabolic rate. Your RMR is the amount of energy your body needs just to stay alive. Your brain, that mysterious cluster of ganglia, neurons, axons, dendrites, gray and white matter, lobes, synapses (and empty space!), represents about 2 percent of your total body mass (to get a sense of that ratio, imagine one teaspoon of sugar in a standard cup of coffee). Just to keep you alive, your brain requires a disproportionate amount of energy. At rest, it consumes about 20 percent of the oxygen you breathe and the calories you burn (imagine your coffee with 10 teaspoons of sugar!). That’s more than your heart (10 percent), your lungs (10 percent), and your kidneys (7 percent). And that 20 percent gobbled up by your brain is just in a resting state. When you’re really thinking, that proportion can go way up. Chess masters, for example, have been known to sweat out between 7 and 10 pounds of fluid during a two-hour chess match.

So thinking ... truly focused thinking, which includes mental activities such as observing, remembering, wondering, imagining, inquiring, interpreting, evaluating, judging, identifying, supposing, composing, comparing, analyzing, calculating, and even metacognition (thinking about thinking) ...is hard work. Which, as Ford said, is probably why so few people actually do it.

You may be saying to yourself, "Don’t be silly. I’m thinking all the time. I never stop thinking. I think while I work, while I talk, while I drive. In fact, I’m thinking while I read these words."  Well, it probably seems as though you’re thinking all the time, but like the rest of your body, your brain uses a variety of strategies and tricks to minimize the energy it requires, and its most effective strategy for conserving brain energy is actually not to think at all. In fact, most of the time your brain is involved in just one of three activities: distraction, reaction, or following well-worn patterns...

... Like the distraction of monkey mind and the split-second reaction of gator brain, the tethering effect of following well-worn patterns can be a major barrier to thinking. In India, elephant wranglers, or mahouts, prevent elephant calves from wandering by chaining one of the animal’s legs to a stake deeply embedded in the ground. Try as they might, the young elephants aren’t strong enough either to break their chains or dislodge the stake. Attempting to do so is not only fruitless but uncomfortable as the chain tightens around their legs. Pretty soon they stop trying. As adults, elephants are kept in place with a length of woven hemp (much cheaper and more convenient than a chain) tied to a stake hammered into the ground with a few strokes. Full-grown elephants can pull away from their tethers easily, but they don’t. They have a deeply ingrained pattern that tells them that escape is impossible. For the elephants, the pattern has become more powerful than the data.

This book is about harnessing monkey mind, taming the gator, and cutting the elephant’s tether.

Innovation Best Practices

Learn the latest in global innovation best practices - entirely from your computer!  Announcing the Global Innovation Exchange 2007 virtual conference (November 7-9), a groundbreaking online event focused on collaboratively sharing and diffusing innovation insights, strategies and next practices from around the world.  Learn about emerging innovation models, tools and approaches from leading experts from Johnson & Johnson, the Innovation Center Denmark and numerous other organizations from the US, Europe, India and the Middle East.  For more information or to register, visit http://www.innovation-point.com/GIE2007/index.htm.

Making Thinking Visible and Peering

You, Me and Pictures Part 1

Making Thinking Visible and Peering

By Linda Yaven

peer: to look very carefully

peer: somebody who is equal to another person

This afternoon my nephews Eli, 9 and Zach, 8, were playing on the front porch with toy boats, cars and planes. Suddenly I heard the cousins squabbling and Eli shouting “But just imagine it, Zach! Imagine the scene!” Zachary, being an articulate fellow, was shouting back “I don’t know what you are talking about! I can’t imagine it! It’s stressing me out to try!”

Each of us has a unique relationship to the domain of the creative.

In Zach’s case, seeing is believing. I know his imaginative capacity shows up in math, music and dance. Yet this simple exchange between children echoes the cultural conversation between logic and intuition, left/right brain, image/text and quantitative/qualitative thinking.

A few days ago a colleague e-mailed exuberant about a project to ask: “How can I make my thinking visible?” A savvy question because whenever we are wrapped up in data we can easily lose a handle.

An emergent category is surfacing in the pressure cooker of business innovation called Making Thinking Visible. Since 1999 along with colleagues and graduate students I have been designing/implementing MTV curriculum, recently adapting it for business.

I have identified here its advantages as a strategy for interactive research. Part 2 of this article will focus on MTV as a strategy for building cohesive teams swiftly.

1. Making Thinking Visible furthers thinking by making a line of inquiry visible.

We usually think of documentation as a something moribund and conclusive. At the core of MTV, however, documentation is a responsive, interactive dynamic and a mirroring tool for a chosen cycle of inquiry.

MTV is an improved discovery session for researching desired topics. It makes use of digital/non-digital documentation, unfolds in specific, successive phases with custom tailored goals unique to the people putting it into play.

Although it uses visuals alongside words it does not require a visual skill set; in a recent training there was audible relief to discover how accessible it is. It puts participants in a good mood by providing understandable ways to test out ideas, gain control of unwieldy processes and elicit diverse lines of inquiry for higher order outcome.

Paint Jam

Just when you think you can't do something, watch this incredible video.  It takes 5 minutes but it will give you a new perspective on what's possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIJtKxdRQzY

Make Your Ideas Sticky

Ideas are a dime a dozen ... but *everything* starts with an idea.  ... So how can you make your ideas "stick"?

Marketing guru, Guy Kawasaki makes the following prediction for Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath: it will join The Tipping Point and Built to Last as a must-read for business people. The book explains why some ideas stick and some don’t--and I’ve been on both sides of this equation. A warning though: If you read this book, you’ll revamp a lot of your marketing material (as you probably should).

Chip Heath will be one of the featured keynote speakers at the 13th annual Innovation Convergence:  Innovation Immersion, held October 15-17th in Scottsdale, AZ.  (More information and registration:
http://www.iirusa.com/convergence.)

Here’s a selection from an interview  Guy conducted with the authors (full text can be found on Guy’s blog: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_stickiness_.html.)

Question: What separates ideas that stick from those that don’t?

Answer: We spent lots of time researching sticky ideas--ideas that people understand, remember, and that change the way people think or behave. The ideas we studied ranged from the ludicrous to the profound, from urban legends (no, there is no kidney theft ring) to great scientific theories (yes, the land we walk around on does ride on giant tectonic plates and when they collide they cause mountain ranges and earthquakes). We found there were six principles (SUCCES) that link sticky ideas of all kinds. Sticky ideas won’t always have all six, but the more, the merrier.

For example, JFK’s idea to "put a man on the moon in a decade" had all six of them:

1.      Simple -- A single, clear mission.

2.      Unexpected -- A man on the moon? It seemed like science fiction at the time.

3.      Concrete -- Success was defined so clearly -- no one could quibble about man, moon, or decade.

4.      Credible -- This was the President of the U.S. talking.

5.      Emotional -- It appealed to the aspirations and pioneering instincts of an entire nation.

6.      Story -- An astronaut overcomes great obstacles to achieve an amazing goal.

Join us at Convergence for even more about how to make your ideas stick ... it could make all the difference in the success of your ideas ... and your personal success.  You'll also get a chance to hear from:

-- Gunter Pauli, Founder & Director of ZERI (Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives Foundation
-- Arkadi Kuhlmann, CEO of ING Direct
-- Mary Cullinane, The Technology Architect for Microsoft's School of the Future
-- Jane Stevenson, Managing Partner, Heidrik & Struggles
-- Michael Chai, Sr. V.P. Leapfrog Enterprises

Also learn from a host of other innovation practitioners from major organizations such as:  HP, Carlso Hotels Worldwide, Kimberly-Clark, Church & Dwight Co, NineSigma, Motorola University, General Mills, Adobe Systems, Mayo Clinic, Dow Corning, Ping, Inc., Mondi Business Paper Services, The Yankee Candle Company, Dunkin' Brands, Inc, Visa USA, Intel and more.

Trust: the Heart of Innovation Free Web Seminar

Why is it that many (large and small) companies have challenges in making innovation work -- or even holding successful "off-the-wall" creative sessions? Often it is because innovation is viewed by some key people more of a "threat" than as an opportunity.

An atmosphere of trust is needed for real innovation to take place.

Collaborative systems can help build stronger relationships among the key people in the company -- especially among the most "outside-the-box" thinkers. This web seminar will help you understand how to build trust in an organization by using a concept called NetWeaving which offers a step-by-step guide to help foster innovation and generate the "secret sauce" for enabling true change to occur.

Speakers: Bob Littell -- Bob Littell is principal of Littell Consulting Services and Second Opinion Insurance Services, LLC, and also carries the title of Chief NetWeaver. Although he wears a number of hats within the insurance and financial services industry, Bob's passion these days is a word and concept he created called NetWeaving – a Golden Rule and Pay It Forward form of networking which fosters creative ideation – a required ingredient in order to become more referable.

Register for this free web conference at http://iirusa.com/convergence.

Tom Peter's 5 P's of Innovation

Valarie Willis, principal with the Tom Peters Company tells us that Tom has come up with five P's of Innovation Success. She states, "As I read them, I thought about how I have believed for quite awhile
that innovation comes as a result of Pain, Passion or Need.  Usually one of the three will move us to do something new, different and creative.  Of course, Tom always has a different take on things so
here are his 5 P's:"

Pissed-offedness - Something that makes you so mad, that you decide enough is enough, let's fix this!  Dick Nettel of Bank of America tells the story of how people had to press a buzzer to get in and out of the mail room at the bank. The buzzer was 'important' for security reasons.  They figured out a way around that buzzer,Dick said, 'it was like a light bulb went off,fix the problem."

Passion - Passion drives most non-profit companies, so why not organizations?  Dyson who invented the first vacuum that wouldn't lose suction was passionate about his invention, even though it scared the other vacuum companies. The other vacuum companies couldn't imagine a bagless vacuum, after all, bags were worth millions in sales.  Dyson almost went broke bringing his vacuum to market. Passion prevailed.

Pals - Never go it alone. If you want to go out on the limb, be sure to have someone holding on to you so that you don't fall.  LeJeune from Fabcon manufacturing came up with an idea to make concrete panels for building lighter.  He had two other Fabcon employees in on the idea, who served as sounding boards. The company eventually created a new product called VersaCore, which according to Gallup helped the company to stay in business.

Politics - What is it that no one likes, it exists everywhere, and everyone is guilty of it but me? Politics would be the right answer.  Think of politics like gaining sponsorship, and as a way to get your idea 'sold' in the corporate marketplace. We all need influential people who can help market and sell a good idea.  Every project needs a project sponsor or champion

Persistence - Most ideas will get shot down before a person finish speaking, but those who prevail will not give up on an idea.  There were two sisters who invented a product called Ghostline, this is a poster board with faint lines so that you can write straight on the paper, but it looks as if no lines exist.  They invented this product after helping their young relative with a science project where they had to start over several times to get it right.  They stayed with their idea until they found a paper company that would produce it for them. Their persistence paid off, they now get royalty checks in the mail, from not only the company that is producing the paper, but from a competitor that tried to copy their idea!

If you want Tom's PowerPoint slides on innovation, you can download them from his site:
http://www.tompeters.com/slides/uploaded/TRY_It_072407.ppt

Small Gifts of Service

From Joyce Wycoff:

We talk a lot about service these days ... mostly horror stories of bad service done to us.  Yet, how often do we think of ourselves as part of the service cycle?  Each of us has "customers" who depend upon us for service in some form; each person we interact with is an opportunity to give the gift of service.

Gandhi advised us to be the change we wished to see in the world.  Perhaps it's the same for service.  We need to BE the service we want to see and experience.

For an inspiring story of how anyone can create a positive impact through service, watch the video at the link below.  It is from Ken Blanchard and Barbara Glanz and tells the story of how a simple effort impacted and inspired the entire system on one organization and one community.  Who knows how far those ripples extend as this story is shared around the world.  Enjoy!

Watch the video at:  http://www.stservicemovie.com