- In his day, Johann Sebastian Bach
was known as a pretty good organist,
but that was about it,
his compositions weren't really well received.
It wasn't until 79 years after his death
when Felix Mendelssohn performed Bach's St. Matthew Passion
on March 11th, 1829,
and people just lost their minds
and couldn't get enough Bach.
Kind of the same story for Galileo,
he had some pretty innovative ideas
which ultimately turned out to be spot on,
but the culture in the environment at the time,
just wasn't having any of it,
they weren't ready to receive those ideas.
We see similar stories with people like Leonardo da Vinci,
Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein,
sometimes we say these people were just ahead of their time.
But there's a key lesson here for us
in our own organizations,
just having good ideas isn't the secret cheat code
to all our wildest innovation dreams.
Innovation exists within a system,
and we're talking good old systems theory here.
We might have a creative idea,
but we also have our corporate culture,
our organization's risk tolerance,
our resource availability,
our time, our ability to grow and nurture ideas.
We also have to consider our external environment
as part of our system,
would our customers find value in this idea?
How might our competitors imitate the idea?
Look, anyone can come up with an idea,
but how can we help our organizations
come up with the most valuable ideas?
(bright music)
Welcome to another episode of "That's Innovation."
In this episode, we're going to talk about creativity.
Now, if you're following along this series in sequence,
so far, we've talked about process, strategy
and idea management.
We've covered those things first on purpose,
we wanna begin with a good understanding
of our particular ecosystem
and then be able to focus our creativity into ideas
that have the best chance of progressing our strategy
within that system.
Think creativity is just for the artists
and musicians of the world?
Think again.
No really, science says so.
(upbeat music)
Well hello class,
in today's lesson, we're taking a deep dive into creativity,
where do we find it and how do we harness its immense power?
Most organizations try really hard to optimize process
and become efficient,
which spawns things like standardization and templates,
good for efficiency, but this mindset ends up working
against creativity sometimes.
In innovation terms, we often talk about a mix
between exploit and explore.
We can exploit our existing capabilities
to keep on keeping on,
or we might wanna explore new things.
Organizations with more mature innovation practices
will have certain ratios of exploit, explore,
defined through budgets, strategy
and organizational structure.
As you progress with your innovation efforts,
you'll wanna help your leadership figure out
a good mix for your organization.
Another component of creativity and exploration
is the concept of slack.
No, not that slack,
slack in organizational terms is extra resources,
maybe budget, time allocation, head counts
that are above and beyond the bare minimum required
for business as usual.
Going back to the 1960s,
studies have shown a positive correlation between slack
and innovation.
And that makes sense,
because when everyone is 100% deployed on business as usual,
no one has time or the motivation to think of anything new.
If this sounds like an excuse for waste,
well, some argue that it is.
But consider this,
we use the term slack in project management
to represent extra time built into the schedule
to account for unexpected things
or new opportunities that might crop up.
Why shouldn't we use this same thinking for our future?
In the 1950s, Alex Osburn proposed rules for brainstorming,
get a group of people together in a room,
come up with ideas no matter how crazy.
The only problem is research has shown
that this doesn't work so great for really creative ideas.
One challenge is groupthink,
which is when people together
tend to gravitate towards the same thinking.
Some research has shown that creativity and brainstorming
actually work better with people working remotely.
When people work alone, their ideas tend to diverge,
but when they're working together, they converge,
because we're generally non-confrontational
and wanna get along and be agreeable.
So if you find yourself in a distributed organization,
don't think that you can't brainstorm,
in fact, distance may be your secret weapon.
Did you know that highly diverse teams
tend to be more creative?
Different ethnic, socioeconomic,
and educational backgrounds bring different experiences
and insights to the creative process,
which then inspires further ideation.
And don't forget about recruiting different personality
types, introverts, extroverts, pragmatists, dreamers,
you name it,
the more variety you can get into your innovation efforts,
the better.
If you're trying to prototype some process, device
or application, don't worry about making it professional
and pretty,
it's actually better to create low resolution
rough prototypes when trying to get feedback.
When someone is seeing a prototype for the first time
that's a polished pixel perfect creation,
two things usually happen in the mind of the person
you're asking for feedback,
either they think, wow,
they really spent lots of time and effort on this thing,
I don't wanna hurt their feelings
by saying anything negative,
or, well, it seems like they already know
what they wanna create, they don't need my input.
Rough unfinished designs tend to elicit more open
and honest feedback,
people see it as easier to change and more flexible.
Additionally, that rough prototype
represents a concept snapshot,
and when lined up over time,
can help show your stakeholders the tangible evolution
of your ideas.
(bright music)
You might've heard of design thinking,
it's got plenty of hype and intention,
and just like agile or lean, it gets lots of press,
but, usually it's superficial at best.
The idea behind design thinking
is to better empathize with the customer.
I've seen firsthand how design thinking
can really help companies improve their customer journey
and significantly increase the value and utility
they provide to customers.
For example, a nonprofit was able to leverage
a cloud-based service for real time language translation,
removing a barrier between their employees
and their customers who spoke a different language.
And I've also seen cases where organizations
do little more than design thinking theatricals
and just come away with a wall full of sticky notes.
Similar to agile or lean,
it's all in how you buy into the philosophy
and whether you're willing to put in the hard work
and make the uncomfortable decisions.
It also helps to have an experienced facilitator,
at least in the early days.
Design thinking isn't some miracle breakthrough,
the components have been around forever,
and we can use some of these components
to help elicit some creativity in our own organizations.
One good resource you might find helpful
is the design thinking methods catalog.
This website is full of various activities and processes
to provide some structure and framework
for creative ideation.
Another free resource that I like
is from the Stanford d.school
called the Design Thinking Bootleg deck.
It's a set of cards in PDF form
chock full of design thinking tips, methods
and tools that you can use.
In a bit here, I'm gonna show you how to generate some ideas
relatively quickly using the 6-3-5 method.
It can be done in an in-person group setting,
and we can also do it completely online.
To do it online, we just need some cloud-based Kanban tool
like Asana, Jira or Trello,
or even just a cloud-based whiteboard
like Microsoft Whiteboard, Miro, or Google's Jamboard.
(upbeat music)
In this demo, I'm gonna show you how you can employ
the 6-3-5 method for brainstorming with remote teams.
6-3-5 is short for six people writing three ideas each
in five minutes,
then we swap those ideas with another person
who adds on to those original ideas for another five minutes
and so forth.
You can use any real variation,
there's nothing magical about six people or five minutes.
If we're doing this in person, we might use sheets of paper,
but to do it virtually,
all we need is some shared workspace.
I'm gonna be using Trello,
but you can also use Asana, Jira, Microsoft Whiteboard,
Google Jamboard, whatever.
We'll create a new board,
we'll be brainstorming on employee engagement.
We'll start by creating columns for our participants.
For this example, I'm just gonna use five participants.
Now we can invite our participants to this board via a link.
Once our participants are signed into the board,
we'll give them the instructions.
In five minutes, create three ideas as cards
under your respective column.
And let's start our five minute timer.
Okay, at the end of five minutes,
everyone should have three ideas,
you can see mine here,
provide a free class pass to the yoga studio in town,
hold a virtual employee talent contest,
have a "bring your pet to work day".
The other participants weren't very imaginative here,
but, you get the idea.
Now for round two, we rotate.
I will focus on Thomas' list,
Thomas will go to Avro's list,
Nancy to Jennifer's list, Jennifer to my list.
The objective for this round is for the next person
to think on the ideas and add their own spin, suggestion
or twist to the original idea.
Okay, so in this demo, I'm playing the part of everyone,
so, bear with me here.
Maybe Jennifer is wondering if virtual yoga classes
is a thing.
(upbeat music)
For round three, we rotate again.
Nancy would move to my list,
Jennifer would move to Thomas's list and so on.
And we'd repeat this process
until everyone rotated around the other lists.
We could then review the ideas
and flag the ones that we might wanna follow up on.
So with this method, we were able to generate 75 ideas
in 30 minutes.
Now of course, not all the ideas will be great,
but if only 10% are, that's seven or eight ideas
more than we had 30 minutes ago.
This is the 6-3-5 method.
(bright music)
If you're playing at home, here's something to try,
why not dig into some of these design thinking tools
and see how you might put some of the science
of organizational creativity to work for you.
Maybe try out one of the brainstorming methods
against some problem in your next team meeting.
Have remote team members?
No problem, the cloud can help you there, as we've seen.
Now go forth and innovate.
Thanks for watching, I'm Scott Pletcher
and "That's Innovation."