creativity and innovation

Joanna: 'There's this idea that you can only create great ideas in a free-form, unstructured environment. I don't believe that.'

In Creativity is Not Enough, Professor Ted Levitt (who later became editor of the Harvard Business Review and popularised the term 'globalisation') said interesting things about creativity and innovation:

It is alleged that everything in American business would be just dandy if
industry were simply more creative and if it would hire more creative people and
give them the chance to show their fructifying stuff.

It seems to me that the world would be a better place if more Harvard Professors used terms like 'fructifying stuff' and my fantasy is that, of the two terms, he'd rather be famous for that than globalisation.

Levitt goes on to explain his view that:

...there is really very little shortage of creativity and of creative people
in American business. The major problem is that so-called creative people often
(though certainly not always) pass off on others the responsibility for getting
down to brass tacks. They have plenty of ideas but little businesslike
follow-through. They do not make the right kind of effort to help their ideas
get a hearing and a try.

His point, clearly enough, is that ideation in businesses is relatively abundant. It is its implementation that is more scarce. Which brings us back to one of the conventional distinctions made by people who attempt to define innovation and creativity: namely that creativity is about having the idea, while innovation is about making it happen.

In this sense, Red Stripe had the perfect brief. It had not only to have the big idea or ideas, it had to 'pick one or more of these ideas to develop, and then bring the idea(s) to market'.

Another point made by Levitt in the same article, is that 'in most business organisations, the most continually creative men... are also generally known as corporate malcontents.' For whatever reason (Mike Seery says the team members were chosen 'for their flexibility, enthusiasm and to get a range of experience within the team'), the Red Stripe team members were far from corporate malcontents. Of course, they were not all unreserved admirers of their employer but, by and large, they liked and respected The Economist, were proud to work for it and determined to do well by it during the six months of the project. Perhaps, if the team really had been capable, as Slashdot suggested, of frittering away the six months on drink and debauchery, then they might also have been even more receptive to even more revolutionary thinking:

In the first week, the staffers bought beer, wine, whisky, condoms, flat
screen televisions and gaming consoles.

In the second week, the staffers hired a young graphic artist through the internet for $35 per hour to set up a rudimentary web page asking for innovative ideas.

The next 5 months is a blur.

The final two weeks were a flurry of activities. So many good ideas to review! So little time!

By contrast, it was their respect for The Economist Group and concern not to do anything that might damage its reputation (or concern for their jobs, or conservatism, or pragmatism... call it what you like) that led them to back off from their brief at times. When they could have gone public with the Lughenjo idea and effectively forced the hand of The Economist Group (who would not have wanted to be seen ditching an admirably philanthropic scheme), they deliberately chose to stay silent and seek approval from the GMC first.

Staying with Ted Levitt, he further noted:

There is some evidence that the relatively rigid organisation can build into
its own structure certain flexibilities which would provide an organisational
home for the creative but irresponsible individual. What may be required,
especially in the large organisation, is not so much a suggestion box scheme as
a specialised group whose function is to receive ideas, work them out, and
follow them through in the necessary manner.

One of the bravest decisions that Project Red Stripe took in its early days was to abandon the great ideas that most of its members had brought with them and, in some cases, which they had worked up into virtual business plans in order to get accepted onto the team. (Joanna didn't have an idea at the outset and, as a result, felt somewhat split off from those who were 'awash with them'.) After presenting their ideas to each other on a cold day in Regent's Park, the team set about finding ways to harvest ideas from Economist readers and other interested parties. In using this crowdsourcing approach, they defied James Surowiecki, the granddaddy of crowd stuff, who claims - in the words of Dave Pollard - that 'despite compelling evidence that executives and experts are poor at making decisions, and that the collective wisdom of large numbers of people is very much better at it, few businesses rigorously canvass their employees and customers for anything more than inconsequential assessments after the decisions have already been made.'

For the first few weeks they simply worked on developing a workable scheme for collecting, collating, sorting, classifying and evaluating these ideas.

As a result they put themselves at a stroke in exactly the position of the 'responsible' evaluation group rather than that of the 'irresponsible' creative individual.

One reason this was such a bold decision was that it effectively undermined one of the most significant 'glues' that the team started out with - the notion that they could come up with an idea that would change the face of business, or the world, or - at the very least - The Economist.

In doing so, they freed themselves temporarily from the clutch of the becoming-whale-of-an-idea.

Dilemmas:

If good ideas are relatively abundant but the ability to commercialise them is relatively scarce, it may be useful to focus on the latter. But, if you do that, you might end up missing out on the really good idea, which no-one has had yet.

The crowd will come up with good ideas but it may also be tainted by lowest-common-denominator thinking.

A less responsible (or more malcontent) bunch than the Project Red Stripe team might have pursued the idea of a philanthropy website and launched it in a blaze of publicity without approval from the GMC. The Economist Group would have got 'businesslike follow-through' but would also have got an innovation it didn't want.

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Credits:

Innovation depot: Chris Denbow

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those ideas in full

Regent's Park, 5th February 2007

Here are the ideas the team shared at the very start in a meeting mentioned in maps:

Steve's presentation was not so much a thought-out idea as a gathering of thoughts. Many Economist readers, he supposed, would have sent a letter to the editor and would have moved from being communication Luddites to being heavy Internet users, but probably wouldn't download a podcast.

Were there any low-hanging fruits, perhaps an 'online weekend companion', perhaps a sort of digital Intelligent Life (The Economist's 'engaging lifestyle magazine')? Perhaps there were synergies to be derived from combining data from The Economist's 'World In' and 'Cities' Guide', with local community information and blogs? Perhaps a way could also be found to secure weekend advertising through a new service like this?

Subsequent discussion focused on covering leisure, presenting advertising in a more relaxed environment and easing the transition into the digital life.

Tom used chairs to display his hand-written posters (PowerPoint happily wasn't possible in the park). Influenced in particular by Netvibes' web content aggregator and personalised portal service and the way in which he consumed the web, he presumed that this kind of behaviour would become more widespread.

He proposed an 'Economist Reader' homepage service, which would combine comments by magazine readers on Economist articles, a bookmark feature (like de.licio.us) to enable users to find out what other Economist readers are looking at on the web, a community-based service echoing digg pages for citizen journalists, an 'Economist Sandbox' (a little like the Wikipedia Sandbox) in which readers could play with Economist data and repackage them and a profile page where users could put up their CV Facebook-style.

There was much discussion of The Economist's intelligent readership, how much it has to say and how much readers have to offer each other.

Stewart's proposal didn't specifically relate to The Economist Group and was much more broad-brush in its approach. It took as its starting point the idea that the Internet is about communication rather than information. Why not, he asked, let people create interest groups and subscriptions within given geographical areas, helping to find local services, a football team or somebody to have a date with? Economist readers want to meet other Economist readers, and a service like this could be combined with geolocation technology.

Discussion centred around existing services like twitter and the more business-orientated linked in and why they were more popular in Asia than in Europe.

Joanna's proposal tended to ask questions rather than offer solutions. Before coming up with ideas of what to do, she felt the team should ask things like:

• What do people need?
• Should they try to do something for a lot of people or only for a specific group?
• What can The Economist Group do to fulfil people's fundamental needs?

Everyone agreed that this was an important corrective to the previous discussion they'd been having.

Ludwig's idea, as you'll have guessed, was 'Economist.kids'. He proposed using The Economist's data, skills, resources, reputation and values to create an Economist-like service aimed at a much younger audience. It could include a moderated Wiki, advise on job seeking, writing and all aspects of learning as well as offering financial and political information and news.

Much of the discussion was around how to commercialise this service without alienating the target audience.

It was very early on and Mike, in leader/facilitator role, didn't bring a proposal to the park.

Following these ideas through the project, you'll have noticed that Ludwig's Economist.kids proposal made it through to the last two in April, largely due to its author's enthusiasm for the project. Or, as his Myers-Briggs profile said: 'May appear so unyielding that others are afraid to approach or challenge them.'

When the Bavaria/Lughenjo idea emerged, centring on universal primary education and a broader philanthropy exchange, it had no real roots in any of the above ideas (except that Intelligent Life has a strong philanthropy theme), although it was the result of returning to Joanna's 'what do people need?' approach. But the final HiSpace social/knowledge network proposal had obvious roots in Tom's idea and in some of the discussions they'd had in the park in early February.

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Credits:

T-shirt: cafepress.com
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maps

Mike: ‘Let’s put a huge Google Maps marker flag on top of The Economist building so it appears on Google Earth.’ [Here’s one Aram Bartholl doing pretty much that:]

At the end of their first week, Mike asked each member of the team to produce a map of where they had been so far and to ‘sell’ their map to the rest of the team.

Three of the maps were 'geographic', in that they plotted where the team had been physically (they had been on a couple of ‘team-building’ trips in London and had been to Regent’s Park to have a meeting where they shared their own ‘big ideas’ for Project Red Stripe. Stewart had used Google Maps to record where they had been on their trips, while Steven used Google Earth to show his journey from Beijing, his natal Canada and the team’s current digs. Both were technically excellent and applauded by the rest of the team. Mike, who was the only one to remember his own instruction to ‘sell’ the map to the others, produced a map on tracing paper, which could be overlaid onto an atlas, given to others as a walking tour of London or resized on a photocopier.

It became clear from Mike’s comments that he had intended them to produce a physical map of where they had been, rather than something that would only qualify as a map in a fairly loosely metaphorical world. This immediately raised some anxieties among the others about whether they had done the exercise wrong and this, on and off, was to be an anxiety that recurred for some members of the group. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for innovation teams, where the notion of getting it right is even harder to pin down than it is for most teams. It’s a cliché in business that it’s only by making mistakes and getting things wrong that you learn how to get them right. So, in a group like this, it may be really important to work out at the start in what ways team members are allowed to get things wrong. It ought, according to the theory, to be an all-embracing acceptance, but getting things wrong by not turning up or not doing any work or consistently failing to meet self-imposed targets might be too much for any team to bear.

Six-second delay

[An enchanting possibility emerges from recent brain research and the making of mistakes:

‘we can predict the likelihood of someone making an error about six seconds in advance, with gradual changes starting as much as 30 seconds ahead of time’.

The research is reported in The Economist and the article goes on to suggest that people could wear hats that would alert others to the likelihood of them making a mistake. Clearly this relates only to certain types of task, at this stage, but the principle of detecting changing attention patterns could apply more broadly. Imagine the mounting pressure on a chess grandmaster or World Cup penalty-taker or business decision-maker or woman trying to decide whether to dump her bloke. Would a flashing dunce's cap (alerting themselves and others to the impending error) help prevent the error or increase stress levels to a point where a different error was more likely?]

On with the maps. Ludwig used a piece of visual content management software called TheBrain [which for a long time was the rabbit glue holding together your viewing experience here, before it got too clunky] to represent the areas that the project team had been working on rather than the geographic places they had visited. He was on something of a mission, announcing in his soft mid-Atlantic accent (which can make it hard to tell that he’s German until a word with a leading ‘w’ looms into view) that:

‘I no longer want to be the scribe, but if you want me to be the master of TheBrain, I can do that’.

The team never took him up on his offer and he continued to do most of the formal writing for the team, although he largely didn’t record their discussions any longer. In spite of his suggestion that the team used TheBrain to save and display information, they opted to use Central Desktop. With its traditional, hierarchical, information-storage structure, Central Desktop was perhaps not the most creatively useful software tool for them, though it made finding stuff easy and they used it for the next six months. [How much time should you devote at the outset to getting the technology right?]

Joanna (the only Feeler in a team with five other Thinkers according to their recent Myers-Briggs initiation: game and first set to Myers-Briggs) mapped, amongst other things, her feelings – which included hesitation, trepidation and excitement, though Gerard Fairtlough later told me that she seemed to him ‘to be the person who was the strongest’. Her map was on a single sheet of A4 and showed a series of loops (sharing ideas, getting to know each other, etc.) which all turned back on themselves and on each other. She said that the first week had ‘felt like you were planning your big overseas trip; you’d been out and bought your backpack, done your research, and so on’. It was the only thing I ever heard her say that betrayed her Australian origins, though her accent and High Rising Terminal did so in a different way, of course.

[You can listen to a sound file - not of Joanna - here.]

[You can read another account of the maps exercise - yes by Joanna - here.]

Joanna judged that the team was preparing itself before moving. She named ‘severe doubt’ and ‘fear’ amongst her feelings during the week – feelings that, in another context, might have been more fully addressed by the others. Here they were heard and the next map presentation began.

Tom (observing that ‘we have been places emotionally as well as physically’) had all sorts of stuff going on including Paradiso on coat hangers and labels on the spiral staircase and Inferno under the desks. You had to crawl under the desks and lie on the trailing sockets to read the contents of Inferno. Here were to be found:

• Failure
• No fun
• Hell
• Judging
• No hope
• Jealousy
• Blame
• Undeliverables
• Bitterness
• Disloyalty

Gerard Egan and Bill Tate have both written about managing and auditing the shadow side of the organisation – but few others have paid it much attention. (Although, of course, it lurks under every stone in conversations about corporate governance, business ethics and the like.) And here it was, being manifested before my eyes.

I think that every work group, project or process team, department or small business should have its own version of Inferno posted somewhere significant – just to remind themselves of the things they don't get to talk about. The contents should be as specific as possible – not just greed or ambition or lust, but clear examples of these shadowy 'behaviours' in action.

Dilemmas:

Giving permission for team members to get things wrong is the new mantra. But it may not be as simple as it seems. Obviously, there are times when you absolutely need them not to get things wrong. And some mistakes are much more fruitful than others. It’s probably helpful to come up with clear guidelines rather than a blanket permission, but there’s always a trade-off between control and opportunity.

Like teambuilding, or any other form of preparation, time spent getting the right systems and technology in place is - on the face of it - always time well spent. But things change. What if you use mind-mapping software that people don't know well or find well-suited to their needs? What if you adopt a more familiar and easy-to-use file management system but subsequently find that it unduly constrains information-sharing?

Paying attention early on to the 'shadow side' looks like the perfect solution to unspoken fears, tensions and rivalries. If you don't do it, you risk never addressing those issues. Do it, and you risk unsettling team members or replacing one set of unrealistic 'hope beliefs' with another set of 'failure fears'.

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Credits:
Google marker video: Aram Bartholl
Regent's Park photo - Francesco Gasparetti
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