Coaching for Creators

Professional coaching is a much-overlooked creative thinking technique. 

If we accept the basic premise that many of the best ideas come from the subconscious mind of the already-immersed practitioner (rather than, say, the lay onlooker) then the major challenge in generating ideas is to disentangle traditional, embedded thought pathways, to reveal more direct routes to the outcomes we’re striving for. 

Call it the creativity of simplification:  A professional coach can use pretty straightforward technique (albeit with a great degree of skill) to have us answer to the very questions we brought into the room with us, and may already have been wrestling with for months!

Here’s one recipe for the coach …

Ingredients

Restraint, patience, logic and compassion.

Method

1.       Ask the coachee some questions about the objective

2.       Ask questions about the current state

3.       Ask questions about the possible routes from 2 to 1

4.       Ask questions about the preferred route, and the immediate intention of the coachee

This doesn’t sound too smart does it?  So why does it invariably work?  Because we find it hard to be disciplined in applying a logical process to our own thinking.  Far too easily we make emotionally-charged leaps at (or away from) the most obvious ways of tackling a problem, without giving due consideration to the pros and cons.  Having to expose these erratic responses to an outside audience keeps us in check, and makes it much easier to pursue the best course of action.

Good coaching vastly improves our options when seeking to solve a problem.   It helps us access candidate solutions both analytically and creatively, and also supports us in picking the winner.

Let’s consider a brief example:  I spent weeks recently working out how best to open-up conversations with target customers on a particular theme.  I was convinced that the two or three most obvious routes were barred, but had failed to ask myself whether that apparent constraint was real.  Once I realised I’d limited my options by presuming, I suddenly found I had a much more direct solution to my problem.

And in case it’s not obvious, yes you can self-coach.  That’s what I did in the example above.  Perhaps best to experiment with a partner first though, to get a feel for the process before you try wearing both hats simultaneously.

Creativity and Cloud Economics

For reasons which I won't go into here, I often find myself rabbiting on about the relationship between "innovation" and "cloud". 

This isn't just some pun on "Blue-Sky Thinking", but rather a serious point about the impact that cloud computing could have on the prospects for new business ideas.

So what's the link?

Cloud computing is the provision of IT and business services as a utility:  That's to say, under arrangements where the consumer pays per unit, and can consume as much or as little as is needed in any given period.   The more the consumer "turns the tap", the higher the monthly bill.

This all sounds terribly simple, and of course it is simple at a conceptual level.   Making a successful transition to that model though is a venture not to be undertaken lightly - or at least not without careful planning and thorough modelling of the projected benefits.

But perhaps it's worth the time and trouble, especially for organisations in competitive sectors ...

Picture the scene:  Your team has just conceived the most promising new business idea in years.  It centres on a new product, but is likely to bring at least a million new customers in the UK, and might allow you to move into new markets too.  Your company is uniquely well-placed to launch the product so hopes to get first-mover advantage, but others are sure to be close behind.

The design is simple, as with all great ideas, so the prototypes are ready in days, and your marketing team have rallied round magnificently.

But hang on ... your web server platforms are at capacity, and you don't have the CRM system which is critical to the sales strategy.  You're also struggling with business case approval because there's a sunk Capex cost in excess of £5M before you can kick-off, and your worst-case revenue estimates are only £4M.  Ooops.

This is where "cloud" comes in:  If you're in the cloud (or ready to move there) then you'll only have to wait a few hours to get the IT you need.  If not, we'll be talking weeks or months.

Better still, because of the per-pay-use billing model, you only need to pay for what you need.  Your business case now shows less than £1M of up-front investment.   All the other costs are only incurred if you actually make the sales you're hoping for.

So Cloud has the potential to shake-up our industries, wherever they're constrained by traditional IT.  Just buy units of "compute" immediately, when you need them, and focus on what differentiates your business instead.

What a Wonderful Word (Part 2 – “Po”)

When I blogged about “Mu” three weeks ago, the bright sparks amongst you must surely have expected a follow-up.   (The clue was in the title:  “Part 1”!)   So here’s the sequel, this time discussing Edward de Bono’s wonderful word, “Po”.

In some respects, it’s actually a little like “Mu”.  Both words are hedging their bets in my preferred netherworld between “Yes” and “No”.

Actually de Bono was trying far too hard here, positioning the word variously in his 40+ books as shorthand for almost anything, but certainly for “Provocative Operation”, “Provoke”, “Prod”, “Poke” or “Position”.   No-one needs to be so thorough or exacting, and I’d have been just as happy with “Yip”, “Clo” or “Sab” myself – but then I’m not the best-selling author.   (If only you’d each agree pay 99p a month for this blog on your Kindles!)

Curiously, the way he encourages us to use “Po” makes it feel more like punctuation!  It announces a provocative suggestion, but isn’t actually part of that suggestion.  For example:

• “Po, let’s stop selling that product and buy it instead”
• “Po, why don’t cars have square wheels”
• “Po, a factory should be upstream of itself” 

It’s this final example of which de Bono seems most proud.  He tells his readers that it was this particular “po” which resulted in a change of best practice, such that most water inlets are now downstream from the outlets.

Based on the examples above, the level-headed reader might already have deserted this blog post, opting for a nice cup of tea in preference to a plate of tripe.  But fear not, I’m coming to the point … by degrees …

The really important thing about these “pos” is that they’re highly effective in their job of provocation.  If the audience is prepared to tolerate creative thinking techniques (often the biggest challenge) then they successfully divert the thinker onto new tracks.   No-one’s suggesting that wheels should actually be square, it’s just that in pursuing that train of thought we might arrive somewhere new.  And it might even be sensible and valuable too!   That’s what EdB is getting at when he observes that you sometimes don’t know why you’re saying something until after you’ve said it.

Some here are some suggestions to help you formulate “pos”.  The more you practice, the better equipped you’ll be, because it’s often useful to be able to launch “pos” with little or no notice:

• Introduce some random element in combination with the subject at hand, or
• Cast aside the constraints of reality, and plant some idealistic vision, or
• Abandon or reverse or resize one of the basic attributes of the subject 

Better still, here’s my challenge to the web development community:  Why can’t I just visit “www.pos-r-us.com”, type in my one-line problem statement, and expect a “po” at the click of a mouse?

Artistry in Adversity

We could all manage to learn something from the victorian artist John Atkinson Grimshaw. 

Although not the most famous painter in today's contemporary galleries, he's still immensely popular, and there are both artistic and non-artistic reasons for that.

Perhaps surprisingly, it's not the content of his artwork which I find the most creative:  Far more inspiring for me are his techniques and styles, and far more interesting are the reasons why he adopted them:

It was not well known in his day that in fact he was heavily indebted, and his prolific output was due to force of circumstance more than addictive habit.  Jane Sellars, curator of the Mercer gallery in Harrogate, said in a recent edition of the Guradian newspaper that "He painted to pay bills, painted keep his family together, and painted in lieu of rent on his palatial homes."

His parents tried to stymie his career as an artist, even resorting to throwing-away his materials. 

It's often said that most of our best inventions come in times of war.  The list ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, including radar, synthetic rubber, the jet engine, and even tampons and the "Slinky"!

It seems that adversity drove Grimshaw to innovate too.  To keep afloat financially, he invented an exceptionally quick-drying varnish, learnt to create powerful effects with the minimum amount of paint, and often resorted to painting rainy streets for which a smaller palette would be needed.

This is all very interesting, because we're often told by the experts that workers reach ideas much more effectively when they're given the time, space and resources to play around.

But perhaps we also need a problem to focus on.  And if our problems are insufficient time, space and resources, all may not be lost for the creative thinker.

So perhaps it's back to my favourite theme of variety:  Sometimes we need too much, and sometimes too little.  The important thing is to move the chairs around, ring the changes, fire the synapses ... then harvest the ideas.

Weak Tie Rack

I have lots of very poor ties, despite weeding them out periodically.  But enough about my sartorial demons.  That's not this week's topic.

Instead I'd like to talk about "weak ties", AKA loose connections.  It's long been theorised that  they're the key to unlocking meaningful new ideas.   Let me explain ...

To arrive at a new business idea, you need to link two previously disconnected concepts, or at least link them in a new way. 

But if they're too closely aligned already, someone will already have beat you to it.  The new product will already be en route to your market. 

Correspondingly, if the two concepts are too far apart then your seemingly wacky idea might actually be just wacky.   Nothing more.  

The trick then, is to strike the middle-ground:  to juxtapose two or more seemingly dissimilar ideas, concepts or objects, and then juggle them around until a meaningful innovation begins to emerge.

I'm absolutely sold on this, having tried it several times to good effect.

That's why I was so interested to read about Semantic Clustering in the March 2011 edition of Harvard Business Review (yes, I'm still 2 months behind in my reading!)  This technique analyses textual documents from various sources, and looks for connections based on the frequency of predefined keywords.

In the example given in HBR, texts from several thousand companies were run through the engine from software specialist "Quid", and the outcome was a stunning visualisation which was more than a little suggestive about where weak ties might occur.

You can read more about this at the following links.  If you have time to experiment, I'd be delighted to hear your results.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/8304525/Technology-entrepreneurs-are-driving-UK-towards-recovery.html

http://hbr.org/2011/03/vision-statement-locating-your-next-strategic-opportunity/ar/1

What a Wonderful Word (Part 1 - "Mu")

Bafflement might be our western response if I answered your questions with "mu", instead of the more traditional "yes" or "no".  But in the far east this kind of thing is still well-understood, and fairly common practice.

Despite working for a Japanese company, I first came across "mu" in the modern classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig (a bizarre book, but full of inspiration).

Loosely speaking, "mu" means "nothing", or "neither yes nor no", and I think of it as a way of suspending judgement.  It's great to have a word for this, because it legitimises the pause-for-thought and helps us resist pressure to judge prematurely.

"Mu" has another use in creativity too:  It encourages the search for alternatives, by tossing back closed questions.   If we're 10 minutes into an idea-generation exercise when someone asks "Shall we go for idea A rather than idea B?" then the correct answer should be "mu".   The time for that decision comes later when options C to Z have revealed themselves, and when the pros and cons have become clearer.

What a wonderful word then to complement the creative phases of innovation, where it's necessary to suspend judgement and also seek out new approaches, in order to fuel our ambitions.

If only it were easier to throw new words into conversations casually.  Unfortunately people tend to be wedded to their own adopted jargons, so unless you're in a creative industry you might struggle to garner support for "mu".  Better perhaps to hold the concept dear, and remember that "I don't know (yet)" is often the most helpful answer.

Creative Marketplaces

I'd like to use this week's blog post to hypothesise about the potential for "Marketplaces" in creativity.


Let me explain:  There's a huge buzz around the world about Open Innovation at the moment.  This is the rather loosely-defined practice of exposing parts of your organisation's innovation process to external influences which can (fingers crossed!) bring fresh ideas.  Everyone's experimenting with inviting selected partner organisations to contribute ideas, usually under a carefully constructed non-disclosure agreement.


I'm sure this sometimes works, but perhaps there are better models ...


Why not cast our nets wider, by adopting some of the practices from crowd-sourcing?


Why not define the necessary tasks more clearly?


If it's ideas were after, why not advertise the need for specialists to fulfill certain thinking tasks en route to innovation, notably:


1. Problem or opportunity definition and scoping
2. Idea generation
3. Translating business goals into idea assessment criteria
4. Performing assessments and iterating ideas
5. Modelling benefits and proposition development


Freelancers could apply, but so could organisations with complementary skills or capabilities.


Payment, where appropriate, might take the form of an exchange or job swap, instead of cash.


There are already "out-tasking" outfits operating in the internet, such as "Payperhour.com" or https://www.minutebox.com/, albeit for freelancers only.  Could that kind of model work for tasks in organisational creativity too?


So here's my public commitment:  Should my company bonus actually materialise next month, I'll out-task this blog for a week, and see what happens.  Watch this space.


As usual, I'd be delighted to enter into a debate, in the hope of improving my insight.

Cracks in the Crystal Ball

I’ve been musing on strategy this week, inspired by a couple of articles on IT strategy which I think have wider applicability, but which also have quite worrying implications for creativity:

David Chan wrote in the Spring 2011 edition of “CIO Connect” about the weakening position of strategic planning, as external influences continually shorten our effective planning horizons.

And this reminded me of a book I read a few months ago on the recommendation of a customer:  In “FruITion”, Chris Potts questions the need for IT strategy.  His point is that IT’s only destiny is to become an investment portfolio which returns to the business, so if anyone writes an “IT Strategy” then that’s the journey it should prescribe.  Having tripped around in the darkness for a few months beforehand wondering how traditional IT strategies could possibly deliver value, I became an instant convert to that point of view, and now consider any other subject matter masquerading as “IT Strategy” to be deeply sinister!

So why shouldn’t I tolerate strategists, if that’s the kind of work which makes them happy?  (After all, I used to do a bit of it myself.)

Usually I do, but there comes a limit.  Some organisations have yet to recognise their shortened planning horizons, and continue to strategise in a top-down fashion in support of inflexible long-term plans. For the majority of the time, exponents of this kind of rigid behaviour consider creativity to be some kind of intemperate animalistic force which pops up at all the wrong times armed with unpleasant and peculiarly-shaped weapons.  For as long as we to plan in five-to-ten year cycles, we’ll continue to mistrust creativity, fail to lure it from its hiding place when we do want it, try to hire it from outside organisations, and run out of money just before we see its results.

So should we abandon strategy activities in general?

Or should we abandon strategy only when we perceive that it restricts us?

Here’s my suggestion, to which I’d welcome robust comments …

Let’s continue strategising for a sense of common direction, but demote strategy so that it’s always subservient to the emerging reality.  (Indeed this may be the only way for strategy to maintain a modicum of self-respect.)

Let’s consider strategy to be a “living exercise”, so that it can always be influenced.   Let’s abandon our fixation on strategy baselines (we can always create a snapshot called “five year view” if someone wants yesterday’s agenda).

And most importantly … let’s be receptive to new ideas at any time.  No improving organisation can afford to lock itself into a plan which is suboptimal upon reflection.

Us, Ws, Ms and Overscores

In recent days I met up over coffee with Roland Hardwood, co-founder of 100% Open.  Amongst a hundred or so other interest thoughts we shared, one in particular stood out as blog-worthy:

We talked about the U-shaped curve of individual reward (Y-axis) against time (X-axis), as an innovation progresses from concept through to implementation.

For many so-called creative types this is certainly a good representation, with the real enjoyment occurring firstly in the initial formation of the embryonic idea, and then later in the form of pride when the idea has gone public in a usable form.  (A strong bias in the right-hand side of the “U” might reveal a tendency for celebrity!)   For “U-shaped” people, the period between these two peaks is dull or unrewarding by comparison.

I’d also like to cover three more profiles which have occurred to me since that conversation:

Firstly there’s the “W”—someone who gets most reward the same way as the “U”, but who can also contribute energetically to ensuring that the idea passes one or more hurdles en route to implementation.  A “W”-shaped sponsor can provide invaluable, and it’s sometimes easier than you might imagine to find and cultivate one.

Then there’s the “M”—someone who is visibly blasé about an supposedly exciting concept or about its ultimate adoption by its consumers, but is passionate about the main body of process in between.  Often the “M” is a project manager who takes immense pride in efficient implementation, almost irrespective of the content being delivered.

I’ve met several “Ws”, and it might surprise readers of this blog that I’ve also met many “Ms”.   Perhaps the “Ms” are a quirk peculiar to my native industry.

I’ve heard the legends of “Overscores”, but I don’t think I’ve met one in the flesh.  If you’re luckily enough to find any “Overscores” on your payroll, I’d suggest doing whatever you can to keep them entertained.   If they’re discerning in selecting the right ideas at the concept stage, they could well prove to be important engines of improvement for your organisation.

School Belle

A few weeks ago I saw signs that formal (and potentially creative) thinking methods seemed to be gaining a foothold in our schools.  At the time I promised a follow-up if I found out more ...

Having blogged, I then blagged a free copy of "Creative Teaching and Learning" magazine (thanks Sandie!) and started reading.  The most interesting article I found was about a framework called "TASC", which was introduced by Belle Wallace some years ago.   I'd recommend glancing at the 8 stages of the TASC framework at http://www.tascwheel.com/.

I was immediately struck by the partial similarity of TASC to another framework--"TO-LO-PO-SO-GO", by Edward de Bono.   His method is described best in the "Thinking Course” book, but here's the gist:

• TO - What's our goal?
• LO - What do we know, and what can we find out?
• PO - Can we provoke ourselves to think more unusual thoughts?
• SO - Which of our options is the best?
• GO - What are the next steps?

I've revealed my hand on this subject before, most notably by contributing a variant of "TO-LO-PO-SO-GO" as a customisation script for the "Southbeach Modeler" tool.

The similarities with TASC are comforting, and should further encourage both authors that they're on to something.

But I spotted two differences:

1. Whilst de Bono tries to identify the problem before gathering information about it, Belle Wallace seems to tackle these steps the other way around.
2. The three reflective steps and the end of the TASC wheel have no parallel in "TO-LO-PO-SO-GO".

So I got in touch with Belle, who was very helpful ...

She explained that the order of the first two phases can indeed be reversed, but she also gave me a great reason for their given order:  "If the pupils are likely to know something about the general topic then they gather and organise what they already know first - then the identify [phase] becomes 'What would we like to find out?' " 

Having a hand in exploring what they don't know, and what they'd like to find out, encourages children to do far more than just copy and paste answers from the internet.

As I suspected, the last three phases are most applicable in a learning environment, to help us conclude effectively and do everything better next time.   They're "major stages in becoming an expert, reflective thinker."

Belle also told me that TASC is now widely used across the UK and some Local Education Authorities are encouraging all their schools to engage with the Framework.   Apparently the TASC website has an evaluation of its use across 10,000 classrooms, and OfSTED have praised it for developing pupils' thinking.

Perhaps Generation Z will be able to teach de Bono and Wallace a thing or two about thinking?  Ever the optimist, I'm certainly hoping so!