Write, hear, know

[A guest post by Mandy Haggith]

Here is a simple and surprisingly powerful method for loosening up your creativity. I have led many groups of people through this process as a warm-up exercise on creative retreats and creative writing workshops, and I do it myself, on my own, whenever I feel stuck. It is the best way I know of listening to myself.

You will need a notebook and a pen or pencil, ideally ones that allow you to write quickly. If you insist, you can type, although personally I find the quality of thinking that flows out of a pen and onto a page is completely different from, and much more helpful than, the words that arise out of double-handed action on a keyboard.

Step 1: Write freely and without stopping for five minutes. Do not correct spelling mistakes or grammatical errors or worry that what you are writing is incoherent or pointless or rubbish. Nobody else will read it unless you show it to them. Allow yourself complete privacy and freedom and let whatever words wish to get written onto the page. Just scribble. If you don’t know what to write then write, ‘I don’t know what to write’, over and over and over. Eventually you will get bored and write something else. After 5 minutes, stop. Read over what you have written, underlining any words or phrases that seem interesting. Choose one of the words or phrases and write it down. Do this quickly, without analysis.

Step 2: Use the word you have chosen as the start of a second burst of automatic writing. Write for 5 more minutes in just as free a manner as before. Read over the second section of writing, and again find a word that jumps out.

Step 3: Use this new word as the trigger for writing for 5 more minutes. Read over what you have written.

Very often, people find that in this process they have made a discovery of some sort, revealing something about themselves or their creative direction. Today, for example, I discovered that I’ve been denying to myself how much I miss the intellectual challenge of academia. The last time I led a group in the exercise, one of the members realised that in the piece they were writing the protagonist was gay, which changed the whole story.

Why does it work? I can’t give a definitive answer, but this is what I think. Metaphorically, our creativity is a stream flowing out of a personal reservoir of sensory life experiences, and stream-of-consciousness writing helps the water flow freely and keeps us in touch with where we are creatively.

What seems to be key about the ‘write, hear, know’ process is the act of stopping and reading back over, thereby listening to and respecting what the subconscious is saying. Choosing a word to continue with is an acknowledgement of what has been read, like picking out a glitter of gold that has been washed down the stream. During the second burst of writing, I often find that my body loosens, as if trust has been established. Often the ‘discovery’ or ‘revelation’ happens during the third period of writing after the choice of the second word has reinforced that the internal voice is being heard and attention is being paid to the creative flow.

To use a different metaphor, I sometimes think it is like diving and coming up for air, then diving again, with a greater sense of what is below. After a second breath, you can reach all the way to the bottom and retrieve whatever it was that you had lost overboard.

Perhaps it is simply about tuning into your mind, which requires a couple of turns of the dial.

Whatever the explanation, try it. I hope it works for you and something revealing turns up on the page.

Mandy Haggith blogs at cybercrofter.blogspot.com.

Don't Quote Me ...

... I'm not worthy!

But I've decided to quote other people.   Take a look at the new (nascent) page of quotations:

I'll build it up as new ones hit me, but please suggest your own too.

Think Small

There’s lot of money to be made by solving the big problems that consumers face, right?

So how do we find that next breakthrough product (like the motor car, microwave or dishwasher) which revolutionises an existing market and sells in its millions, for hundreds of pounds a time?

In the western world, we’re still very passionate about consuming products.  Our default world-view is that any problem in our out-of-work lives can be overcome by spending money on products, whether our panacea of choice is an wireless printer, a 7MP camera to replace our 6MP one, an iPad, or just a huge tub of ice cream to cry into!   

But it’s surprising just how much revenue and kudos can be gained from an idea which seems “small”.  Just think how popular the following have been:

1.        Packs of diced vegetables, which save the busy parent those all important 30 seconds in the kitchen

2.       The mobile phone “sock”, which solves the frightful problem of traditional phone cases looking too corporate

3.       The plastic bag dispenser, which saves you having to think where to keep bags you wish to reuse, or worrying about how on earth you’ll extricate them from that place

As the east becomes more westernised, so the demand for these kinds of products will grow.  China’s emissions and energy consumption have already overtaken those of the US, and their economy is projected to overtake soon, so the future seems bright for small products solving small problems.

Meanwhile in lesser-developed economies like sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, creative people are finding fascinating ways to solve problems which we’d consider more basic.   The financial model is similar (low prices, but large volumes) even if the products are more serious in nature:

1.        M-PESA, which allows mobile-to-mobile money transfer in East Africa.

2.       Kiva, the US solution for worldwide micro-loans

3.       The concept of a $300 house, with designs at http://www.300house.com/blog/2011/06/300-house-open-design-challenge-winners.html

4.      The XO-1 $100 laptop

So there’s a lot to be said for innovations which solve a mass problem, even if unit profits are very low.  The way to break into these “small” markets is by truly understanding the point problems which affect the various segments of the world population.  Anyone’s life can be made easier, and almost anyone will be willing to pay something for that – however little.  Watch the world closely, and expect to spot more of these small problems in return …

… why did the hot tap initially run cold?

… why did I have to wait for the kettle to boil?

… why did my shirt button pop-off after only a couple of wears?

… why can’t I rent a micro-scooter in London, only a bike?

… why didn’t the taxi firm just know when my meeting finished, and which train I was planning to catch?

Whose going to fix all that?   Any answers much appreciated.

It's Not All Monkey Business

I do try to keep this blog varied, and with that in mind I'm going to write about something called "social styles" this week.

After attending a course recently I was inspired to read a book by Nigel Rosner called "It's a Zoo Around Here: The New Rules for Better Communication".   Well worth reading -- if only because you can polish-off the entire thing in about 40 minutes!

Although I'm a sucker for psychometric tests and categorisation of personality types, I've become a little jaded over the years by incessant references to Myers-Briggs, Belbin, and more recently the Strengths Finder test.

One of my difficulties has been that my brain simply isn't big enough to switch between a conversation I'm actively involved in and a parallel assessment of which personality type my interlocutor is exhibiting, turns of phrase, body language and other NLP signals, and more importantly, what all that might mean!

So I listened with some trepidation as I was introduced to yet another model which sought to pigeon-hole us all.

Where Rosner's model scores over the others is that it's simpler, and much more useful on a day-to-day basis. 

From what little experimentation I've done since learning about it, I've found that I can just about grapple with four distinct "social styles" alongside a conversation.  I'll express them here as personal ads ...

• "Dolphin - Friendly and Affable - Low assertiveness, low emotional control - Keen for people to like me"
• "Elephant - Systematical and analytical - Low assertivess, but high emotional control - Want to do right thing, at all costs"
• "Lion - Direct and controlling - High assertiveness and emotional control - Success for me is swift adherence to process"
• "Monkey - Creative and animated - High assertiveness, but low emotional control - Ideas are what's important"

You can all think of a few people who fit neatly into these camps, as well as few people who seem to span more than one of them.  You suspect you know your place, but perhaps you're not entirely sure.

In my course, all this stuff was put to a purpose.  In the same way that rapport results from matching body language, if we match people's social styles perhaps we can have much better conversations.  (That's already started working for me.)

The reason all this is interesting to me is because of its direct contribution to creativity at work.  If we play to people's preferred styles, we ought to get better results.  I would hazard that we should:

1. Produce hard evidence to persuade Lions that creativity is important, and that it can be procedurised, then ask them to sponsor that view in the organisation,
2. Encourage Monkeys to launch ideas (they won't need asking twice),
3. Invite Elephants to vet and refine ideas, and
4. Rely on Dolphins to keep the peace, especially between the Monkeys and the Elephants

I'm not trying to say that Person X can only play one of these four parts.   Apparently 95% of us have at least one backup style, so we should expect to play naturally in two of them.

(There's huge overlap between these stages and de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, but I won't bore you with that right now.  Some other time maybe.)

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.