According to scientist, author and journalist Matt Ridley in
'The Rational Optimist', hominid societies such as Homo Erectus made excellent, functional hand axes from flint. They, and similar pre-human societies did this for the best part of a million years, but without ever improving the design or moving on to a new and better technology. Then Homo Sapiens (that's us!) came along, and before you knew it we were making bows, arrows, ploughs, fishing hooks, nets, bricks, wheels, pots, cloth, beads and canoes. That process has continued apace until today we have cellophane, cell phones and stem cell therapy. Ridley argues that a key driver of cultural and technological innovation since hunter gatherer times has been trade. His erudite and detailed proposition can be (rather simplistically - sorry Matt!) distilled into the following points:
1) When a human population gets big enough - or achieves a numerical critical mass - then its members can begin to specialise. Instead of everybody pitching in with the hunting and the gathering (as was the case with Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals), some can concentrate on weaving, others on fishing, some on spearmaking, others on farming and so on.
2) We are the only advanced apes that instinctively barters goods and services - i.e swopping one thing for another, dissimilar thing. Although chimpanzees have been known to exchange food for other food stuffs, or reciprocally groom each other, true barter is different. It must entail someone being prepared to swop wheat for beads, or dye for leather.
3) This talent for barter, plus the inclination to specialise, meant that when 'Oz' decided to focus on making fish hooks from reindeer bone (and so became really good at it) and 'Ug' decided to concentrate on the fishing - thus increasing his skill, and then both decided to trade these skills....Well then both Oz and Ug benefited out of all proportion to the efforts they made. This was a classic 'win - win' scenario.
4) Further, as our ancestors spread out from Africa and across Asia into what is now Australasia and so on, they came into contact with other tribes and races who had developed their own technologies. These were traded, people learned new things and further innovations were made.
5) Eventually, you went out and bought an Iphone.
Now as I was reading this I was minded of something else I had read about how, pound for pound, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has more Nobel Prizes for Science than any other institution on the planet. Even heavy weights like Cambridge University pale in comparison. And (so the argument goes), this isn't because the staff and students are significantly brighter than those from Cambridge, Caltech or Lausanne's Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale, but because they operate in an environment which is more conducive to information exchange. Simply put, while the Dons and PHD students at Cambridge toil away in the physical silos created by separate colleges along the banks of the Cam, their peers at MIT enjoy an architectural infrastructure which is to a greater degree integrated and has more food courts, sports areas, shared recreational facilities and pedestrian corridors beween faculties and departments where at any given time, you are more likely to bump into someone who has just had a great idea!
'Very interesting' you may say - 'but what has this got to do with my situation'? Well, firstly, to be human is to be an innovator. Innovation is the norm. Not to innovate is the weird thing. Secondly, your organisations' skills and expertise represent a high degree of specialisation. As an innovator with a specialism you should be able to find ways to leverage your skills to find solutions, but only if you meet with, communicate with and share with enough people. So, in these challenging times, we all have to get off our lardies and seek out other interesting people to talk to, swop ideas with and trade information, skills, talents, opinions. We must dissect challenges in partnership with others. We must be hungry to collaborate and work with others.
Simply put, in order to find better solutions to apparently intractable problems we must:
1) Believe that the solution is out there.
2) Get into serious networking. Go to where there are lots of people (the Chamber of Commerce, your local branch of the Institute of Fundraising, conferences, talks, competitor AGMs - whatever).
3) Talk to lots and lots of people with intent to find a collaborator. Spread your business cards like confetti. Look for complementary skills (or at least enthusiasm!).
4) Decide on your perfect partner agency and work out what you can offer them and what you want in exchange. Make the approach (see '2', above).
And if the challenge of bigger targets, more pressure and less money has caused you to begin to lose hope and to retreat into your own 'silo', just remember that the next person you are talking to (be they funder, customer, stakeholder or competitor) could be walking around with a hand axe in their back pocket which is better than yours. And that they would almost certainly be prepared to share it with you if you offer the right thing in return ....
Showing posts with label Creativity and Innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creativity and Innovation. Show all posts
Wednesday, 11 September 2013
Sunday, 20 January 2013
Three cornerstones of creative thinking
Dr. Teresa Amabile, Professor of Business Administration at
Harvard Business School describes the “Three Components of Creativity‟. Writing in the Harvard
Business Review, she considers how, expertise, creative thinking skills and
motivation are all required if creativity is to take place within structured
organisations.
Component 1: Expertise
Expertise, in her model, is not just
that connected to a person’s current post or
job. It also refers to all of the knowledge and experience that
that person has gained in life. So a Chief Executive may also bring skills
garnered from being a mother, a youth leader, or a hockey player.
Component 2: Creative Thinking
Amabile includes a number of elements in her description of creative
thinking. For example she cites a ‘capacity to put existing ideas in new combinations’, ‘perseverance’, ‘the capacity for incubation’ and the combination of ‘knowledge from seemingly disparate fields’.
Component 3: Motivation
Motivation is the fuel that drives the
vehicle provided by the two elements listed
above. All the expertise and ability to think creatively in the
world will be useless, if the person is not motivated to put them to good use. In most organisations, there is a
wealth of talent, both visible and hidden among the staff and volunteers. The
ability to think creatively can be learned or encouraged by reading books or blogs, or attending training courses. But nurturing a positive motivation to
be creative among its people is the one element that most organizations leave
out. And a car without fuel is going nowhere.
How to motivate creativity
There are three things a manager can do to build individual
motivation to solve
problems.
1. Match people with the right
task. If you play to people’s strengths you may
find that they begin to enjoy the challenge. It seems obvious, but
when we want to deliver a presentation, how many times do we see the person
with the strongest dread of presenting being chosen? If a piece has to be
written for the community newsletter, do we choose the best communicator, or
simply the person who is closest to the task, to prepare the copy? If we do not
put conscious effort into the matching process, then mismatches are inevitable.
And then of course, we will have people who are not enthusiastic and engaged,
far less passionate, about their task.
2. Give people freedom to act. A manager may give team
members a clear brief, or target. But if the manager then constrains their freedom
to act in order to retain control over how something is to be achieved, then
they will limit the team’s ability to provide creative solutions. So delegate
responsibility for the results, as well as the task in hand. Ask people to
solve the problem or to come back to you with alternative solutions, but not
with problems. Hand over ownership of the problem. Light the blue touch paper of
your peoples‟ creativity and then stand back.
3. Give people time: People need time to be
creative. They need strategic time.
In other words a long period of time in which to consider,
gestate, ponder and wait for their subconscious brain or intuition to kick in.
You don’t necessarily
get creativity by demanding results yesterday. They also need tactical time.
This is time knitted into the fabric of a day to brainstorm or dream. So create
a long enough timeline, but also encourage people to schedule in quite time
into their daily schedules. Encourage them to clear their decks of urgent but
not necessarily important tasks and “have a meeting with their creativity‟.
Sunday, 13 January 2013
How to generate ideas and solve problems
How to generate ideas and solve problems
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a technique, developed by an American Advertising Executive, Alex Osborn in the 1930s. It is based on what we know of the brain’s physiology and operation. The latest thinking in neuroscience has poo poo'd the idea of a strict demarcation of function between the right and left hemispheres of the brain as it has been found that both sides are involved (in different ways and to differing degrees) with almost everything we do or think. However, I'm going to use 'right = creativity' and 'left = objective rationality' as a sort of shorthand for the different mental processes of generating ideas and evaluating those ideas.
Regarding the 'left brain' approach to evaluation - we are very good at spotting the weaknesses in our ideas pretty much straight away. This can become a powerful habit, with the left brain happily trashing every idea the right brain can throw at it. We have an internal monologue repeating ‘that’ll never work’ and before we know it, we’ve ‘run out of ideas’. In fact, the right brain has just become dispirited and given up! Plato told us that ‘necessity was the Mother of Invention’. Well then that makes ideas into infants and your left brain guilty of infanticide many times over, as it has snuffed out new born idea after new born idea!
This isn’t just an internal process - it is something that happens when groups of people come
together to discuss an issue or a problem. Teresa Amabile, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School has asserted that ‘people believe that they will appear smarter ... if they are more critical ... In many organisations it is professionally rewarding to react critically to new ideas”.
Brainstorming works because:
* it forces the left brain (our own and that of other people) to suspend judgement, to shut up
for a while while the right brain does its work. Only when this process is completed do we
begin to evaluate.
* it suspends the culture of criticism referred to by Amabile, encouraging the acceptance of ideas
- at least temporarily.
Osborn spotted how ideas were often killed in meetings before they had a chance to develop. He
developed four simple rules to ensure that all ideas were able to survive long enough to ensure
proper debate and evaluation. These were:
1 Criticism is ruled out and judgement withheld until later.
2 Wild ideas are welcome.
3 Quantity is more important than quality.
4 Combination of ideas is good; in other words, building on and developing other people’s
ideas is just as important as coming up with new ones of your own.
Structured brainstorming - Radiant Thinking
In ‘The Power of Creative Intelligence’ Tony Buzan outlines the idea of Radiant Thinking. This idea is similar to Mind Mining, with one crucial difference - it offers a visual and tangible ‘map’ to ensure that your ideas are more systematically identified and captured. The fact that the technique helps us actually draw a map of our developing thoughts is vitally important to its effectiveness. In ‘Thinking Skills and Eye Q’, Caviglioli, Harris and Tindall assert that because of the central role sight has played in our survival and success as a species, we are hard wired to learn visually. ‘Show me’ rather than ‘tell me’ works better for most of us ... ‘when people can see what they are thinking, they immediately become better thinkers’ say the authors. And that is what radiant thinking does. It shows us the map of our ideas as they develop, stage by stage. In so doing it gives clarity to the relationships between facts, ideas, issues and so on, and allows us to free associate to look for answers or solutions.
An example of radiant thinking, wherein one starts with a single idea and then adds associated ideas can be found below. I tried this with a small charity working in London which needed a basis to begin looking for new ways to fundraise.
Step one: Start with a single idea, let’s say ‘Fundraising’. This is the Primary Concept. Create a
figure with the word in the middle, so:
Step 2: Radiate 5 ‘spokes’ away from the core idea, and write an associated idea along each of
these. These each represent a Secondary Concept. For example:
Business / Trusts / Community / Statutory Individuals
Step 3: Next take each of the secondary branches and radiate 5 (or so) sub spokes from each of these.
Place ideas that you associate with the Secondary Concept along each of these branches. These
are the Tertiary Concepts.
This is a really quick way to exploit your mind’s natural ability to build connections and ‘map’, in
quick succession many ideas. The three step sequence above took only a few minutes and yet
produced 30 Tertiary fundraising ideas for further discussion. Specifically, the ideas looked like this ...
Business
Sponsorship - develop packages. Create a Gifts in Kind schedule. Use Chairperson’s connection.
Investigate Give As You Earn. Research local corporate HQs.
Trusts
Take training in proposal writing skills. Invite past donors to AGM. Develop supporting materials.
Create new ‘trust friendly’ projects. Get policy details of top 50 trusts with an interest in our
beneficiaries.
Community
Run a flag day. Contact all local schools. Ask local churches for Christmas donations
Get adopted as charity of the year by one major local employer. Enlist Student Union in
fundraising activities.
Statutory
Search Home Office web site. Invite Councillor Jones onto committee. Make presentation to full
Council . Check out Primary Care Trust funding. Secure one major contract.
Individuals
Undertake prospect listing session. Identify local high net worth ‘players’. Purge and update the
database. Profile the charity supporters more accurately. Launch legacy pack.
Below you can see a Mind Map designed by a delegate on a time management course run by the author.
Variation on a theme - Mindwriting
This idea is based on the Crawford Slip Method, first developed by C.C. Crawford at the University
of Southern California in 1925. The key difference is that participants are asked to make
contributions in writing instead of verbally.
This has a number of advantages:
* because all ideas are captured, there is less chance that the session facilitator or leader can
influence the outcome or place an emphasis on just some of the ideas generated (in a
conventional brainstorming or mindmining session it’s easy to move on quickly without writing
something up on a flip chart, either because you don’t fully understand it or you don’t really like
it. When this happens, it is not often challenged.)
* people may be less inhibited.
* if you keep the contributions anonymous before critically examining them, it takes ‘personality’
out of the equation. The ideas stand or fall on their own merit.
Hope you found this helpful and interesting!!
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a technique, developed by an American Advertising Executive, Alex Osborn in the 1930s. It is based on what we know of the brain’s physiology and operation. The latest thinking in neuroscience has poo poo'd the idea of a strict demarcation of function between the right and left hemispheres of the brain as it has been found that both sides are involved (in different ways and to differing degrees) with almost everything we do or think. However, I'm going to use 'right = creativity' and 'left = objective rationality' as a sort of shorthand for the different mental processes of generating ideas and evaluating those ideas.
Regarding the 'left brain' approach to evaluation - we are very good at spotting the weaknesses in our ideas pretty much straight away. This can become a powerful habit, with the left brain happily trashing every idea the right brain can throw at it. We have an internal monologue repeating ‘that’ll never work’ and before we know it, we’ve ‘run out of ideas’. In fact, the right brain has just become dispirited and given up! Plato told us that ‘necessity was the Mother of Invention’. Well then that makes ideas into infants and your left brain guilty of infanticide many times over, as it has snuffed out new born idea after new born idea!
This isn’t just an internal process - it is something that happens when groups of people come
together to discuss an issue or a problem. Teresa Amabile, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School has asserted that ‘people believe that they will appear smarter ... if they are more critical ... In many organisations it is professionally rewarding to react critically to new ideas”.
Brainstorming works because:
* it forces the left brain (our own and that of other people) to suspend judgement, to shut up
for a while while the right brain does its work. Only when this process is completed do we
begin to evaluate.
* it suspends the culture of criticism referred to by Amabile, encouraging the acceptance of ideas
- at least temporarily.
Osborn spotted how ideas were often killed in meetings before they had a chance to develop. He
developed four simple rules to ensure that all ideas were able to survive long enough to ensure
proper debate and evaluation. These were:
1 Criticism is ruled out and judgement withheld until later.
2 Wild ideas are welcome.
3 Quantity is more important than quality.
4 Combination of ideas is good; in other words, building on and developing other people’s
ideas is just as important as coming up with new ones of your own.
Structured brainstorming - Radiant Thinking
In ‘The Power of Creative Intelligence’ Tony Buzan outlines the idea of Radiant Thinking. This idea is similar to Mind Mining, with one crucial difference - it offers a visual and tangible ‘map’ to ensure that your ideas are more systematically identified and captured. The fact that the technique helps us actually draw a map of our developing thoughts is vitally important to its effectiveness. In ‘Thinking Skills and Eye Q’, Caviglioli, Harris and Tindall assert that because of the central role sight has played in our survival and success as a species, we are hard wired to learn visually. ‘Show me’ rather than ‘tell me’ works better for most of us ... ‘when people can see what they are thinking, they immediately become better thinkers’ say the authors. And that is what radiant thinking does. It shows us the map of our ideas as they develop, stage by stage. In so doing it gives clarity to the relationships between facts, ideas, issues and so on, and allows us to free associate to look for answers or solutions.
An example of radiant thinking, wherein one starts with a single idea and then adds associated ideas can be found below. I tried this with a small charity working in London which needed a basis to begin looking for new ways to fundraise.
Step one: Start with a single idea, let’s say ‘Fundraising’. This is the Primary Concept. Create a
figure with the word in the middle, so:
Step 2: Radiate 5 ‘spokes’ away from the core idea, and write an associated idea along each of
these. These each represent a Secondary Concept. For example:
Business / Trusts / Community / Statutory Individuals
Step 3: Next take each of the secondary branches and radiate 5 (or so) sub spokes from each of these.
Place ideas that you associate with the Secondary Concept along each of these branches. These
are the Tertiary Concepts.
This is a really quick way to exploit your mind’s natural ability to build connections and ‘map’, in
quick succession many ideas. The three step sequence above took only a few minutes and yet
produced 30 Tertiary fundraising ideas for further discussion. Specifically, the ideas looked like this ...
Business
Sponsorship - develop packages. Create a Gifts in Kind schedule. Use Chairperson’s connection.
Investigate Give As You Earn. Research local corporate HQs.
Trusts
Take training in proposal writing skills. Invite past donors to AGM. Develop supporting materials.
Create new ‘trust friendly’ projects. Get policy details of top 50 trusts with an interest in our
beneficiaries.
Community
Run a flag day. Contact all local schools. Ask local churches for Christmas donations
Get adopted as charity of the year by one major local employer. Enlist Student Union in
fundraising activities.
Statutory
Search Home Office web site. Invite Councillor Jones onto committee. Make presentation to full
Council . Check out Primary Care Trust funding. Secure one major contract.
Individuals
Undertake prospect listing session. Identify local high net worth ‘players’. Purge and update the
database. Profile the charity supporters more accurately. Launch legacy pack.
Below you can see a Mind Map designed by a delegate on a time management course run by the author.
Variation on a theme - Mindwriting
This idea is based on the Crawford Slip Method, first developed by C.C. Crawford at the University
of Southern California in 1925. The key difference is that participants are asked to make
contributions in writing instead of verbally.
This has a number of advantages:
* because all ideas are captured, there is less chance that the session facilitator or leader can
influence the outcome or place an emphasis on just some of the ideas generated (in a
conventional brainstorming or mindmining session it’s easy to move on quickly without writing
something up on a flip chart, either because you don’t fully understand it or you don’t really like
it. When this happens, it is not often challenged.)
* people may be less inhibited.
* if you keep the contributions anonymous before critically examining them, it takes ‘personality’
out of the equation. The ideas stand or fall on their own merit.
Hope you found this helpful and interesting!!
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