Competence in business is essential – but is it enough? If your strategy for survival is that you continue to be more competent than your competitors, is that enough? What happens when your competitiors catch up and also become competent? You cannot really become ’super competent’. Competence is a condition you gradually approach. You can indeed continue to make small improvement – and so can your competitiors.

In the future three things are going to be needed in business. In the English language they all start with ‘C’. So we have the three ‘C’s.

Cash
Competence
Creativity

You can indeed find special circumstances where one or other of these is not essential. For example in a huge market with few players, then cash and competence will allow you to do exactly what the others players are doing and still get a share of the market. But, on the whole, all three are important.

Cash is the fuel in the car. Competence is the engineering competence of the car. Creativity is the driver’s choice of destination.

Many organsiations claim that they are not short of ideas and have more than they can handle. Yet surveys show that the biggest barrier to innovation is simply lack of new ideas. Just as advertising is usually outsourced because organisations feel they cannot have all the creative talent in-house, so the same will (partially) apply to idea generation.

For this reason I have set up a consortium to provide comprehensive and experienced creativity (Saatchi for ideas and communication, Ernst and Young for analysis and creativity, DMR for software/IT and creativity, Shine for public relations/youth market and creativity – and myself).

Most organisations greatly underuse their assets: talented people, competent infrastructure, brand image, know-how, market position, distribution system etc.

There is always a need to choose and tailor the ideas that suit your organisation. Organisations need to set up an ‘ideas liason office’ to deal with idea sources.

“You can analyse the past but you have to design the future”. The quote is from my book ‘New Thinking for the New Millenium’. ‘Design’ is such a very important word because it is the opposite of analysis. Technically, the opposite is ’synthesis’ but in practice synthesis is not the same as ‘design’. Design has a much stronger sense of purpose and value.

Most organisations run on the basis of maintenance and problem solving. This is understandable because continuity is so important and it is never possible to change a lot at a time in an established organisation. There is also the risk factor. Anything new is always a risk and if it goes wrong, or does not prove as beneficial as promised, then somebody is to blame.

The result is that most organisations rely on slow evolution, fashion and ‘me-too’ to make changes. This means operating way below potential.

“The apparent purpose of education is to convince two thirds of the population that they really are stupid”

“Schools waste two thirds of the talent in society and universities sterilise the other third.”

These quotes of mine may sound harsh and provocative but they are serious. Up to one third of youngsters (sometimes more) do well enough at school to go on to tertiary education and professional jobs. The remainder leave school with the notion that they are indeed ’stupid’. This self-image stays with them for the rest of their lives.

That is why teaching thinking for just five hours to unemployed youngsters on the Government New Deal programme increased the employment rate five hundred per cent. These youngsters suddenly realised they were not stupid at all.

That is why all schools should teach thinking and operacy as a core subject.

How often do we deliberately design comfort for others? In an argument do we seek to design a comfortable way for the other party to accept defeat? In conflicts how much effort do we put into designing a way forward that suits both parties?

Our primitive instincts of fighting and conquering are rather too dominant. Design is important but usually neglected.

I continue to be amazed that so many people do not understand the ‘logical’ basis of creativity.

Essentially this is the behaviour of information in self-organising systems that inevitably form asymmetric patterns. All this is laid out in several of my books. Whenever I talk to audiences of top physicists and mathematicians they are full of agreement. There is no mystique. Yet serious people still treat creativity as some mysterious event about which nothing can be done except wait for it to happen.

I am writing here about ‘idea creativity’ not about artistic creativity. Once again we have the usual failure of language to distinguish between the two. That is why it was necessary to create the term ‘lateral thinking’.

Read the whole story here…

In a democracy what do politicians have to do? Do they have to do good thinking or can they get that from advisors and committees? Is their job to present matters well and agreeably? What do people expect from President Obama in the USA?

Perhaps they expect inspiration. Perhaps they expect good thinking. Pehaps they expect confidence. The role of a politician is never clearly defined. The task is to get elected and to continue to please people. Is that the same as making progress? Possibly, not.

Politics is mainly made up of wordy people such as lawyers, teachers, journalists and trade unionists. Such people do not have much experience of constructive thinking – of making things happen. There are many engineers, architects, scientists or executives. Such people do not want to take the risk. If you are not elected the second time you cannot go back to where you were.

The human brain is designed to recognise. I described in detail how the brain does this in my book “Mechanism of the Mind” which was published in 1969. The leading physicist in the world liked my book and commissioned a team of computer experts to simulate what I had described. They reported that the system worked exactly as claimed.

So the brain is a recognition machine. This means that most of our thinking is judgmental. This has serious consequences – especially in international affairs.