knowinnovation

Networking for Novelty

2011-05-05T16:16:00.002+01:00

While its origins might be more technical, the term networking has stretched into the human realm, and with the advent (and overuse) of the term Social Networking, has raised our sensitivities about its meaning. In its most neutral sense, a network is a collection of connected resources that share and exchange and economize together. If you think about the network of people around you, hopefully it’s a vision of something supportive, a chain of people who sustain and inspire you and connect you to a community.

Networking has some less than positive connotations. Someone who networks too much can be perceived as superficial, a collector of business cards, a name-dropper. Picture the person shaking your hand at a cocktail party, looking over your shoulder to see if there’s anyone more important or more connected that they should be talking to instead of you. That’s a networker, in the most pejorative sense.

But the network of people around you is an important resource. This pool of who you know, and who they know – and all the accumulation of collective knowledge of the people within your reach – can make a difference in your ability to do the things you dream of doing.

Dr. Zella King is a researcher who studies social networks, and wonders about how to maximize their value and impact. She says that networking is not about schmoozing, it’s about how you collect people and connect with and harness their brain-power.

During a short workshop called Design Your Ideal Creative Network, delivered at CREA, the European Creativity Conference, she cited a recent blog post by Daniel Pink about research conducted by NYU and Cornell University. The study shows that people tend to produce faster and more creative solutions when they’re solving problems for other people than they do when working on their own challenges. That’s one reason, King suggests, that it pays to be deliberate about how you treat your network. The people you know might be more creative about approaching your problems than you are.

Think about it. When you decide to ask for help with a problem or creative challenge, the first place you’re likely to go is your inner circle of colleagues and friends. But if you talk to the same people about the same things – and usually we do – you’re likely to get the same responses. King suggests going beyond the people who are easy to talk to, expanding your network by asking, “Who else should I talk to?” And after that, “Who else might I talk to?” By cultivating these weaker ties - the mere acquaintances, people whom you see less frequently or people you hardly know - you're more likely stumble upon other perspectives and questions that stimulate lateral thinking and possibly lead to fresh, novel solutions.

This is where social networking sites like Linked-In, Facebook, Ning, Bēhance, Twitter and Yammer can fuel the innovation process. The smart social networkers aren’t just tweeting about what they had for breakfast, they’re looking for links and posing questions and asking the people in their network to connect them to potential creative resources. This kind of open innovation and crowd-sourcing is changing the way companies innovate by changing who they talk to about their biggest challenges, and how.

By changing the way you use your network, you'll change the conversation in a way that’s more likely to lead to unusual connections and solutions. “There is unsqueezed potential in your network,” King says. “By exploring the weaker ties, you might find more creative ideas.”

Intelligently harnessing your social network to stimulate creativity is one of KnowInnovation's themes for 2011. If you would like to help us explore the topic, please leave a comment, or get in touch.

Know Further: Follow Zella King's new blog, The Social Life of Ideas or look at her video about analyzing creative networks. Here's an extremely thorough summary of top social networking sites and who to connect to within them. Get a better view of your own networks using InMaps. If you're in the mood to read a "how to" book, try The Ten Commitments of Networking.

When is a Sandpit not a Sandpit?

2011-04-13T13:38:00.001+01:00

We've received an increasing number of requests to run a shorter version of the Sandpit innovation event. This is, no doubt, a reaction to the recession and a reflection of the pressures on organisations to deliver greater value with less time and less money.

A five-day Sandpit often produces astonishing results, but what happens if the event is compressed into a shorter period of time? Do breakthroughs happen in the same way, or is there a minimum time required to achieved innovation? In an attempt to answer these questions we’ve designed a new event called a Jumpstart. It is literally that – a jumpstart to enable the right people to come together and start the creative process. If a Sandpit is a marathon, the Jumpstart is a sprint, the 100-metre dash that allows people to get their creative juices flowing, which hopefully results in solutions to challenges or problems.

Compressed Innovation

Jumpstarts follow the same process as a Sandpit except the process usually starts before the event often with online introductions and networking, and continues after the event with groups working together to refine and add substance to their proposals and ideas. Interestingly this provides an opportunity that’s not necessarily part of a traditional Sandpit: the chance to invite and involve new people who haven’t attended the event to participate in the emerging projects. In that way, the Jumpstart has a wider reach and perhaps is even more inclusive.

A typical Jumpstart begins, as does a Sandpit, with introductions and networking activities. It moves very swiftly to exploring and defining the challenge areas. By the end of the first day, participants are immersed in the challenges inherent in the situation. We might include some catalyst talks by experts to stimulate further thoughts about the challenge, as we do with a Sandpit - a lot depends on how much time we have for input.

Then the fun starts: this can be organized chaos with groups forming and reforming and individuals deciding where they want to be and where best they can contribute. By the end of the second day, the groups are deep at work on challenge areas and beginning to formulate ideas and solutions. This continues into the third day, and the event finishes with groups pitching their ideas sometimes for seedcorn funds.

The difference between a Sandpit and Jumpstart?

Time and depth. With a 5-day residential experience, participants have an opportunity to explore a challenge in an environment with few distractions, and the intense focus of their new colleagues. There’s time to ask the follow-up questions that go deeper into a root problem. There’s time to play with potential solutions that wouldn’t get explored when pressed for time. There’s the incubation factor as well. At a Jumpstart, you’re heading home on the third afternoon. At a Sandpit, you’re still developing your ideas, and the extra time allows for further refinement and the emergence of surprising solutions you hadn’t expected. The feedback from participants after a Jumpstart always includes a few comments like this: “It was great, but I wish we’d had more time to explore this further.”

Having said that, the Jumpstart serves a purpose. When time and resources are limited, the shorter program can ignite new thinking and spur conversations that wouldn’t otherwise occur in typical day-to-day interaction. It’s a smaller spark for innovation, but a spark nonetheless.

Know further: Learn more about the Sandpit process here or send us an email with your questions about the Sandpit or Jumpstart programs.

Be Deliberate

2011-04-05T09:53:00.001+01:00

Too many people think of creativity as something that magically happens: a Eureka experience of discovery and invention, an abstract inspiration of an artist, the genius of a composer or the brilliance of an architect. This kind of thinking – that creativity is a talent bestowed only upon the gifted - spurs self-deprecating comments like, “I’m just not that creative," which makes us cringe, because our work is built on the premise that anyone can be creative and that it doesn’t always happen by accident.

Every person is, in some way, creative.

This is one of the tenants of Creative Problem Solving (CPS), the foundation of most creative processes and the framework upon which our Sandpit model is designed. Creativity extends beyond the arts, beyond science and invention - it can be expressed in so many different ways: developing a genius marketing plan, inspiring young children, designing a garden, cooking up miracles in the kitchen, engineering a more efficient manufacturing process, managing a team of diverse personalities. When we include problem solving as part of the practice of creativity, an entire universe of possibilities opens up, for anyone and everyone.

It is possible to be deliberately creative.

Creative ideas sometimes come as a surprise, but they don’t have to be an accident. Instead of waiting for good ideas to arrive at random or by luck; we can hunt them down. When you use a creative process - whether it’s for a few hours, two days, a week, three years – you can deliberately to take up the challenge to generate from scratch, and on demand, a creative solution. This is useful even for those accustomed to coming up with spontaneous ideas: to keep in the tool-kit and use when, for whatever exceptional reason, the creativity isn’t flowing. A creative process is also useful when applied to group challenges, where some level of consensus and group ownership will help to ensure the ultimate implementation of the creative solutions that are chosen.

People can learn to be more creative.

What does it take to be deliberate? Having a creative process and learning how to use it can significantly increase the level of innovative output. A research paper titled, A Review of the Effectiveness of CPS Training: A Focus on Workplace Issues (Puccio, Firestien, Coyle and Masucci) cites a number of research studies about CPS - which happens to be the most researched creative process - including several studies that demonstrate how the use of a deliberate methodology like CPS is enhanced if the group is trained. For instance:

"In a study designed to measure the effects of CPS training on the communication behaviors that occur in small groups, Firestien and McCowan (1988) and Firestien (1990) found that groups trained in a semester-long course in CPS (approximately 33 hours of instruction) responded more, i.e. got more involved in the group problem-solving process; criticized ideas less; supported ideas more; laughed more; smiled more; and produced signiﬁcantly more ideas than the groups that did not receive training."

In this particular study, ideas were generated by two groups, one trained in CPS and the other untrained. The ideas were rated by two business representatives, without knowing which group generated them. The trained groups produced double the number of ideas, but also twice as many ideas that were rated as very valuable (the top 20% of quality) by the business experts.

With CEOs and University heads worldwide clamoring that innovation is principle to their growth strategy, it would be a shame to leave the creativity up to chance. It doesn’t have to be an accident, or some magic that’s bestowed in moments of grace. Everyone is capable of creative acts, and with a little bit of discipline - and some training - creativity can be summoned, deliberately, to generate valuable innovative ideas, on demand.

Know Further: Is everyone really creative? Not everybody thinks so. If you're curious about team training, some research on how it improves team performance. If you're inspired to be really deliberate about creativity, look into getting a Master's degree in creative studies.

The Female Factor

2011-02-13T20:36:00.001Z

Science is a subject available to both genders and yet women, if not directly discouraged, haven't been encouraged to pursue it as a field of study. Girls are steered toward languages and the liberal arts, implying that maths and sciences are better left to the boys. It’s a stereotype that’s been torn down, and yet the gender imbalance is still apparent in the field of scientific research and academics.

We see it in the make-up of the participant rosters for the Sandpits we run. These events host between 18 and 35 people, depending on the type of question and the funding available. Usually the number of female participants – women who’ve applied to and have been accepted – hovers around 25% of the group. When the question has easily evident social-science impact like the future of the digital economy, the number is higher. But in a typical Sandpit, the ratio of men to women is 3:1. It’s even been as low as 4:1.

That means that we miss out on an important aspect of thinking and creative problem solving. According to Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutger’s University, women’s thinking is different than men’s. Women think contextually and holistically and display more mental flexibility. They take in more data and synthesize it adeptly, connecting the details faster, using imaginative judgment. She refers to the interrelated way that women think as web thinking.

Men, Fisher says, tend to focus on one thing at a time very intensely, and have a strong capacity to compartmentalize their attention. They work to eliminate what appears to be extraneous pieces of data, seeking the straightforward path to the goal, with as little ambiguity as possible. Fisher describes this style of thinking as step thinking.

It’s not that Fisher doesn’t value the masculine way of thinking and working, but she points out in her book, The First Sex, that the characteristics of web thinking are essential to innovation. Since women do it naturally, their role in teams and in organizations is becoming more important.

A research study conducted by MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Union College studied small teams with the objective of understanding the level of collective intelligence in a working group. The study revealed that a group’s intelligence is not simply the sum or an average of the intelligence (cognitive and emotional) of each of its members. Even if the individuals on a team are very smart and talented people, it isn’t enough to guarantee results. There’s an internal dynamic – a collective intelligence – within the team that leads to good performance, and if it’s there, the team can thrive. And not just at one task, at many different kinds of demanding, multi-functional tasks.

The key factor, the study found, is a measure of social sensitivity. In the high performing teams, the members could read facial expressions and infer what people were thinking and feeling in order to react to each other more efficiently and effectively. There was also a quality of equal participation and conversational turn-taking, rather than having one or two people dominating the dialogue of the group. Probably because women tend to exhibit these behaviors more naturally, the study found that the groups with a greater number of women had a higher collective intelligence and performed better.

This is evident in Sandpits, too. When there are women in the group, the dynamic is different. There’s more apparent collaboration and a gentler, collective creative process. Bharat Maldé, an organizational psychologist who advises us on Sandpit participant selection agrees.
“A gender-balanced sandpit brings an importantly different dynamic which is denied when the female contingent is a mere handful.”

Men and women are different. The sexes think, speak, and act differently, so it would make sense that creativity is different between genders, as would be the style of team work. In fact, ascribing gender characteristics isn't entirely fair; some men have more feminine styles and other women may exhibit more masculine traits. A good balance of yin and yang is probably the best recipe for successful innovation and team performance.

Still, we have witnessed how when there are women in a group, the men play nice – nicer than they would with their male counterparts.
So vive la différence, but maybe invite a few more women.

Know further: Do women shun science? Except there are women in science, and you can find out about them here, here and here. Read this EU paper about gender challenge in research funding. And visit some of our favorite science blogs written by women: Cocktail Party Physics, FairerScience and Skepchick.

Virtually Anyone Can

2011-02-03T16:30:00.008Z

What would the world be like with “frictionless” creativity? What if we could easily engage with practically anyone, anywhere, at almost no transactional cost? How would that impact our capacity to connect with and catalyze our creative colleagues all over the world?

Without geographical constraints you could access talent from anyplace around the globe, while staying put in exactly the place where you choose to be. The economic costs of an office could be eliminated, or at least the expenses of meetings and business travel could be minimized. The environment would thank you for reducing your carbon footprint. Yes, you’d have to account for the cost of people’s time, but that could be classified as an investment with a potentially high return, especially if innovation can thrive, despite – or as a result of – the diverse perspectives of a virtual team.

Once relegated to the world of science fiction, virtual teams and virtual working environments are now a viable way of doing business. Many big companies are downsizing office space as a cost-cutting measure and to accommodate the increase in the employees who wish to telecommute. Entrepreneurs, start-ups and even interns have hopped on the work-from-anywhere bandwagon. But working virtually isn't without its challenges. A virtual teams survey report finds managing conflict significantly more challenging for virtual groups than it is for face-to-face teams, as is making decisions and expressing opinions – three activities that are essential to the innovation process. So how do you keep a virtual team on track?

The team that learns together, performs together

Another research study on virtual project teams stresses the heightened importance of team learning, the process of reflecting in order to detect and adapt to changes in the environment and improve a team’s performance. In order to learn as a team, members have to believe that they can take risks, ask questions, talk straight about their problems and discuss their mistakes without fear of recrimination. They also have to believe that they are working inter-dependently with their peers and that they’re collectively responsible for achieving the team’s goals.

This could be said of any team, but the nuances of learning together are different when working virtually. Without visual, spatial, and non-verbal cues, the leader of a virtual team has to go the extra distance to make sure people remain engaged. On the simplest level, this means keeping team members from checking emails during an on-line meeting, but also more profoundly it entails engaging with each of the team members to help make anyone at an outpost feel closer to the center of activity and decisions.

Having the right tools

Knowinnovation has some experience working virtually, as we are sprawled across two continents and occasionally traveling to others. We’ve put together an efficient and layered system: We share files using Google Docs and DropBox, we coordinate our schedules with Google Calendar, we share links in Yammer and file them in Delicious. We have small conferences on Skype, and full team meetings in the 3D Teleplace. We've also worked with clients to facilitate virtual meetings using Adobe Connect.

All these tools are useful, yet I’d attribute a large portion of our success to the meetings held in Teleplace, because when we meet in our 3D virtual conference room it really feels as though we’ve been together. We see each other via video link in the heads of each avatar gathered around the virtual conference table. Like any good meeting, midway there’s a change of perspective or a quick stretch to enliven participants, so we’ll all "move" to the wall on the other side of the virtual space and brainstorm (with virtual post-its) or go “upstairs” to the observation deck where there’s a basketball hoop and a hot air balloon. It's amazing that despite the fact that I’ve been seated in a chair with a headset viewing the 3D space on my computer terminal, taking that on-line stroll by the basketball hoop actually seems like a real break. Our meetings often speed by, and afterward it feels like like I’ve really been in the physical presence of my colleagues.

From working to learning

If the key to making virtual teams work together is helping them learn together, we believe it's going to become more and more important to optimize the on-line virtual learning process. KI uses mechanisms like a customized Ning networking site for each Sandpit we run, climate-setting and training videos and we have our own on-line platform for group problem solving. Just recently, KI has taken on a project with a UK university to run an entire innovation training program on-line, using all of our virtual tools, but especially Teleplace. We can fill a large auditorium in that virtual environment and create break-out rooms to facilitate as many smaller sessions as needed.

We're watching closely to see what's emerging in the field of virtual work and learning environments. The technology is changing rapidly and will continue to evolve, just think of how the iPhone and iPod Touch interfaces have changed how we interact with technology. At the moment our 3D systems are constrained by 2D input devices. But not for long. What will emerge to fill the gap?

It's surprising how effective simple 3D environments like Teleplace can be, and surely this is just the start. Second Life also has an immersive workspace, and Pixelearning is using gaming technology to create more effective on-line learning experiences. Even YouTube has demonstrated the potential of virtual collaboration. If the performance of a virtual choir can sound this good, then I bet we can do virtually anything, virtually.

Know further: Download the Economist Report on Virtual Working. Read more about how to manage virtual teams here, here and here. Brush up on the history of Virtual Learning Environments and how to use a VLE in education. Offerings from a virtual learning academy and some very cool on-line learning experiences.

The Productive Dissident

2011-01-26T20:54:00.004Z

Standard thinking in creativity – and for meetings designed to generate innovative output – is to create a climate where people can feel free to play with concepts, to risk their intellectual vanity and say things that might not make sense but might lead to novel ideas. The objective is to remove any negativity from the immediate environment, encouraging a playful stream-of-consciousness and flow of ideas.

To do this, a set of guidelines is usually proffered. The language varies but most of the rules are the same:

Defer Judgment

Go for a quantity of ideas

Seek unusual ideas

Combine ideas to make new ones

Every idea has value

The operative phrase for all of those guidelines is parceled up in the first rule: defer judgment. If you can manage to suspend the critic, it can help to generate a longer list of ideas, and it's often the ideas at the end of the list that are more intriguing. That’s for the divergent part. We also advocate the employment of affirmative judgment in the convergent steps of process, opting for a kinder, gentler selection of top items from the list. It takes a lot of energy to have an opinion, and in certain phases of an innovative process – or even just a discussion – strong opinions can also shut people down and thwart the process, killing wilder options too soon or without proper development. There’s good reason to ask for a more positive kind of evaluation.

But it is possible to err on the side of too positive, too blue-sky, too willing to set feasibility aside in service to the goal of achieving many wild ideas. Good judgment is critical to innovation; the whole notion of choosing the root problem, the best or most provocative question, the ideas with the most promise, the optimizing path.

Judgment wears many hats and comes in different flavors. It can be inhibiting during a creative process. It can also be useful.

At a recent workshop, there was a participant in the group who had a propensity to scrutinize. He wasn't exactly judgmental, but he could have been. He always asked clarifying questions. He often raised his hands to disagree and probe a point that had been made. He spotted typos and discrepancies instantly, and didn't hesitate to point them out. And yet he never harmed the process. He actually enhanced it with his precision and perseverance. He wasn't disruptive, he was a productive dissident.

What was it he did that kept him from being disruptive?

His intention was honorable and authentic. He wasn’t interrupting with questions in order to get in the spotlight or to fuel his ego. His “buts” were all tethered to sincere intellectual curiosity.

He didn’t grandstand. No 3-minute preambles and questions disguised as comments. He asked simple, direct questions. When prompted, he was willing to reframe a slightly negatively-phrased question into something more open-ended, using “how might we…?”

He was willing to suspend judgment during idea-generating. That’s when judgment hurts the most. A little critical analysis around making choices is useful, but it can grind any idea-provoking session to a halt. He employed his critical thinking at the points where it enhanced the process, not where it slowed us down.

He wasn’t a jerk. Too often judgment comes in mean packages with anger or contempt. You don’t need to be ugly to be deviant, you just have to thoughtfully express a different view point.

Deviance has an important place in the innovative process. We don’t challenge norms without a little (or a lot) of deviant thinking. And the single best way to discourage inventive, out-of-the-box deviance is to prohibit disagreement, critical probing questions and a little clarifying, critical judgment now and then.

The trick: can you cultivate a culture of occasional and appropriate contrariness that is productive? This happens when people feel free to say “I don’t see it that way,” and ignite a discussion rather than a reprimand. This happens when people can joke freely with each other, unafraid of offending. This happens when critical thinkers learn to when to speak out (and how) and when to wait.

It’s important not to shut down the dissenters. They are valuable contributors to the creative process, and often the courageous voice in a room of hyped-up aspirations. The key is to help them express criticism with a helpful attitude and constructive language. And when you find a productive dissident – one who can push back without raining on your idea parade – cherish that person and their important role in the process. Occasionally, you need a negative voice in a creative room.

Know further: Unpacking disagreement. Suggestions for how to disagree without being disagreeable. Research on disagreement in group decision making. Use reverse brainstorming to turn negative comments into potential ideas.

Equating Procrastination

2011-01-16T03:02:00.006Z

A skilled procrastinator can be highly innovative, inventing all sorts of reasons not to do something, conceiving clever excuses to delay starting or not to have finished. If you have to rely on someone who’s expert at this kind of delaying, it can be maddening. If you’re the procrastinator putting off your own projects, it can be stressful, for you as much for anyone who’s tapping their foot impatiently behind you.

But why do we procrastinate? I’d like to think it’s because we’re not ready. We don’t have enough of something – information, research, ideas, inspiration, stamina – we’re lacking (or so we think) and some part of us feels we cannot start, or continue, until we fill that need.

But that’s probably not the case, according to the most comprehensive research on procrastination. Piers Steel, a professor at the University of Calgary, spent ten years correlating nearly 700 other research studies to try and understand what he calls a self-regulatory failure. Steel learned that procrastination is commonplace – especially in academia where 95% of people procrastinate – and it’s on the rise, in every sector, and organizations are paying the price in time, productivity and money.

Steel's conclusion about why we procrastinate? Immediate gratification. We’ll do a minor errand or task (like email) to get the satisfaction of completing something now, rather than doing the thing that’s more important but won’t reward us until the future. Steel puts the complexity of this slightly neurotic condition into a mathematical equation, called the Temporal Motivation Theory:

The utility of the task equals the product of its expectancy (or self confidence) and its value, divided by the product of its immediacy and the sensitivity to delay. When the delay is low – meaning you get a payoff sooner – it raises the utility. Of course you can also raise the utility by increasing the value, which is what happens when a really important, exciting new project lands on your desk and pushes the other work aside. But most of us tend to tinker with the delay factor – it’s more immediate.

Steel’s research aligns with many of the self-help books written about time management, casting procrastination in a negative light, the irresponsible delaying of a task because it is unpleasant, because it’s too hard or too big. But could procrastination have some positive attributes? Can it be useful? Can it cause a necessary delay, one that actually reinforces the creative process?

Then it might be called incubation: letting an idea rest, allowing a question to simmer while our brains consider it, giving the subconscious a chance to deliver its mysterious energy to the task at hand. Taking a break, to go for a walk, have a cup of tea, read emails or surf the web – to think about something else for a day or two, or a week or longer – can result in a shift in perspective that enhances the ultimate outcome.

The challenge is to distinguish between procrastination and incubation. Are you avoiding something because you don’t know how to start? Or have you done some thinking and legwork but now your ideas seem stale or you feel like you’re a bit tired or up against a wall, and maybe you do need to stop for a while and rest your thinking? Maybe this is the general rule: If the postponement is useful and has an outcome that creates something of higher quality and greater depth, then it’s incubation. If it’s just a method of avoidance, it’s procrastination.

Essayist Paul Graham makes the distinction between good and bad procrastination. He says if you put off the small stuff, the banal errands of your life – your bills, filing taxes, laundry – to focus on something that’s important, that’s a good procrastination. The bad kind is when those errands keep you busy and feeling productive, but keep you from doing the real work you’ve set out to do. “You’re ‘getting things done.’ Just the wrong things.”

But the real work, each one of those big, important projects – i.e. the work with high expectancy and high value – has a fear factor associated with it. It’s a lot of work. It’s hard. It’s not clear how to do it. You could fail. That’s when the negative neurosis kicks in, and we feeling guilty for what we haven’t done or stressed about what we may never be able to accomplish. This negative response (the sensitivity to the delay) begets more negativity, and the downward spiral begins. That’s when the lesser tasks start to look intriguing, a short-term fix that gives an apparent feeling of utility.

It’s taken me months to write this post. I did way too much research, read too many articles and made notes about too many things I wanted to say. Each day, each week, the task moved forward on my ‘to-do’ list, haunting me. I’d written a rough draft, but I couldn’t bring myself to edit it. It became a bit ironic, my procrastination about writing about procrastination.

Graham’s essay offered an interesting solution: “the way to ‘solve’ the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.” So I took a break from writing the article. I pulled it off my to-do list. But I kept the topic in front of me, on a bright post-it note on my desk, each day thinking about it a little, reframing it, shifting it from something I had to do to something that intrigued me again.

Procrastination isn’t such a terrible thing; it is such a close relation to incubation, which can be an important component in the innovation process. It’s the negative associations we make about procrastinating that slow us down. So instead of focusing on what’s not happening, perhaps the key is to turn our attention to the outcome we desire – this also correlates to the innovation process – and then creativity we put into avoiding a task or challenge can be reassigned to tackling it.

Know further: Read about Dr. Piers Steel's research in his book The Procrastination Equation. Some more pondering about procrastination. Hints on how to manage procrastination or change your habits. To focus on the desire outcome rather than the problem, how to keep your focus during the workday.

Twitter Tales

2010-12-07T21:17:00.047Z

Though an early skeptic about Twitter, I gradually joined the revolution. First I connected with a few social-tech-savvy friends, then added some colleagues and acquaintances. Eventually, a random tweet would grab my attention and I'd decide to follow its author. Soon I was reading the microblogs of dozens of strangers.

Twitter has a way of polarizing. It's either a distracting waste of time or a modern method of exchanging information. It all depends on how you use it. One friend of mine never tweets and follows only news sources, journalists and recognized thought leaders. Twitter is how he aggregates his daily news into one constant feed.

Being selective about whom you follow seems obviously important; too many tweets or too much banality is considered by most manicured Twitter users legitimate grounds to unfollow. But Jonah Lehrer, the contributing editor at Wired, makes a case for following strangers: "being exposed to a constant stream of unexpected tweets - even when the tweets seem wrong, or nonsensical, or just plain silly - can actually expand our creative potential." The odd assortment of random thoughts and occasionally inaccurate data can serve to break the banal patterns that form in our own minds, and help us associate differently as a result of the random input.

Here's another reason: Scanning the Twitter stream yesterday morning, I noticed a tweet from someone I follow - not a total stranger, but still, not someone I know that well - an academic who has attended a couple of Sandpits in the past.

It just so happened that KnowInnovation is running dual Sandpits this week, and though he wasn't heading to my meeting, he was heading to the other Sandpit.

I showed the tweet to a colleague, who then emailed the participant to discover that he was on the Virgin West Coast line with access to the onboard WiFi connection. A call to our mates running the Sandpit he was headed toward, and a Skype connection was established.

On the agenda at that event: a networking exercise much like Speed Dating that allows for an efficient one-on-one inventory of the expertise and interest of the group. Our traveling participant was able to join the activity via Skype to a lap-top that was inserted into the rows of chairs, going face-to-face with each participants as they shifted seats.

For two hours he was plugged in to the meeting; the connection was only thrown off twice because of tunnel interference. He was on an iPhone, which meant audio without the picture, but it still worked. He was successfully incorporated into a key climate building and information sharing component of the workshop, and met with warm applause when he finally arrived at the venue, just before dessert.

So for those of you who remain skeptical about the value of Twitter, consider how it feeds the creative process. It's a little random input, or a part of a technology solution that saves the day.

Know further: Twitter use for adults and for kids (this one with lots of useful links). How to use it productively and there's even a wiki on how to use Twitter.

Brains and Soul, in Equal Measure

2010-11-27T10:29:00.008Z

So much depends on getting the right people in the room. A workshop designed to produce innovative outcome can fail – even with the perfect agenda design and the most astute facilitators – if the people who’ve been assembled don’t have the right spirit and motivation to help it succeed. But how do you get the right minds in the right place?

Bharat Maldé is an organisational psychologist who works closely with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the first proponent of the Sandpit process. We believe his guidance is critical to the success of these workshops, which is why we asked him to talk about his experience working with the EPSRC and other scientific research organizations, screening applicants for the intense Sandpit event.

KI: How did you get involved in with the Sandpit selection process?

Bharat Maldé: Some six years ago, colleagues at the UK Research Council EPSRC were beginning to conceive the IDEAS Factory process – now known as a Sandpit – as a platform to get scientists to innovate. I’d been working with the EPSRC assessment centre in my capacity as an independent organisational psychologist and they turned to me when a dry run of a prototype Sandpit had yielded mixed results.

It was clear that the sandpit – an intensive residential activity with a collection of individuals engaging with strangers for 3 to 5 days to generate exciting and ground-breaking ideas on a set theme – was a very different concept from whatever had preceded it. There would not be much time for bonding and developing; we had to collect participants who could hit the ground running and gel quickly.

How would you describe the participants who can “hit the ground running?”

Individuals who delight in creative problem solving as a teamwork rather than a solitary activity, and who are not precious about their own expertise, ideas and – most importantly – themselves. They would be up for an intense intellectual engagement with a problem pulled this way and that, turned on its head, and then re-assembled for the most exciting offshoots for solution or further exploration. Self-confident without being arrogant or dominating, keen and curious without being manic, and free of an overload of ego or anxiety or any other baggage that would stand in the way of intellectual free play. They would be willing – even delight – to be pulled away from time to time from their preferred ways of exercising their talent and expertise to engage in fun side-activity to kindle or re-kindle their creative juices that may have laid dormant or dried up.

What’s your role in selecting a participant group for a Sandpit?

I normally work with the selection panel, a group of scientists, each with an important role at the Sandpit. The EPSRC overseers and I tend to be on the same page for Sandpit suitability, but this is not always easy for scientists who are new to the Sandpit process and used to scientific merit being judged via a brains-only lens. They tend to give undue importance to the applicant’s publication record when the Sandpit is designed to break new ground and work with fresh blood and fresh minds, not to perpetuate established practice. We’re looking for brains and soul in equal measure. I guess my role is to try to point out who will help us achieve that balance.

How do you find the right people?

We use the simple selection device of a 2-page application form comprising half a dozen honest, open-ended questions, without any trip-wires, which we expect the applicants to respond to honestly. The majority do. Others do not. When the odd punter dupes us they soon get found out as the pressured setting of a Sandpit has a way of flushing out the dark side of human nature. Of course, most applicants do not set out to dupe but in echoing the positively worded questions with like-spirited responses, they are often lulled into saying yes to everything only to find, once at the Sandpit, that perhaps they'd overlooked their own frailties or not fully appreciated what they were letting themselves in for.

What are the consequences of not having the right people in the room?

Overlook or underplay an important selection signal and you can risk having the sandpit bedevilled with the distraction of having to manage – even worse, failing to manage – the particular idiosyncrasies of an individual and the negative dynamic they invariably inject into the proceedings. We are wary of individuals who are likely to showcase, strut, trumpet or pontificate.

I can think of a Sandpit where some of the final proposals were agreed upon by what I call ‘muscle and manipulation’ rather than intellectual merit. The Sandpit mission underlines the pursuit of intellectual quest in a spirit of bonhomie and fair play. Those who want to play differently become an anomaly – one that the selection device of a simple 2-page application form does not always pick out easily – especially now that it is common for each event to attract more than a hundred applications.

As long as we’ve succeed in getting the core company of individuals right, then the minority of outliers add to fuel the ‘creative tension.’ But interesting surprises unfold: once we managed to do so well at picking positive-outlook individuals that everyone got along too swimmingly and not enough sparks flew! Now we try to experiment at the edge of the core body by picking at least one or two ‘wild cards’ who are very different from the rest, and who often raise the quality of the sandpit.

Are there any things you notice that are related to gender or culture?

Gender and cultural diversity are essential to creative problem solving and the widest possible life experience across the body of participation is an invaluable adjunct to the Sandpit. Female representation suffers from demographic trends – women continue to be under-represented in top posts and the hard sciences. As best I can, I encourage each selection panel to go beyond any demographic pro rata formula as I believe a gender-balanced sandpit brings an importantly different dynamic which is denied when the female contingent is a mere handful.

Cultural diversity is also essential and here the problem lies in the possible handicap with the application born of language or style difficulty for those of a non-English origin. There is also the notable tendency for some cultures, far eastern as an example, to shy away against the engaging and active demands of a sandpit. It’s important that the facilitation team is sensitive to this.

Early career participants bring an important freshness - that they tend to do well at a sandpit is unsurprising as they are least likely to come with an overload of ‘baggage’ that more senior academicians tend to suffer from.

How can you tell if someone is going to add to the group experience or detract from it?

You have to get the sense, from their application, about the twinkle in their eye. A twinkle in their eye that reflects “Hmm, I wonder what ideas are going to emerge – I can’t wait.” falls on the right side of the suitability divide. The same twinkle that reflects “Hmm, I know exactly how to get what I want out of this lot...” falls on the wrong side.

You’re obviously a believer in the Sandpit process. How would you like to see it grow and develop?

There is so much to be fascinated about. That against the stereotype of the solitary scientist, who shrivels up in human company, we’re cultivating a new generation of scientists who actually enjoy breaking new ground in the company of others! On a different tack, how about an early career only or an all female sandpit, to see how the mood, the dynamics and outputs unfold differently from the ‘mainstream’ model? How about having a resident Sandpit neurologist to wire up the participants at key stages to see what parts of their brains light up and to what pattern if any? What if we could determine, at the time of a sandpit eureka moment, which hormones are leading the charge – the cortisols or the endorphins?

The EPSRC’s vision for the IDEAS Factory all those years ago has now turned into an exciting reality. It is now copied across continents, establishments and settings for which the EPSRC deserves every credit as the original inventors of the concept. I leave the last word to the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer who said at the Conservative Party Conference 2010 (4 October): "Let us make Britain the IDEAS Factory of the World!" So, as you can see, I am not the only fan!

Know Further: Read more and more about the Sandpit methodology. Or read about KAI and Foursight, some other tools we use to help understand who's in the room and how to help them better work together.

Wondering Mind

2010-09-15T23:36:00.000+01:00

The way we talk about our problems says a lot about how likely we are to solve them creatively. When we state a problem as a fact, it becomes a heavy weight. For instance: Nobody’s been able to model the XXX process. Indeed, that’s a problem. It’s also a negative statement – already a downer – and it doesn’t lead to any ideas. It’s a static problem.

A productive problem is one that’s phrased as a question: How might we understand how to model this process? It asks you to wonder about the problem, and even suggests other questions: In what ways is it like other processes that we can model? How might we understand and model aspect of it piece by piece? A problem posed as a question invites ideas that might be a solution. Not even just one solution; an open-ended, wondering question hints that there might be many approaches that could work.

This subtle shift in language provokes our thinking and makes our brain more nimble. Instead of complaining about what doesn’t work or isn’t happening, the problem posed as a question starts a chain reaction that ignites our curiosity. We realise it’s not so much about naming the problem, it’s more about wondering what are all the problems embedded in the challenge and what are all the ways to address it.

This is cultivating a wondering mind, letting curiosity be the driver of your creative process.

We know it's useful to pose problems as questions, but it could be a more effective way to articulate solutions, too. A Scientific American article about the Paradox of Willpower cites a study by the University of Illinois psychologist Ibrahim Senay. He tested the notion that goal setting might be a less effective way to achieve change (i.e. implement a new idea) than wondering about the future with an open question:

He had a group of volunteers work on a series of anagrams—changing the word “sauce” to “cause,” for example, or “when” to “hewn.” But before starting this task, half the volunteers were told to contemplate whether they would work on anagrams, while the others simply thought about the fact that they would be doing anagrams in a few minutes. The difference is subtle, but the former were basically putting their mind into wondering mode, while the latter were asserting themselves and their will. It is the difference between “Will I do this?” and “I will do this.”

Asserting intentions about a goal, Senay found out, might actually be limiting. Keeping an open mind can “enhance feelings of autonomy and intrinsic motivation, creating a mindset that promotes success.” Senay determined that people with questioning minds are more intrinsically motivated to change. That would mean that cultivating a wondering mind might improve not only your ability to invite new solutions, but to succeed at implementing them as well.

The value of curious thinking and questioning is becoming more apparent at business schools, too. Over the last decade, in addition to the staple curriculum of finance, accounting and marketing, courses about integrative thinking and design thinking have become critical elements of the current MBA degree. Business leaders today need to be more holistic and responsive to the current environment and its challenges, rather than being entirely goal-driven. The competency that these business schools are trying to develop: inquisitiveness and curiosity, the elements of wondering.

But you don’t need a business degree to learn how to wonder, all you need is an open mind and the willingness (not the will) to remain curious through every step of the creative process.

Know further: An article about Wonder-talk considers the difference between opening up and sizing up. Or here's a book about the Art of Wondering.

Right, then.

2010-07-30T17:41:00.002+01:00

We see it happen in working groups all the time. A new idea gets suggested – whether it’s playfully put out or seriously proposed – and someone in the group, often a senior person with some status or authority, shoots it down. Fairly typical phrases are used to do this: That'll never work. We’ve tried it before. We’ll never get that approved. It's just not possible.

But hasn’t just about every major or radical innovation been about doing the very thing that couldn’t be done before? You’ve heard the examples: how Thomas Edison got it wrong 10,000 times before he got the light bulb right. Or how Richard Branson's been wrong as much as he's been right, but that risk-taking is what makes him such a notorious and successful entrepreneur.

Still there you are in some meeting, ostensibly about cultivating novel solutions to a chronic problem and the standard assumptions are upheld – sometimes even defended – usually by the person who thinks they know better. The person who needs to be right, gets to be right – but often at the expense of novel ideas and potential innovation.

What if that same person could suspend judgment for a moment? What if, even though he thought he was probably right, he was willing to entertain, temporarily, the possibility of being wrong? Could she call a time-out on certitude, and whimsically toy with the idea that her long-standing premise about what's right or wrong might be incorrect?

What happens if we play a little game of “What if?” with the things we believe to be true, or to be right?

We might find another solution, a brand new one that comes from deferring judgment. Or if not, at least we've demonstrated to the people around us that we’re open to seeing old things through new eyes and testing our assumptions. There’s huge power and possibility in the willingness to be wrong. The power to build trust with colleagues and the possibility to blow through the (perceived) barriers that are limiting. Innovation isn't about being right, it's about risking that we might be wrong, and finding out where those unlikely and impossible solutions might take us.

Know further: Others muse on the need to be right and on being wrong. And 101 gadgets that came to life because someone was willing to be wrong (or sure they were right).

Defining Brainstorming

2010-07-26T09:55:00.006+01:00

A recent Newsweek article sparked an age-old debate between two camps in the innovation field: those for and against brainstorming. The term dates back to 1930s, when Alex Osborn first employed organized ideation in the advertising agency he headed. In his book, Applied Imagination, published in 1953, Osborn defined brainstorming as "a creative conference for producing a list of ideas - ideas which can be subsequently evaluated and further processed."

Five years later, in 1958, Yale University conducted a study to test brainstorming and concluded that brainstorming didn’t work. The Yale study created a debate that has percolated for fifty years. Does brainstorming work or not? Does a group generate more and better ideas than the same people would if they were working individually?

To enter this debate it’s necessary to consider what happens when you put six people in a room and simply tell them to come up with new ideas. That’s when the assumptive rules of brainstorming kick in:

1) Only say something if you think if it’s a good idea.
2) Judge any idea you hear right away, especially if you think it won’t work.
3) Only speak up if doing so will make you look smart or serious. Try to avoid appearing silly.
4) Support the ideas of anyone who is higher in the hierarchy than you.

If a group hasn’t been trained to generate ideas together, or if there isn’t a facilitator to avoid the above pitfalls, these behavioral mores will take over the group experience. In which case, the so-called "brainstorming" probably won’t work.

The Yale study put a group of people in a room to come up with ideas, but did so without any training, and without a skilled facilitator. The assumptive rules were automatically applied, and just by reading them you can deduce that they wouldn’t help a group come up with very many new and innovative ideas.

Brainstorming is a term in every major dictionary, but its definitions vary widely. The Oxford dictionary calls it a spontaneous group discussion to produce ideas and ways of solving problems. Merriam-Webster calls it a violent, transient fit of insanity, or a sudden bright idea or a hair-brained idea. There's even a legal definition for brainstorming. Wikipedia defines brainstorming as a group creativity technique designed to generate a large number of ideas for the solution of a problem. The Wikipedia definition of brainstorming also includes the basic ground rules that Alex Osborn suggested to effectively counter the assumptive rules:

1) Focus on quantity
2) Withhold criticism
3) Welcome unusual ideas
4) Combine and improve ideas

The ground rules for brainstorming were developed precisely because a bunch of people in a room operating normally will not generate better and different ideas. The social dynamics, if they are not set aside, will worsen the group’s performance. Osborn wrote in Applied Imagination, "No conference can be called a brainstorming session unless the deferment-of-judgment principle is strictly followed."

If you are not following the deliberate ground rules of brainstorming, then you are not really brainstorming. You’re just having a meeting with a bunch of people. As innovation practitioner Jonathan Vehar puts it, “just because you call your hammer a diaper-changer, doesn’t mean you get to say it doesn’t work. It just means you're using it incorrectly.”

In the end, the trouble conjured up by the Newsweek article lies in the definition of brainstorming. Maybe if we agree on a precise definition of the term, that it’s “a collective effort to come up with new ideas within a framework of ground rules for deferring judgment,” then perhaps we can all get along.

Know further: A little history about Alex Osborn. A review of brainstorming research. Tips for better brainstorming here and here.

When Toys are Handy

2010-06-30T21:27:00.004+01:00

The big round tables are stocked with pads of paper and pens, Post-it notes and Sharpies. The agenda is printed, after the last finishing touches to the intended choreography of the event. Flip-chart stands are positioned around the room. The projector has been tested, our slide pack is ready to go. But it isn’t time to start a Knowinnovation meeting until the toys are out on the table.

The playful gizmos and gadgets we bring along help make the conference room look less sterile and corporate, but the toys are not just for show. If you're a tactile person, being able to pick up a squeezy rubber ball, or twist the beads of a wooden wand, fumble with a Rubik’s cube or stack tiny colored magnets into small mountains can actually aide the fluidity of your thinking. While your hands are fidgeting, new things can pop into your mind.

In fact, putting your hands around something may actually help you get your head around it. Neurologist Frank Wilson, in his book The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture, believes that hands-on exploration is critical to cultivating inventiveness in children. He's concerned that the current generation of students isn't getting enough hands-on practice to develop the necessary problem-solving skills.

Another case for keeping toys handy, according to Scientific American, is that toys can serve as inspiration. Benjamin Franklin used a kite for his experiments, The Etch-a-Sketch has served as a model for problem solving, Lego have been used by researchers to test theories and by R&D teams to build prototypes. If we can think of problem solving as playing with ideas, then why not use toys, the cornerstone of play, to stimulate our thinking? Our silly tabletop toys have become, inadvertently, a metaphor for framing a problem, or a spark for a new idea.

At the end of our workshops, all the toys we've put out on the tables are up for grabs; we expect participants to take the gadgets home. People usually ask if it’s okay, usually with the same excuse: “I just want to take something home for the kids.”

(Right.)

Know further: Tips to help tactile learners, more on the different learning styles and a some obsolete Lego constructions. Not sure which is your learning preference? Take this survey. Order your own table-toys, also known as fiddles or stress-relief toys. Our favorite table toy, by the way, is the rubber chicken. And finally, further reading and viewing on the science of play.

Right People in the Room

2010-06-25T12:18:00.015+01:00

There is an alchemy of elements to create a successful workshop. It includes a casual setting that creates an open climate, a thoughtful agenda design, delivery by facilitators who can build a rapport with the participants, and the presence of willing, committed participants.

We recently facilitated a retreat for an organization that brought together their staff for strategic alignment and team building purposes, and it was impressive how smoothly the meeting flowed. Every activity, from the ice-breakers to the serious up-to-your-elbows addressing-conflict exercises worked like a charm. When it was time to change sub-groups, the groups shifted around. When we switched activities, the group followed. When it was time to reflect, they went quiet and made notes. When it was time to debrief, they talked, with passion and commitment. When it was time for play, the group played. After three days together, we met all the objectives of the meeting.

I wish we could take credit for the success of the workshop. It was partly due to the design and execution of the program, but truthfully, the reason this meeting went so well: the right people were in the room.

The participants who attended the workshop were dedicated to the organization. They wanted the meeting to be productive and realized their individual responsibility to participate and create a constructive outcome. They were people who had their egos in check, who wanted to make the most out of this rare occasion to be off-site and in-process.

Whatever the purpose of a training or workshop – for innovation, skill-building, team building, strategy development – a sure-fire sabotage is to invite people to attend who aren’t committed to the meeting outcome, or who have another hidden agenda.

Among the worst participants:

Tourists are lightweight. They may not do anything that specifically detracts from the task at hand but they don’t add much value either. They’re just there to see what happens. They're not deliberately harmful; it's just that their lack of concrete participation creates a vacuum. When several people in the group don’t contribute anything of substance, it drains the energy of those who do, and slows the group down instead of driving it forward. Tourists get invited to meetings when the organizers are more interested in getting bodies in the room or including “someone from every department," instead of thinking about who brings the right skills and the best attitude to the meeting.

Political Appointees are invited because of their ego, or because they represent a constituency within the organization that has an ego problem. They're included not because of what they can contribute, but because of what they represent. The problem is they come with their own political agenda, which is not always the agenda of the meeting. And because they usually have some clout or authority, they can easily hijack things in the wrong direction.

The Eeyores are just like the character in the children’s book Winnie the Pooh, they’re convinced from the start that none of this is going to work. The premise of the meeting is wrong, the facilitators don’t understand the business, workshops never do any good. They participate reluctantly, which impacts the energy of the rest of the people in the room. Paradoxically, Eyores are often the people who stand to gain the most from a successful meeting, yet they sabotage it by their inability to let go of their skepticism and just try to make things work. In the end, they get to be right about one thing: these workshops never work (for them).

For some of our events, Knowinnovation uses a psychologist to review the participant applications, gauging the level of ego-control and the capacity to work within an intense group setting. The result of this vetting: a more productive meeting. The facilitators spend much less time worrying about “problem participants” and much more time on the content of the workshop. It doesn’t mean there won’t be healthy conflict and disagreement during the program, but it means the focus of the workshop will be the content and the output, not the personalities.

If you're going to organize workshop or an off-site meeting, it makes sense to be vigilant about every detail. The right venue creates an open climate. Facilitators take the responsibility of moving things along. The program design is critical. But possibly the most important thing to attend to is the guest list: Be sure to get the right people in the room, people who care about the outcome and who are prepared to do their part to make your meeting worthwhile.

Know further: A few tips for how to handle difficult participants here, here and here.

Sweet Solitude

2010-06-15T10:22:00.003+01:00

Most of the work we do – running Sandpits, facilitating training and problem solving sessions – involves group work. Our innovation process calls for collecting an often diverse group of people and perspectives and creating opportunities for them to catalyze and connect with each other to reframe a problem or generate new ideas to solve it. We try to mix it up; working in large groups, sub-groups, pairs, trios and foursomes. We shift the groups over the course of the program so different minds get to meet and merge.

We know that verbalizing a question can help to clarify it, so we often get people talking to a neighbor or to the others at their small table, to help define what problems they face. We know that talking to someone else about an insight you’ve had after listening to a provocative presentation can expand the insight, and hearing someone else’s “Aha” can broaden your own understanding. We find that when a group functions properly, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – but they often don’t know that until they talk to each other.

Sometimes, however, the din of workshop chatter can be too much. After three days of “turn and talk” and exchanging ideas and mapping out scenarios together, we’re overloaded and over-stimulated. Our brains are full. We cease to think with clarity or good judgment.

About mid-way through our most intensive programs, when participants eyes are bulging from input and process, we often ask them to take an hour and go off and be alone. We make the suggestion that this hour be used not to catch up on email or to check-in at the home office, but rather to take it as an hour of quiet time, in solitude. An hour without conversation, without internet-checking or web-surfing, without intake, input or stimulus. We suggest to people that they go for a walk or sit someplace quietly and just think. You might call it a thinking-permitted meditation.

When you permit the stream of consciousness of our mind to run its course, unhindered for an extended period of time (an hour can seem endless in this modern age of click-through and the digital noise of the internet), interesting things happen. Unlike meditation, where we attempt to quiet the mind and be thought-free, our quiet time doesn’t try to quiet the thoughts of the mind; it means only to give the thoughts space and time to unravel and sort themselves out, to be clarified and anchored. It is also a chance to breathe a moment and not think, if you choose. Sometimes clearing the mind is the best way to make room for the next level of concentration and synthesized thinking.

Participants usually come back from this time-out refreshed and re-focused. (Some have even said it's the best part of the workshop.) Then we dig back into our work, sometimes in groups, sometimes not – but always more productive because we’ve had a little solitude to sort things out.

Know further: Some research suggests that meditation might change how your brain functions. Another case for the value of meditation. Other reasons why designated office quiet time is a good idea.

Do You Feel Lucky?

2010-06-06T13:26:00.002+01:00

Some people think that creativity is a matter of luck. You’re lucky enough to have good ideas. You were lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time. That guy has all the luck…

Is it luck? Or is luck what happens to you when you do the things that increase your chances of seeing new opportunities?

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire has spent a number of years researching the impact of chance and luck on people’s lives. In one of his studies, he invited participants to described themselves as lucky or unlucky. He gave each participant a newspaper and asked them to count the number of photographs inside. The unlucky people took several minutes to count all the images. The lucky people were finished in seconds. Both groups were reading the same newspaper.

Here’s why: on the second page of the paper there was a large advertisement with this message: Stop Counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper. Wiseman writes, “It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.” He also put a large ad in the paper that read: Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you've seen this and you'll win 250₤. The "lucky" readers found it, the "unlucky" ones didn't.

Wiseman attributes this to the fact that people who consider themselves unlucky are usually anxious and tense, which keeps them from noticing the unexpected. Lucky people, on the other hand, are more relaxed and open – happier. This mood keeps them primed to notice synchronicity and to see new patterns and opportunities not yet explored.

This might have something to do with paying attention. The unlucky newspaper browsers were so focused in the immediate task at hand, counting the photographs, that they didn’t see the other words and images in the paper. They didn’t notice what else was there. People who are continually successful at creative endeavors are open to other stimulus and to the wider world. They notice more oddities. They see the opportunities that others don’t see.

Wiseman notes that lucky people deliberately choose to make their life diverse and different. Unlucky ones tend to stick to routines. So one way to instantly improve your luck, and your creativity, is to change things up. Do it differently. Eat lunch at a different place. Shop at a new store. Walk home a different route. And while you’re doing it differently, pay attention – not just to the task at hand, but the layers of life around it, the environment, the weather, the light, the sounds, the other things happening on the periphery.

It might be a way of reframing what it means to pay attention. Attention is often thought of as singular, or even narrow; honing in your focus and your regard to understand something comprehensively or to master it. But what about when you widen your view and see a larger range of cues that are available to you? If you could do that, would you be more innovative? Or just lucky?

Know futher: Look for Wisemans’ book, The Luck Factor. Also, watch this video about paying attention. And then, after you've viewed the video (not before), visit here.

Another Brainstorming?

2010-05-19T16:03:00.005+01:00

What do you do when the email message lands in your inbox, inviting you to the latest departmental brainstorming meeting? Do you grin or do you groan?

If it makes you groan just to think about it, you’re like a lot of people. Brainstorming sessions can feel like a waste of time, and don’t always generate new ideas, which can make them feel like a useless activity.

It’s too bad because brainstorming can have so many benefits beyond the primary purpose of coming up with new ideas. If it’s a productive meeting, it can give the participants a real sense of accomplishment and group ownership of an idea, which can only enhance the sense of team – much moreso than a rigged teambuilding event. If the session if lively and humorous, the laughter and silliness reduces stress and creates a good working climate. And if well facilitated, the ideas that come out of a brainstorming meeting can be radical and innovative. We’ve witnessed this first hand.

If you want to restore your colleagues’ faith in brainstorming, here’s how:

Start from a very specific question. This is the great paradox. It’s much harder to come up with ideas for a general problem than it is for a challenge that's more narrowly defined. "What ideas do we have for fundraising" will likely yield fewer innovative ideas than "How to inspire people to donate every year?" (And putting the problem in the form of a "how to" question also helps invite more responses.)

Be tenacious about quantity. The objective of a brainstorming is just that: a shower of ideas. Too often we have a few ideas and as soon as one is mildly interesting, we jump on it and debate its feasibility. There’s no getting around the maths of ideas, the only way to have great ideas is to have lots of them.

Don’t shoot down bad ideas. Hidden in the banal, boring and bizarre ideas there is a nugget of something that, if given room to breathe, could be a new idea or could trigger an idea in someone else who sees your idea from another perspective. Or, if simply evacuated from your brain by shouting it out, gives liberty to other thoughts or ideas to emerge. Holding back on an idea because it might look stupid is a disservice to the group. You’re not being smart, you’re being selfish.

Give uncertain ideas a chance. Try putting a star by the worst ideas, and giving each an earnest 10 minutes of creative attention to see if there’s a way to transform them into something inspiring and possibly feasible. Everyone has to agree to give it their best shot at survival. You’d be surprised at the results. Like a neglected child, once given care and attention, an off-keeled idea can thrive.

Facilitate the meetings. A productive brainstorming session works best when there is someone leading it who is focused on the process. When people rally around an idea too early, he’ll watch for signs of groupthink and table it, temporarily: “There’s a lot of potential I that idea, but what if we were forbidden to do it, what other approaches might we take?” If people get stuck in their habitual thinking, she’ll suggest a detour to stretch the group’s imagination. If groupthink is prevailing, a facilitator will use a technique that gives people a chance to generate ideas individually – so new gems can be developed without getting stepped on, and everyone’s ideas can be heard.

Use sparingly. Not every problem deserves a brainstorming session. Save a meeting like this for a challenge that really requires group brainpower, and prepare thoroughly for the session so it’s well facilitated and worth people’s time.

If you're smart about not going overboard on brainstorming sessions, and using these meetings at the right time in the right way, then maybe when it's time for "another brainstorming" you'll get fewer groans and more people saying, "Great, what time?"

Know further: A few tips on running effective brainstorming meetings here, here and here.

The Naïve Mind

2010-05-05T21:28:00.001+01:00

Sometimes what you don’t know can help you.

The naïve mind asks questions that test widely held assumptions. The naïve mind dares to ask the stupid questions, not even realizing they might be stupid. The naïve mind makes abstract conclusions that someone steeped in the problem can’t see or hear – not because of being closed-minded, but because the human brain excels at seeking out data that fits established patterns – data that fits with what it already knows.

We see this in political discourse; heated debates from the left or the right fixate on the talking points that prove their political point, distorting or eliminating data that doesn’t mesh with their point of view. But even highly skilled scientists, trained to be observant, skeptical and curious, can fail to see a different and possibly breakthrough answer that’s right in front of their eyes.

A good example: Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists do research, in particular how scientists fail and how they succeed. He tells the story of two labs that encountered the same problem. One lab had a mixed team with a range of different kinds of scientists and medical students. The other lab team was made up entirely of highly specialized scientists who were experts in one specific field. The group of experts took several weeks to sort out the problem. In the diverse team, nobody was expert, so they all traded questions and used metaphors and analogies to solve the problem…in about 10 minutes.

So if your team is fairly expert, it might help to invite a non-expert who may be especially fluid or creative, but who’s in the dark about the subject at hand. Their questions often end up redefining the problem, and because they are unencumbered with the conventional wisdom, they are freer to think of wild and unusual ideas to solve a problem. Even if their ideas are too far out, they can at least provoke the thinking of the rest of the group an unlock them from their habitual thinking.

Scientific experiments rarely reveal what scientists expect; brainstorming sessions don’t always yield the ideas you’re expecting either. The trick is to weed through all the failures or “not-quite-right” ideas - using the naïve mind - so you can see the successes and opportunities embedded within. Like the over-told (but here it is again) story of the failure that created Post-It® notes. One inventor, Spencer Silver, developed the re-usable adhesive in 1968 but had trouble persuading 3M to market it. Six years later, Art Fry, an engineer from a different department who’d heard about the glue, started using it with small sheets of paper to make page markers in his hymnal. Then he used it to write notes to his boss. Eventually, the failed invention became one of 3M's most famous products.

Next time you have a sticky problem that requires innovative thinking, invite some naïve minds with innocent questions and unfiltered responses, or a few inspired minds from a different métier who'll reframe and diversify your thinking. What they don't know might be just what you need.

Know Further: Read about the value of ignorance and how to promote ignorance in your organization. More about the beginner's mind; and Shunryu Suzuki's classic text: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

A Smaller Sandprint

2010-04-22T07:00:00.038+01:00

A recent Sandpit on the topic of energy efficiency gave us reason to pause and consider the carbon output of our own work. Given that we travel to hotels or meeting venues to work with our clients, and that very often the people we work with are collected from far-flung locations to come together for innovation workshops and sessions, it dawned on us we might be churning out a fair amount of CO2.

Since today is Earth Day, it felt like the right subject to ponder.

Our initial problem statement: How to minimize our carbon footprint? We invited the participants at our recent energy efficient event to offer suggestions first of all on how we could measure our carbon output, so we have a benchmark against which to improve. And then we invited any ideas they might have about controlling our carbon output.

An obvious way to attack this problem is to think about all the ways to cut carbon output, to travel less and on more efficient means of transport, to be conscientious about the equipment we use, its condition, how long we leave it on, how much energy we consume. These are all good things to consider, and many of our initial ideas were in this vein.

Then one of these clever scientists challenged us to pose the question differently: How might we create an event/workshop that actually has a negative carbon impact (or a positive contribution)? Could we move beyond the idea of a carbon-neutral or carbon-zero event? Could we actually reduce the carbon in the atmosphere after each workshop? Could we go better-than-zero carbon?

(This is why clarifying the problem is such an important part of the creative process. We could easily come up with a lot of interesting, useful ideas for minimizing carbon output. But something shifted when we reframed the question to a more compelling challenge. Our adrenalin surged, eyebrows raised…this was a more intriguing problem.)

Here’s a new objective: better than zero.

One idea: solar ovens are emerging as a popular solution to the challenges of wood-burning cooking stoves in poor and developing countries. Burning wood puts carbon soot into the atmosphere and adds to the problems of deforestation and ecological imbalance. The collection of wood is time consuming and is often done by women and children under less than ideal – sometimes dangerous – circumstances.

What if Knowinnovation donated a specified number of solar ovens to needy communities every time we did a workshop, in such a way that our contribution would more than offset our carbon debt, it would pay forward?

That’s just one idea. What else could we do to not only neutralize our carbon footprint, but to do more than our share? How can we make the world a little less polluted after every workshop we run?

Know Further: Learn more about being carbon neutral. Curious about solar ovens? Visit the solar cooking wiki.

Innovate this Week

2010-04-14T07:47:00.014+01:00

The entire Knowinnovation team is together in Italy this week to celebrate the anniversary of Leonardo DaVinci’s birthday, on April 15th, which also happens to be the beginning of World Creativity and Innovation Week.

All our thinking and wondering about creativity and innovation is aided by the fact that we are gathered with other peers and colleagues and friends at the European Creativity Conference, otherwise known as CREA. Since 2003, the CREA conference has been a draw for people interested in exploring creativity and how to be more deliberate about it. CREA is a sister-conference to the Creative Problem Solving Institute, CPSI, the first ever creativity conference – it’s been an annual event for more than 55 years – sponsored by the Creative Education Foundation, the CEF.

What do you do at a creativity conference? You connect with like-minded people (curious about creativity) who have many different approaches (diverse perspectives) on how to use creative methods and techniques - or sometimes just your intuition - to be deliberately creative. We call this applied creativity.

World Creativity and Innovation Week has been happening since April of 2001, and is meant, according to co-founder Marci Segal, "to help people celebrate their capacity to use their creativity to make the world a better place, and to make their place in the world better, too." There are events this week in Canada, the United States, Malaysia, Australia, Peru, Argentina...not to mention Italy.

The purpose of any of these conferences, events or week-long celebrations? To remind us that creativity isn't necessarily something that just happens, and that we can be deliberate about how and when we are innovative by using processes and tools and techniques. It reminds us to pay attention and to innovate on purpose. What will you do to innovate this week?

Know further: Watch How to Think like Leonardo DaVinci, by Michael Gelb, author of a book by the same title. Find out what events are lined up for World Creativity and Innovation Week. Experience deliberate Creativity by attending CPSI this June or CREA next April.

Know even further (a post post-note): Learn more about CPSI by reading the reflections of other people who attend the conference: Jonathan Vehar, Cynthia Rolfe, Amy Basic, Gregg Fraley, Pablo Munoz, Whitney Ferré and Missy Carvin.)

Just One Thing

2010-04-07T18:29:00.000+01:00

Imagine if all you had was one thing to work with, and one thing to produce. What would you do with such a tabula rasa? What could you create? How would that free you up?

Dutch artist Peter Callesen demonstrates that one single sheet of paper can become almost anything he imagines. He produced an entire series of A4-sized paper cut outs, some of which are extremely intricate and complex, but they all start with one simple blank sheet of paper.

Think about some aspect of your work or life that you deal with everyday. It might be how you drive your car, how you walk the dog, how you manage a staff meeting or how you habitually solve a problem. What if you had an unlimited amount of time in which to focus on just that one thing, in an attempt to improve it or use it in new ways. What might you achieve?

Forget your Troubles

2010-04-02T06:49:00.001+01:00

A century ago British psychologist Edward Titchener described the “warm glow of familiarity,” the idea that people develop a preference for things that are familiar to them. There’s been a fair amount of research on the Exposure Effect, how repetition increases the likelihood of affinity.

But then there’s always the old adage: familiarity breeds contempt.

Which is it? Does familiarity make you like something, or not?

It all depends on your mood, according to research conducted by an international team of social and cognitive scientists led by the University of California at San Diego and the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

The team set out to research how emotional context might impact people’s tendency to like things that are more familiar. What they learned: When people are sad, they prefer the comfort of familiar patterns. But when they’re happy, the familiar can seem humdrum, and that’s when new things become more intriguing and attractive. In a good mood, people are more receptive to novelty, and to new ideas.

We know crisis can be a driver for forcing innovation, or at least accepting the need to change. But negative stress may impede people’s ability to see new ideas, let alone recognize their value and act on them. This suggests that if you want to optimize your receptivity to new questions and new ideas, it makes sense to put yourself in a good mood before brainstorming, and to collect around you the people and resources that make you feel happy.

Maybe there's a very basic first step to innovation: don’t worry, be happy.

Know Further: Gretchen Ruben has a book and a blog about the year she spent test-driving studies and theories about how to be happier. Also, a few smart, no-fuss tips on how to handle negative stress.

In the Sandpit

2010-03-22T13:07:00.008Z

At lunch, the participants seemed lighter, relieved. Their 10-minute final pitches for funding behind them, the weight of the week’s work had been shed. There was nothing to do but wait for the assessment team to finish their deliberations and in the meantime get a bite to eat and socialise with the others in the group, new colleagues who just four days ago were perfect strangers. This is what Fridays are like at a Sandpit.

Last week, 27 people assembled at a conference hotel in Bath Spa, UK, to try their luck at getting funding to do research on user-centered design for energy efficiency in buildings. Their backgrounds were varied; a deliberate attempt was made to invite participants from a broad spectrum of academic and business backgrounds. Participants applied to attend, which means they were prepared to clear a five full days from their schedules and throw their lots in with a group of people they didn’t know, but with whom they’d have to partner in order to get funded. The amount of money on the table: up to 2 million sterling.

The Sandpit

With the goal of inspiring more innovative and multi-disciplinary research proposals, the Sandpit was conceived by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in 2003. Knowinnovation helped with the early design, and we’ve been privileged to facilitate about 20 of these workshops, known for being extremely intense, interactive and demanding. I say privileged because it’s an amazing thing to witness what happens at a Sandpit: a group of highly intelligent people with academic and industry expertise come together around a serious topic to redefine the challenge and generate novel ideas to address it. Previous Sandpits have included topics like ensuring digital privacy and consent, understanding uncertainty in climate predictions, detecting terrorist activity, the application of synthetic biology, to name only a few. Other UK and US research councils have borrowed the format; we facilitated Sandpits for the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Multi-disciplinary, multi-organizational

It’s not that research proposals solicited in a more traditional method haven’t been innovative or produced good science. They have, and they still do, and not every research topic merits a Sandpit initiative. But because the Sandpit format involves a diverse group of people and forces them to catalyse and collide and collaborate, the output is often unique and innovative. Questions arise that wouldn’t otherwise have been posed, and partnerships form between people from very different scientific disciplines, universities and stakeholder organizations. Part mix of people, part pressure, part incentive - the week ends up with a very dynamic collection of research teams and topics.

The workshop week

Participants arrive on Monday and most of the first day is spent getting to know the talent and expertise in the room. We use a number of low-risk activities to get people talking with each other so they learn more about how they might work together. In the afternoon, we start discussing the subject at hand, often inviting experts to make presentations. We ask participants to listen to those presentations a bit differently, in order to get to questions and problems that we might not have asked the same way before. On Tuesday this problem definition work continues; we take a lot of time for this because it's often redefining the question at hand that inspires novel ideas.

Sometimes it isn't until mid-day Wednesday that groups begin to form around different problems and start generating ideas. By the end of the day, very rough proposals are shaping up, but it's still early; groups form and splinter and reform a number of times over the next two days. On Thursday, the working groups make two, sometimes three presentations of their thinking so far, and the rest of the group uses a peer feedback process to help enhance and critique the ideas to make them stronger. As a result, participants end up collaborating with people that they're also competing against. It's a bit awkward, sometimes, but amazingly, it works. Solving the problem becomes a priority. In that way, everyone at the Sandpit contributes to the solutions, whether they get funded or not.

Last Friday, five of the seven teams that formed over the week were given a positive head-nod. Now they have several weeks to put meat on the bones of their proposals and submit a more formal, comprehensive funding request. Those who didn't get funded leave a bit disappointed, surely, but we often hear from unfunded participants that despite the fact they didn't walk away with money, they significantly increased and enhanced their network of people and knowledge. And on many occasions, ideas born in a Sandpit are funded from other sources.

A different way to work

The Sandpit isn't for everyone. Not every topic lends itself to this type of pressure and competition. Not every academic can perform when thrust in this intense environment, which has been likened to that of Dragon's Den. But the research councils who've used the Sandpit praise the innovative results, and the participants, at the end of the week, are surprised at the ground they've covered in such a compact period of time. As one participant from last week's event describes it: "a crazy week but always an amazing idea generator."

Know further: Learn more about the Sandpit process here or email us with questions about how and why we do it.

Hacker Attitude

2010-03-01T01:18:00.014Z

Hacker is a word that gets hijacked too often, casually tossed out as an adjective – not always but usually pejorative – to describe someone capable of cracking the code of a computer system and having their way with it. Editor of the Jargon File, Eric Steve Raymond, would substitute the label “cracker” for that subset of the code-literate community. “Hackers build things,” he says, “crackers break them.”

Hackers are problem solvers. They get juice from understanding a problem and sorting out a solution. Their motivation to meet challenges is internal. Occasional bragging rights aside, hackers do what they do because it’s extremely satisfying to solve puzzles and fix the up-until-now unfixable. The pleasure derived is both intellectual and practical.

You can’t deny the good deeds performed by authentic hackers who in fact built the internet (and Unix and Usenet) and who continue, quietly and behind the scenes, to monitor the World Wide Web so it functions for everyone else.

But you don’t have to be a geek to be a hacker. Being a hacker is a mind-set.

“There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things,“ says Raymond, “you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art.”

In his treatise, How to Become a Hacker, Raymond describes the fundamentals of a hacker attitude. It caught our attention because we think these very same principles apply to being innovative.

The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
Innovation, no matter what field you’re in, happens because you’d rather solve a problem than complain about it. If you happen to find these problems fascinating and intriguing, well, then it won’t even feel like hard work.

No Problem should ever have to be solved twice.
We’re sticklers for clarifying the problem before we start generating ideas. It’s easy to jump to solutions, but sometimes that means you solve the wrong problem. A little bit of rigor on the front end of a problem solving process means you tackle the right and real problem, so you only have to do it once.

Boredom and drudgery are evil.

The best way to lose touch with innovation is to become too repetitive. Innovation requires constant and vigilant creativity. It may not be broken enough to fix, but there’s no reason not to tweak it and cut boredom off at the pass.

Freedom is good.
There are certain moments in the innovation process where anything goes. Following every train of thought that comes to you – especially the random ones – can lead to novel thinking. But first you have to be free-thinking, which means quieting your inner censor and feeling open enough to play with, and share freely, new – and sometimes raw – ideas and concepts.

Attitude is no substitute for competence.
So you’re open-minded and you see problems as intriguing opportunities, that’s a start. But then you have to do the work. Innovators are always at it, seeking to understand a problem more
deeply, puzzling at how an unworkable idea might become workable, increasing their skill set so that they are better problem solvers and can better execute their ideas.

Hackers are the innovators of the Internet, the MacGyvers of the domain of computer programming and information networking. How about your field, who are the innovators? Who’s got that relentless, curious, problem-solving attitude? Is it you? Are you a hacker?

Know Further: Learn more about the hacker world. Read How to Become a Hacker. Subscribe to Lifehacker. Read what essayist Paul Graham has to say about great hackers.

Playing around, Arsing about

2010-02-19T01:16:00.007Z

Last summer, I had occasion to spend a day at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Initially I was somewhat reluctant about the excursion, but once I got there, all I wanted to do was play. The sheer volume of dolls and toys that are housed in this museum is stunning (every model of Barbie and GI Joe ever made, for instance) and the interactive activities – things you can get in, try, touch, and fiddle with – throughout every exhibit of the museum, are as intriguing for adults as for children (ahem).

The walls of the museum are covered with quotations extolling the value of play. They’re probably posted to remind the adults who find their way into the museum that play isn’t just for kids.

Experts will tell you that engaging in play is good for your health, that play can reduce stress, and that working in a playful way can increase the productive output of a team. There’s research that shows that the brains of rats living in a cage with toys and friends thrive, growing larger than those caged just with friends. (The brains of rats living without friends and toys actually decreased in size.) Laughing and playing are like pilates for the brain, strengthening it at the core and restoring balance.

There are books about the science of play, and books about play as a key to innovation. There’s even an institute for corporate play, and Stanford University even offers an engineering class in play and innovation.
Maybe creativity is just the adult word for play. Think about it: creativity involves testing, trying, imagining, pretending, expressing, making things up – everything that is part of a child’s world of play. When we use our creativity to solve a problem, we’re actually playing with the problem, playing with language and perspective, toying with possible solutions.

The problem is most adults equate play with silliness; we tend to think of work and play in polarized terms. But what if we viewed them as synonymous? The famous educator Maria Montessori said, “Play is the work of the child.” Couldn’t it be that work is the play of adults?

One of the quotes on the museum wall, by Greek philospher Plato, says it best: "Life must be lived as play."

Know Further: If you want more play, watch IDEO's Tim Brown on TED. Get more awesome quotations about humor, play and creativity.