by John Brooker | May 8, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
The Creative Gorilla #118 How to facilitate people to innovate… “The rules are simple, hit him, don’t let him hit you.” Jackie Chan in “The Karate Kid” How might you facilitate innovation? I drove to Dublin in Ireland with a colleague to start a new Innovation Programme. After a long drive and with the prospect of a full day ahead we retired to our rooms at 8.30 pm, my head hit the pillow at 10 pm and I was asleep. Three hours later I was awoken by a loud crash, like someone throwing a collapsible table out of the window. I dozed off, only to be startled by another loud crash. After the fourth time I realised it happened whenever a vehicle exited the hotel car park over a metal speed bump. This being a tourist hotel in Dublin I laid awake for most of the night as taxis came and went, drifting off around 4 a.m. On the bright side I was able to relate this story to the group next day, using it to define business innovation as: Find someone with a problem (crash!) Identify if they are wiling to pay for a solution (I would happily pay!) Develop a solution Market it Earn revenue True, this is highly simplistic, but it can be useful to cut through complexity to the basic concept. So Whilst the concept of innovation is simple, implementing it is a little more difficult, so, here are eight ways to facilitate innovation in an organisation, based on my experience and reading: Know what you want Understand why you want to innovate and describe...
by John Brooker | May 6, 2012 | Facilitate meetings
The Creative Gorilla #116 How might a creative leader retain mental resolve when under pressure…? “Robert Green is confident he has the mental resolve to bounce back from the World Cup howler that helped the United States draw 1-1 with England.” BBC Sport website 13 June 2010 Do you have mental resolve? Driving home the day after England’s World Cup match with the USA, I listened to BBC radio. They were interviewing a sport psychologist who explained how people react after making the kind of mistake that England’s goalkeeper Robert Green made in the match, fumbling the ball and enabling the USA to equalise. He went on to discuss how sport psychologists toughen athletes’ mental resolve in four areas: Concentration is the mental quality to focus on the task in hand. There are two areas of focus: 1. The Broad – Narrow continuum; the athlete focuses on a large or small number of stimuli. 2. Internal – External continuum; the athlete focuses on internal stimuli (feelings) or external stimuli (ball). Common distractions are anxiety, stress and fatigue Confidence is driven by the belief an athlete can achieve their goals, leading to more enthusiasm, perseverance and positive thinking Control of emotions (e.g. anger and anxiety) is essential for successful performance in adversity. Lack of control causes mental and physical affects which reduce performance Full Commitment to the goals they wish to achieve (or save in Robert Green’s case), is essential So Listening to the discussion, it struck me how we might relate the 4Cs to creative leadership. After all, it can be tough challenging the status quo. Here are...
by John Brooker | May 5, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
The Creative Gorilla #115 Continually using the same approach is very efficient, but it can lead to stale thinking … “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got …” JB (after Anthony Robbins, motivation guru) Need a new approach to problem solving? Last week, I gave a talk to a company in Bristol. Having had my diary changed at the last minute, I decided to stay the night in a hotel and so immediately followed my usual approach for booking a hotel; go online and book through my regular hotel chain. Alas, all their hotels in Bristol were booked as were all the other chain hotels. So I Googled “Bed and Breakfast Bristol” and instead of staying in a prefabricated block just off the motorway, I stayed at a lovely Edwardian hotel overlooking the Downs. In the morning I went for a long walk across said Downs, found a fabulous view of the Avon Gorge and had time to rehearse my talk in my mind. Having been forced to take a fresh approach to booking my hotel I was delighted it had paid off so well. It also gave me an opening story for my talk, which challenged the use of only one approach to tackling problems. Like many companies, the one I talked to uses a structured approach to problem solving, in this case, “Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control”. Essentially, this type of approach senses a problem, identifies the symptoms, finds the root cause and looks for solutions. Companies have been using these types of problem centred approaches for many...
by John Brooker | May 4, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
The Creative Gorilla #114 Use a range of idea generation approaches to avoid stale thinking… “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” Linus Pauling, American Scientist What approaches do you have for idea generation? Reflecting on televised political leadership debates, the thought struck me, “What if the management teams of companies were elected?” No, not the Board; for most private companies the shareholders elect them. I mean staff voting for the management team. Imagine the CEO having to debate with rivals for his job in front of the staff… This idea sneaked in to my head as I lay in bed and is an example of idea generation that we might call “Individual Spontaneity.” It relies on our existing knowledge and making “connections” between pieces of knowledge in our brain, sometimes prompted by an external stimulus. The advantage is that it is free and the ideas can be brilliant; Eureka moments! The issues include that it is ad hoc and unreliable. The same can be said for “Group Spontaneity”, where ideas arise when you are chatting with friends or colleagues. For an organisation to rely on Spontaneity for new ideas is a little haphazard, even if your organisation encourages people to socialise and talk about work. Therefore, it will require some kind of structured approach to produce ideas more consistently. I consider there are three structured approaches to generate ideas, which I term: Structured Unprovoked Structured Provoked Structured Unlearning Let’s review them. As usual I would appreciate your feedback to broaden my perspective. Structured unprovoked Common in the workplace, someone gets a...
by John Brooker | May 2, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate, Tools
The Creative Gorilla #112 Use Mind Mapping to help you find solutions… “Creativity is the development of original ideas, concepts and solutions using imagination and association – this is the premise of the mind map.” Tony Buzan, with Chris Griffiths, in Mind Maps for Business Would you like to enhance your solution finding? Next week, we are taking our children to Germany, to see our football team Fulham play Wolfsburg in the quarterfinals of the Europa League. This is our first ever match abroad and yesterday we went on line to a route planning web site to find out how to drive there. I looked at the detailed list of instructions, which didn’t help much to get an overview. Next I viewed the interactive map but after a minute or so of fiddling, I confess I borrowed my son’s atlas and in a few seconds was able to use my imagination to visualise the route and association to work out the rough distance to three nearby towns for potential hotels. Having obtained a sense of relief at confirming our travel details, I was delighted too that this atlas, with its very clear visualisation and structure, gave me a useful introduction to this article, imagination and association being at the core of how Mind Maps work. I recently attended a course led by Tony Buzan and others, to become a licensed Buzan Mind Mapping instructor and thought I would share how we can use Mind Maps for, amongst many other things, creativity. Many of you will know the concept of left and right brain, the left side of...
by John Brooker | May 1, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
The Creative Gorilla #111 With the right factors in place you can make your workshops outstanding… “In the closing session, participants described it as the best away day they had ever experienced.” Manager, Government department Would you like to make your next team away day really creative? As you may know, I really love to see examples of people putting creativity in to action. This article describes an away day facilitated by a student (and fellow Gorilla) who attended the Open University Creativity and Innovation residential workshop and joined my group of Creative Gorillas. She based the day on what she learned from our group, from her course material and from her own experience and creativity. She wrote the article for her in-house intranet site and I asked her if we could share it with other Gorillas. This is a great example of how someone with limited experience of facilitation and creativity can produce a terrific outcome, using simple principles and relevant tools. Away days generate mixed expectations. Some people want to address the nuts and bolts of delivery; others are focused on team cohesion; a few just welcome a change of scene. When I undertook to plan the away day for our department, I felt it should be possible to address all of these, with some creativity and fun thrown in for good measure. With help from my Open University course on Creativity, Innovation and Change, and thanks to the energetic participation of my colleagues, we exceeded expectations. So how did we do it? Three simple rules stand out: 1) Build a Creative Climate Being creative involves taking...
