by John Brooker | Mar 29, 2012 | Facilitate meetings
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 89 Your style of communication can influence how you make decisions in the creative problem solving process… “We don’t know the effect of our actions. That is because we are either too embarrassed to (want to) know what actually was implemented or are too busy to track what was implemented.” Pete Senge, Management Consultant, in “The 5th Discipline” Does your team struggle to make decisions or make them too quickly? I was re-reading a book this week on the science of non-verbal communication, “The Elusive Obvious” by Michael Grinder. (Buy it at www.michaelgrinder.com). In the book, Michael describes two types of communication style; Approachable and Credible. The Approachable style, he says, tends to be more People focussed and the Credible style more Issue focussed. Groups tend to form a culture over time which we can describe as mostly Credible, mostly Approachable or a mix. What was especially interesting for me, as someone who uses creative solution finding (CSF) processes with groups, was Michael’s comments (see Page 57 of the book) on how groups with a bias towards one style or the other work through the basic problem solving process of Gather (information); Evaluate; Decide; Implement. The mostly Credible groups tend to shorten the Gathering stage and are quick to make a decision. Whether they have gathered the appropriate information to make the decision is questionable. The mostly Approachable groups spend a long time gathering information and tend to be reluctant to move from the Gathering stage. They seek consensus and harmony and so can take an age to make a decision in case...
by John Brooker | Mar 28, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 88 If you set up too many rules and measures, people start to focus more on the rules and measures and less on what is really important … “We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.” Alan Bennett, Playwright in “Getting On” Do more rules and laws really help? Do you know that scientists predicted that high mounted brake lights would reduce rear end car collisions by 50% and that studies reveal it is in reality 4.3%? Are you aware that anti lock braking systems have had a negligible effect on accident reduction because drivers with ABS drive faster and closer to other cars? I found these facts in an extract from Tom Vanderbilt’s book “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do”. I noticed the article because he mentioned that in Kensington High Street, London, where I (and several Gorilla readers) used to work, fatal, serious and minor traffic injuries dropped by 60% in one year. “Wow,” you might think, “What miraculous road safety improvements did they install?” In fact, they removed the bulk of the previously installed road safety improvements, including 95% of the traffic signs and the guardrails along the pavement (sidewalk). Drivers are less distracted and so pay more attention to other road users whilst pedestrians are more cautious. How can we relate this to business? In 2002 the US Government introduced the Sarbanes Oxley Act, improving financial reporting to protect investors from the actions of a few criminals who had falsely reported company revenues and profits. Speaking with someone who...
by John Brooker | Mar 27, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 87 You need to communicate simply and frequently if you are to communicate effectively… “Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.” Robert Greenleaf (Researcher in to Leadership). “And not communicating them often enough…” John Brooker Have you something to communicate? Last Monday morning, I took the lift at the Judge Education Institute north of Beijing (a highly recommended training location). On the floor, beautifully woven in to the lush Chinese carpet in both Mandarin and English, was the name of the day; Monday. The next day, in a different lift, a different carpet informed me it was Tuesday. As I was in Beijing and seven hours ahead of my normal time zone, I found this incredibly useful because at 7 a.m. I was wondering what day of the week it was! I was delivering a Powerful Communication Course out there and I thought the carpet was a perfect example (if rather lavish!) of frequent communication, something that is vital in the implementation stage of the innovation cycle. And if we look at Kotter in his book Leading Change, it also meets a number of other criteria: It is simple (see quotation) It is repetitive / frequent It is a different location from the normal workplace (Kotter says “different forum”) so the message can be seen amongst all the clutter The carpet is just like a frequent advertising flyer! Kotter has a few more criteria and I have included these at the end of the article. So In the current economic climate, I do not recommend you go to your Chief Operating...
by John Brooker | Mar 26, 2012 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Innovate
If you take a risk and run a creative workshop it can pay dividends… “Can you imagine, they asked me to do an extra session so we could do the “Disney Technique!” Open University MBA Student . The excited quotation above is from a student (we’ll call her Inga) who attended my MBA – Creativity and Innovation Workshop. In this case, Inga achieved more than just running her own workshop, but more of that later. Let me tell you first what she did. As part of a course assignment, Inga chose to produce some new concepts for an existing product in her company. She was rather nervous about facilitating a workshop but decided to use the creative and facilitation techniques she had experienced during our workshop. Here’s a summary of what Inga did: Session 1 She took a small group (four people including her) to the park to run the workshop: On the way, each person had three minutes to speak uninterrupted about the customers for the product and their lifestyle In the park, they summarised their points on paper They reviewed key points about the original product concept and added a few more They reviewed material on what makes a concept successful in their company, prior to identifying new concepts They looked at key consumer trends for 2009, using material gained previously from the Internet They looked at benefits to the consumer, splitting them into rational and emotional benefits. At this point, they wanted to know why these benefits were important but ran out of time so stopped for further review. This session lasted just an hour. One...
by John Brooker | Mar 25, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 85 If you rely too much on standardisation, what do you do when you want to differentiate or when the market changes…? “Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.” Arnold Toynbee, British Historian Are you standardised? I have a new woman in my life. She recently helped me navigate across Europe and apart from a brief dispute, (she sent me via a Munich traffic jam when my intuition said to go via Innsbruck) we had few cross words. The children call her Mrs T. (from Tom Tom) and my wife blesses her for saving arguments over map reading. Yes, we have a satellite navigation (sat nav) system in the car and I’m really impressed with its accuracy (most of the time), the way it reduces the stress of navigating and its ease of use. However, one day when pulling out of a hotel in France, I noticed that Mrs T. had me turn right, drive up around a roundabout (traffic circle) and back past the hotel again, when it was perfectly legal and quicker to have pulled out left from the hotel. I noticed two other cars behind me do the same thing and wondered if lots of people buy satellite navigation, will we see more of this behaviour as people use the standard “best route” and forget how to read a map and the road? I envisage thousands of motorists converging on the same location along the same route at the same time, in starling-like swarms. [For videos of starlings swarming, click here, they are very impressive.]...
by John Brooker | Mar 24, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 84 Sometimes, we can focus so much on one threat, we don’t notice another slipping in from a different angle – laddering can help… “If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.” Elizabeth Bowen Are you looking the right way at competition? Last week, I helped run the meeting of the youngest group in our local Scout Troop, the Beavers. This event was very noisy, sometimes challenging and always fun. We played a popular game called “Rattlesnake” in which the children run the length of the hall as the two leaders throw soft foam balls at their legs. If the ball hits their legs, the child is out of the game. It’s easiest to catch them when they are running as they leap in the air, stop and dodge to avoid the balls. It’s great! We were down to the last four children in the game and as I waited to throw, one of them stopped mid run. I threw the first ball and he dodged it. Next, I pretended to throw the ball at him and he kept leaping in the air. We went on like this for thirty seconds until the other leader walked up behind him and hit his legs with the ball! He was so focussed on me that he had forgotten the threat from the other leader. So It struck me that this is a great analogy for companies. It’s easy in a market to focus on the “established” competition, unaware that someone else can creep up on the outside and “hit your legs”....
