by John Brooker | Mar 17, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 77 You need to check your facts if you want to overcome challenges… “You can’t make progress in a bear hunt if you follow the tracks of a deer.” Dean Koontz – Author in “The Good Guy” “You can’t make progress in a beer hunt if you follow a bad steer.” John Brooker – Author in “The Cross Keys” Have you checked the facts…? Sometimes, I have to do something stupid to remember the basics of Creative Thinking. Recently, I co-hosted an informal gathering in a pub in London for students who had recently passed their Open University MBA exams. It was a “drop in evening” when we would meet anyone who turned up at 6.00 p.m. in “The Counting House” pub in London. Regrettably, Elvin Box, my co-host, was stuck on a train at that time. I followed my map and found myself outside “The Cross Keys” pub where a man directed me to turn left down an alleyway, walk some distance and then I would find “The Counting House”. Following his instructions, I arrived at the end of the alley where a number of people stood outside a pub door. As there was no pub sign, I inquired if it were “The Counting House” and a lady assured me it was. Finding a seat in the very crowded bar, I put up a “Beer Mat Night” sign (to the amusement of fellow drinkers) and proceeded to wait… and wait. Elvin called at 7.00 p.m. to say he was half an hour away. Still...
by John Brooker | Mar 16, 2012 | Facilitate meetings
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 76B When you make a mistake, it is useful to draw some lessons from it… “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” George Bernard Shaw, Playwright Have you ever had a communication perceived not as you intended? In the original Gorilla 76 on “Lever Your Life” I made the remark: “I could have attributed it [my lack of motivation] to the plumbers who installed our new bathroom, tradesmen who (despite being the bathroom supplier’s referral) would have made “King of the Cowboys”, Roy Rogers, a Native American squaw in comparison. They certainly made me miserable with their lies and bodges.” I received a few critical responses from readers who interpreted the remark as a slur on Native Americans and I assume that more people may have been offended, but chose not to write. I have responded personally to those who wrote and I am writing this special edition for other readers to make my apologies, explain what I meant and to draw some lessons in communication from it. First, if you did interpret it as a slur, I sincerely apologise. I intended none but did make some errors in communicating, in particular as the Gorilla is read in many different countries. To explain, I will use three questions that were sent to me by readers: “Did you intend your readers to assume that cowboys are good and Native American squaws are not?” No, I did not intend this. The term cowboy in Britain is used colloquially for bad tradesmen. I was seeking to illustrate that my plumbers so “out cowboyed”...
by John Brooker | Mar 15, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 75 The power of choosing in a workshop is not the count but the discussion of why you chose in that way … “Free and fair discussion will ever be found the firmest friend to truth. “ Unknown How can you make evaluation more powerful? I ran a flexible thinking workshop recently and once again, people said “the power of discussion” was a key learning point. Why should discussion be so powerful? Let’s explore… In the course I demonstrate the use of the Options Matrix technique, one used quite commonly by groups to choose between various options. Above I show a simplified matrix based on the challenge of “How to get more funds for the project?” The scoring is based on how well the idea matches up to the criteria, in this case: Excellent = 4; Very good = 3; Good = 2; Poor = 1 Typically the process is: Those involved in choosing give a rating for each option or idea against each criterion, e.g. Mary rates idea “C” as Poor against Criteria 1, Zane rates it Excellent and Joe rates it as Excellent too The rating is averaged and a score given i.e. 1 + 4 + 4 = 9 / 3 people = 3 The average rating against each criterion is added to give a total The option with the highest total score is chosen (Option “B” in our example) and we have an objective result Or do we? Actually what we have is the objective result of a subjective process, or what I call “Subjective objectivity”. So What we...
by John Brooker | Mar 14, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla #74 If you want technology to be successful, you have to ensure it meets a few clear criteria… “New technology turns adult and child roles on their head. If technology is easy to use now, we should say “it’s adult’s play” not “child’s play”. John Brooker ~ Adult player What makes a new technology product successful? I’m writing this in my hotel room in Morocco, having just finished my first ever video call to my family. This excited me so much that I was jumping up and down and clapping with excitement when we connected. We used Windows Live Messenger to make the call, which my daughter showed me how to use at the weekend. Once I had connected to the hotel’s internet (two minutes), it took me just a minute to set up the video call, with a bit of on line coaching from my children. This technology has given me the opportunity to see and talk to my family, easily, simply and for free (hotel internet prices aside!). They can show me their homework, we can play games and generally have fun, so much so that we spent forty minutes on the call. On the telephone, it is usually a couple of minutes’ chat and then they get bored. It also costs me £1.25 a minute. Some of you with a key driver (e.g. speaking to relatives overseas) may have been making video calls from your PC for quite a while, many more of you will use video conferencing at work so what is the big deal about my experience? Well, I think...
by John Brooker | Mar 13, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 73 Mapping your thoughts is a good place to start when your creativity falters… “I have an existential map. It has ‘You are here’ written all over it.” Steven Wright, US Comedian Do you need to unblock your creative pipes? People sometimes ask me if I ever run out of ideas for Gorilla articles. Last week I thought it had happened. We were on holiday in Venice, a perfect place I thought, to get creative ideas for a Gorilla article. I had five “triggers”, the first being the picture on my mobile phone changing from the Houses of Parliament to the Leaning Tower of Pisa as I switched it on in Venice airport (what a lovely idea!). Normally, I sense a trigger and mentally fit it to a suitable concept for an article, but I couldn’t fit any of these five. I had a creative block and needed a creative plumber to free it (and before you say it, help me tap in to my creativity). Then my wife bought me a lovely notebook (Moleskine brand) which I promptly used to map out all the triggers in the form of a Mind Map. (If you are unfamiliar with mapping, here is a link to give you some background) Mapping my thoughts helped me find a connection, but I’ll write about that in the next article, because I realised as I mapped that my mental block was a trigger and mapping is the article concept! When I got home I did a search on all of...
by John Brooker | Mar 12, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 72 Having creative ideas is only useful if you can communicate them well… “At some later date, in perhaps some less guarded moment, we will really get to know what the master of Old Trafford thinks of promotion to one of the key jobs in world football by friendship with the owner, by bartering the post of director of football, the most redundant job in any corner of the game where a degree of success has been achieved under a strong manager, for the top position so recently occupied by a man whose record of achievement, relative to his successor was so far in to another league it was almost beyond measurement.” Sports Columnist – UK Newspaper Do you have creative ideas but struggle to communicate them? Did you read the quotation above? Did you understand it? Did you give up after a few lines? Recently, I developed a course on “Powerful Communications” which is a key part of innovation. As part of the course, I ran a five minute exercise on the Solutions Focus principle “Language – Simply Said” or, “Use $5 words not $5000 words” (In the course I swapped pounds for dollars to make it simpler still for my British audience). As seems to happen regularly (Jung called it “synchronicity” or the coincidence of events that seem related, but are not obviously caused one by the other), just as I was looking for an example of difficult language, I opened the newspaper whilst on the train to find the example I quote above. I read that passage at least five times...
