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”....
by John Brooker | Mar 23, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 83 Creative Tension is something you must use if you are to be more creative … “I believe that working together is about institutionalizing tension so we can make breakthroughs” Jim Farley, Chief Marketing Officer at Ford Motor Company Do you have creative tensions? When you think of Venice, do you imagine riding in a gondola, cruising the sun dappled canals, an operatic gondolier at the helm? Wake up. The gondolas are still there (for the tourists), but if you go, you’ll notice the locals use water buses and taxis, vaporetti and motoscafi, in the local parlance. Riding a vaporetto on holiday last year, I noticed how fast they sped along the canal and the wash they caused. This wash erodes the very buildings the Venetians are striving to preserve, leading to tension between the preservationists and the boat owners. I reflected that this is a good example of what I call “Creative Tension”. You may be aware that Dr Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes Creative Tension in this way: “Creative Tension comes from seeing clearly where we want to be, our “vision,” and telling the truth about where we are, our “current reality.” The gap between the two generates a natural tension.” Personally I consider this to be Strategic Tension. Creative Tension to me is: “Differing views on how something should be achieved lead to creative tension between the different parties, resulting in a better outcome”. This last point is important. Without the better outcome, we simply have tension that leads to stalemate or one party imposing their...
by John Brooker | Mar 22, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 82 If you allow time for your mind to freewheel you can be more creative … “I’m lazy. But it’s the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things.” Lech Walesa, former President of Poland Need to create some space for ideas? Have you ever had a near miss on a bicycle? My recent narrow escape led to a freewheeling of ideas, so hop on for the ride! I was halfway through a 20km cycle ride on a long descent, enjoying the rest after a tough climb, when a white van cut in on me, causing me to swerve. Recovering my composure, I noticed the van belonged to a plumber and my mind leaped to the deficient plumbers who had installed our bathroom. I recalled they complained a lot about people not paying them and remembered the poor customer service they gave. This led to thoughts of how people differentiate themselves with great customer service. As I freewheeled, this notion led on to the idea of “niche” strategies (finding a small segment of the market to compete in), which steered me to Michael Porter Porter made me think of my MBA, which directed me to an ex student who had just contacted me, having set up his own business. This trail moved me on to people who take their MBA as corporate employees and then set up on their own. Which sparked the thought that MBAs are designed around corporate life, so why not have an MBA about running a small business, but aim it...
