by John Brooker | Mar 10, 2015 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
“If you’re trying to achieve, there will be ROADBLOCKS. I’ve had them; everybody has had them. But obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” Michael Jordan, Basketball Player Sometimes you must overcome your own obstacles to creativity… Fresh back from holiday in Cornwall, I ran a Flexible Thinking course. At the end of a very successful course I reviewed the feedback from participants. One had written that I should not demonstrate the creative technique “Super Heroes” in the course because there was no way he could use it with senior managers in his organisation. “Super Heroes” (which I mentioned in the last blog) is a technique in which you get people to adopt the persona of a super hero e.g. Spiderman and consider the challenge from their perspective. For example on the challenge of improving company communication – “I’m Spiderman [adopts the pose] and I fire my web. That makes me think of all the .cc emails that fly around this office to cover back sides. What if we set the system up to fire back an automated response from every person copied on the email? That would fill up the in boxes of the guilty parties and deter them…” I just made that up but I hope it gives you an idea (I quite like it actually!) It may be that the senior managers in his organisation might take a personal affront at being asked to adopt a super hero persona or feel it...
by John Brooker | Feb 26, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 56 “A few minutes working out the consequences of your decisions can save resources “Results are what you expect. Consequences are what you get.” Unknown Do you consider the consequences of your actions? Imagine you work in the Leisure Department of your local authority. You are told to save cash. One idea you come up with is to leave the park gates unlocked at night, saving as a result £60,000 over two years in lower salary costs. Write down all the potential consequences of this action. Have you identified any? The local newspaper recently announced that our parks would remain open at night to save the cost of paying someone to open and close them. “That’s a great idea,” I said to my wife, “then they’ll pay a lot more to repair the vandalised equipment and clean the graffiti.” Well, I was wrong. It was not vandals and graffiti artists. It was fly tippers. The consequence of leaving the gates open was that people dumped van loads of rubbish in the parks. Was that one of your outcomes? So When I train people in my approach to Creative Solution Finding, I lead them through a stage of analysing where their ideas will meet assistance or resistance. It surprises me how many people find this unusual, as it is a logical way to identify where we might find support or meet obstacles. One technique to use is “Consequences”. We ask “What is one consequence of implementing this idea?” We can next ask, “What else?” or we can go further and ask “What is one consequence...
