Creativity by Addition and Integration

A previous post introduced the subject of creativity and briefly described a technique for finding ideas by subtraction. This post continues the theme of creativity but takes up the technique of addition. We usually call it creative combination, and it has two levels: simple addition of two concepts, and the more complex integration of two concepts.

The Hairpin Curve
A number of authors have written about the value of combining a challenge with a principle from some other field of study. Holding the two concepts in thought at once can sometimes lead to insights. For example, if the problem is finding ways to improve sales, the problem solver might select a concept at random like a hairpin and put that together with the problem and see what emerges as those two concepts are held together in thought. Hairpins keep hair in place. Maybe we need to put salespeople in place at key accounts. Hairpins have those little waves on one side. Why? Maybe they help hold the hair and keep the hairpin from sliding out. Maybe our sales people need three or four key holds that they can use to keep accounts. There's another type of hairpin that operates like a clothespin--squeeze one end to open the jaws and then let go so the jaws can clamp down on the hair...

On and on the ideas can flow. Most of the ideas--maybe 90% of them or more will be useless as ideas but may be very valuable because what's really going on is two things. First, the people engaging in the process are forcing themselves to think differently about their challenge and the difference alone may help open up new domains in the solution space. Second, the people are experiencing massive failure (lots of ideas that lead to nowhere) and if they can learn to become comfortable with that feeling, they'll let go of a lot of the fear and tension that inhibits creativity to begin with. So the exercise is beneficial even if nothing comes of it in terms of a solution.

Division vs. Integration
We use creative combinations frequently in our practice and have noticed a few phenomena that may be worth sharing. First is the difference between division and integration. It's easier for us as human beings to take things apart, give them nomenclature and categorize them than it is for us to create synthesis from seemingly disparate concepts. Pattern recognition is difficult for many of us. It's what makes crossword puzzles difficult. If I give you a common word and ask you to list definitions for the word, you'll have little difficulty. However, if I give you a definition for a common word, you'll likely have more difficulty extrapolating from the definition to the word itself. If I give you a category, like birds and ask you to fill the category with related words, again you'd have little problem. First you'd identify types of birds, then characteristics of birds, then other concepts related to birds. You'd build a mind map fairly quickly. However, if I give you four objects: a bird, a cube, scissors, and a car and ask you to synthesize them into an overarching concept, you'd find that a bit more difficult. Division is easier than integration.

Most of the challenges inherent in finding innovative ideas lie in the domain of integration. We're looking to synthesize something completely new out of existing objects or concepts.

There's a facilitation exercise called Yellow Pages that illuminates the problem. Each team is provided with two businesses from the yellow pages and is asked to create a new business that's a synthesis of the two. So, for example, a hair stylist and an irrigation installation company. Try it.

Put One Idea Inside the Other
The first attempts are usually to put on in the context of another. So the Irrigation company gives away free styling coupons or something like that. These ideas may be valuable, but usually they're so pedestrian as to be useless. That's OK if the team uses these initial ideas to just get the mind limbered up and then pushes on. But at some point simple addition isn't enough. What happens when you add apples and oranges? Fruit salad. There's nothing in the composition of the apple or the orange itself that suggests fruit salad. Fruit salad is an emergent concept.

Abstracting to Principles
After a while the team may see that both of the firms are interested in grooming in some way. The former grooms people's hair and the latter grooms people's lawns. This approach involves abstracting each business back into underlying principles and following this track may lead to some new valuable idea (usually unrelated to either of the businesses in the original problem). So maybe there are principles in irrigation that can be carried over into the hair styling business. Does hair need hydration? Could irrigation systems dispense conditioners?

Note that both of these ideas are already common solutions employed by both types of companies. This leads to another point. Unless you're really familiar with the styling business or the irrigation business, the ideas you come up with are likely to be very insightful. Some level of familiarity is required with both types of concepts when you're doing creativity by addition.

Popping to a Completely New Idea
The holy grail of this exercise is to come up with a completely new type of business that traces its roots back to either the specifics of the two parent businesses or to the abstracted principles of the two. This result is very rare. That's OK. The general purpose of the exercise in a collaborative session is to just get people loosened up. And to realize how very difficult it is to look at two concepts and have to imagine a third concept that is the offspring of the two.

Maybe the two companies combine in some form of data management that combines a service that shapes data (related to the stylist) and a service that irrigates data, providing it with nutrients like periodic updates (related to the irrigation company).

Impatience
The final phenomenon I'd like to share in this blog with respect to this topic is the particularly western tendency towards impatience when it comes to creativity. We're all brought up in school to believe that every problem has (usually one) right answer and that answer should emerge immediately, often in competition against time (as in testing) or against other people (as in who raises their hand first). But the real world isn't like that. There's competition, true, but there isn't any company that has a monopoly on the solution space. I believe after having facilitated hundreds of collaborative sessions with clients that the average participant has a tolerance for ten or fifteen "wrong answers" max before impatience (and probably humiliation) gets the better of them and they begin to feel either dejected or angry at the facilitator. My experience of the origin of really good ideas, however, indicates that somewhere between 50 and 100 "wrong answers" are required before a really good breakthrough idea comes up. There may be a few other good ideas along the way, but only one really good one out of every 100 (50 if you're lucky).

Somehow we have to get past this tendency. In the few hours it takes to generate 100's of ideas, how much is really lost? A few hours is all. But the potential reward is very large.

Creativity By Subtraction

Creativity is a part of the innovation process. Often the two are confused as synonyms but innovation includes creativity as a tool or skill (depending on how you believe it happens), not the other way around. Finding a way to generate new ideas involves creativity. Robert Fritz makes some nice distinctions between creating and creativity in his book Creating. He notes that everyone can learn to create something even though we each have different degrees of talent in creativity.

One definition of innovation reads, "to create something new or perceived as new." So the act of creating is fundamental to innovation--bringing ideas to fruition so that they are perceived as new. This newness is important. See my last post on entropy and negentropy for more details, but it's the newness that allows an organization to create a value gap between them and their nearest competitors. That's also why it's still a good packaging and advertising trick to put the word "new" on an item that is basically the same as the last iteration. People are drawn towards something new and different. That ability to draw people to a product or service allows its price or quality or content to be leveraged up, thereby increasing its value not only to the organization that produces it but hopefully to the customers who buy it, the workers who make it and the shareholders who own it.

Good ideas are not a dime a dozen. A good idea is as rare as a good system for executing good ideas. Everything in life that is of enduring value is challenging to conceive and bring to fruition.

Finding good ideas has been a topic for centuries, probably since before Archimedes shouted "Eureka" from his bath. One technique that we use is subtraction.

First, frame the challenge that needs to be innovated. For example, we were writing a bid on some work and the final fee was too high. Or, we had a client that wanted to completely innovate the way education happened at their medical school.

Second, find something that you believe you can't live without and subtract it from the equation. In writing the bid, we removed two phases of work. Then we asked ourselves how we could still meet the objectives of the RFP with the two phases removed. We worked until we understood how that could happen. That cut half the fee. Our medical education client chose to remove tuition from the equation: imagine a medical school that charges no tuition. They worked diligently with this idea to really try to design a school that didn't charge tuition.

Third, play with the ideas until something cool emerges. After we cut the fee in half, we felt that we had lost our distinctiveness with respect to the rest of the field of contenders. While noodling through this challenge, we cut the duration of the proposed phases by 90% and again asked how we would accomplish that. The answer emerged, much to the surprise of us all. Our medical school client while wrestling with the no tuition subtraction discovered several other interesting ideas along the way. These ideas get catalogued because they're really the object and purpose of the exercise. The client also happened to discover a way to conduct a medical college without charging tuition. It's rare for this to actually happen in a subtraction exercise, though.

Fourth, catalog the ideas that emerge and then begin to build models around them. Once the cool ideas emerge, build some models around them to test them. When you test, don't test in order to tear down but in order to build up and strengthen. It's easy to destroy things in this world. It's so much harder to build them. So take even the ideas that don't seem so strong and work diligently to strengthen them. I guarantee you that something excellent and valuable will pop out.

The keys to the whole exercise are two: (1) subtract something from the equation that appears to be absolutely necessary and, (2) play with the remaining challenge with all you'v got. Suspend any sense of impossibility. If you believe that what you've subtracted can't actually be subtracted, you'll never jump to the new perspective that allows you to see new ideas. You need to fool yourself and suspend your disbelief long enough to get to the cool ideas.

Entropy and Innovation

Entropy is the tendency of nature to dissolve differences. Imagine placing two stones next to one another in a closed, insulated box. One stone is 200 degrees and the other is 0. After some period of time you open the box and both stones are now 100 degrees (ignoring the effects of whatever temperature the inside of the box was at the start of the experiment). This tendency to take structure and order and dismantle it into either randomness or uniformity is one of the key laws of thermodynamics.

Until the two stones have reached the same temperature, I can use the temperature difference to drive an engine of some sort. I can direct the flow of the heat from the one stone through a device that uses the cold from the other stone as a mechanism to "draw" the heat through it, giving up some heat in the process and driving whatever the device is.

This law appears metaphorically in the business world as well. If one company comes out with a certain product, it's guaranteed that sooner or later another company will come out with a similar product. At that point price competition will begin and the profit margins of both products will be worn down until they are commodities with tiny margins. At this point there is little difference between them, and no value is created. If a service company comes out with a new offering, its competitors will work to match its character and flavor (if not its substance) so that the buyer will be able to take advantage of a competitive situation.

The entire organizational process from supply chain through operations to marketing, sales, delivery and service is entropic. Even though we focus on it intently, the best it can do over time is run down to a low margin, par situation in the competitive marketplace.

Several mechanisms can be put in place to fight against this dispersive tendency. They can create the phenomenon of negentropy. Life, for example, is negentropic. Life over successive generations can evolve more complexity and differentiation, swimming upstream against the pull of uniformity. Companies need to find ways to bring this innate property of life into their organizations in more than just an ad-hoc way.

Strategy Formation
One of the oldest tools at a company's disposal, strategy allows the company to look at the playing field differently and either change the field, the rules or the game itself. The ultimate objective is to create greenfield marketspace because the margins are greatest where there is little or no competition (real or perceived in the customer's mind).

Brand
In the old days it used to be called marketing and advertising but nowadays branding has the capability to create a differentiation in the customer's mind that may or may not actually exist in reality. The hope is that the customer generates an affinity that marries his self image with that of the brand, thus reducing the barriers to purchasing while at the same time raising barriers to choosing similar products or services from competitors.

Quality
The performance of the product or service can be improved without design modifications that would imply starting from scratch. At the same time, the economy of production can be improved and the increased efficiency can add to the margin of a product in commoditization by carving out space below the price point. The whole quality and process impovement movements of the last 60 years showed us how to do this clearly in manufacturing; less clearly in services where the relationship and not the process is king.

Intellectual Property
IP in the forms of copyrighting, trademarking and patenting is a method for erecting barriers against competition and the erosion of margin on each dollar of sales. I tend to think of IP as a life extender but not as a negentropic generator. But that's probably a personal bias. I see IP today as a tool gone haywire. Taken to an extreme, it inhibits the fight against entropy because the barriers it sets up make it more difficult for ideas to move across the intellectual spectrum. Some of the things that the patent office allows seem ridiculous. Nevertheless, despite the desire of some organizations to use patents to hedge their companies about with nice, thorny, protective barriers, I believe that the thickening hedges will only spur other companies to find ways to work around them (or countries to simply ignore them). IP is too much of a defensive tool to ultimately succeed. Offensive tools are required for the sustained success of companies.

Innovation and R&D
Ultimately a species can only improve so much in its niche. Once the niche itself starts to change too much, new species must evolve. Innovation is the process by which a company remakes its products and services. In so doing it will likely have to remake itself. That means its systems, organizational structure, and policies (its rules of the game). The tendency of companies to shy away from such transformation is why most companies battle it out by trying to just run their operations engine faster, throwing in a bit of process improvement for spice or building IP hedges to extend the runtime of their products. In the process they generate so much heat and friction trying to drive new performance out of an old engine that they burn up their people, their systems and their structures. But ultimately buggy whips will go by the wayside and most of the companies that made them will either fade away into a dying industry's entropy or be absorbed into other operations for pennies on the dollar. Because the creation of an innovation culture takes time, there is a point of no return for organizations that ignore transformation.

So there you have it. Pick your tools. There are probably others, but these are the big ones. Usually a mix of several is wise, or the sequential use of one then another as the current situation calls for.

The Networked Consulting Firm

I've been intrigued lately mulling over the possibility that the next big consulting firm might be a network of individual firms. There are four or five elements that are coming together that would support this and make such a network a serious competitor to today's major consulting firms.

1. eBay
I'm drawing on two characteristics of eBay. One is the evaluation system that eBay uses to rate traders. The second is the marketplace of buyers and sellers.

2. B2B Technology and Affinity Groups
Within the network there will be affinity groups. These serve as the analog to practice areas in the major consulting firms. The affinity groups will be subnetworks of consultants who like working together and who have complimentary skills that together give them the breadth of abilities to tackle difficult challenges. It's likely that leadership will emerge by situation. Job-based contracts keep teams of consultants together for the duration of each job, providing some security for clients and for the team members themselves. It is also likely that consultants will stay members for longer periods of time than the current average turnover in major consulting firms.

3. Creative Commons
A creative commons license would allow members to use each other's IP but more importantly to adapt it and feed it back into the network for others to use. The best would tend to be used more. Databases of IP would hold rating and use information for members to use. This rapid adapatation could keep the network ahead of the competition.

4. Member-based Support
The network would be formed as a membership organization that can provide a number of valuable services from insurance, to basic legal support (contracts, etc.), to assistance with accounting, to discounts for purchases. Members would provide basic financial information to the membership organization so that the combined financial strength an be used in larger RFP's. Rapid deployment team building allows larger teams for big deployments to rapidly come up to speed. Members submit case studies and non-proprietary information after each job so that a repository of knowledge by industy and company segment can be built and accessed by all.

The network would also benefit from its lack of overhead. No major buildings. No battalions of staff. No top heavy structure that requires overworked junior consultants to support the income of senior partners.

Complex Adaptive Systems and the Future of Facilitation

PART II

A number of years ago I wrote some simple rules for facilitation of ideation and idea development with large groups using some of Stu Kaufmann's ideas around patch logic (from his book At Home in the Universe). The rules weren't quite right but the execution over the years has yielded some surprising results.

People in collaboration seem very uncomfortable not knowing what's going on. I should rephrase that because it's impossible for a person to know what's going on in a collaborative endeavor. Instead, people accept an illusion that they know what's going on. So they tend to want to stay in large group all the time so they can hear everything, for example. In reality, they're hearing almost nothing. Imagine sixty people in a room working on a problem of creating a strategy for a new product launch. One of them can talk at a time. If each one talks for a minute, then over the course of an hour each person talks only once. What does each person do with the other 59 minutes? Listen? Highly doubtful. Even with the best of active listening skills, a person fades away after fifteen minutes or so. Take notes? Well, so now we have sixty sets of notes and doodles. What's the value--collaboratively speaking--in that?

If I put the 60 people into ten teams for an hour, now ten people get to talk at once. Ten more get to capture ideas on a flip chart at the same time. Everyone gets to speak for six minutes. The pace of the dialog acclerates. Further, if I give each of these teams an assignment to create something then I end up with ten products. Even if eight are worthless, the value of the remaining two probably eclipses whatever a group of 60 might have come up with together.

Now if I ask the 60 people to solve the problem individually for 20 minutes and then get into ten teams to put their ideas together to create something, I've got 1200 minutes of intense creation and involvement by all the individuals, followed by 400 minutes of intense discussion (one speaker at a time in ten teams for 40 minutes). Compared to the first example, I've leveraged 60 minutes into 1600 minutes of "speaking" versus 60 minutes of speaking.

Now comes the problem. People at some point feel like they're not connected to the rest of the teams and want to hear what they've been doing. It's necessary for them to know what the other teams have been doing because the next stage in the process is to take the ideas and solutions and recombine them together in another iteration of work. This represents the opportunity for crossbreeding and a test for the fitness of the ideas. Through the iterations, the most fit solution will emerge without need for any other decision making approach. But if I have ten teams talk about what they just did in succession, that's about 100 minutes. And you know what happens in those 100 minutes. That's right--one person at a time talks and everyone else zones out. HUGE waste of time.

There are some alternatives. One is to have representatives from each of the ten teams go out to other teams during the process and find out individually what they've been up to and bring those ideas back. So, in each team, one person stays in place and the remaining five people split up and go to five other teams. Rotate once more and now each team of six has touched each of the other teams in the session and they return with the ideas to their home team and incorporate the ideas into the product. Now I've used 20 minutes and each team now has information from every other team.

Or... if there is time, each team posts its results. The best way to do this is with a picture, some text that describes the diagram and a brief 3 minute video tellling the story of what went on in the team. The results are posted to an Intranet and everyone can peruse whatever they want to as the session moves forward.

The most difficult problem left to solve is how to move the work to the next round. In other words, let's say that the group of sixty people is working on coming up with a new product. They might do a couple of rounds generating new product ideas as individuals and in teams. Some rotating between team rounds would cross-breed the ideas and some interesting ones would emerge. Now what? We need to move the best ideas into further modeling and testing. So we need a method to tell which ideas are the most fit--even if it's as simple as the interest that people in the group take in them. Then we need a way for people to sign up to work on the ideas they're most interested in. And we need a way to document everything so that teams have a record of the ideas moving forward. And a record of the individuals associated with each idea so they can go back to the source and ask questions of them for clarification. A report of a team's idea is terribly compressed and it takes interaction with the people who were on that team to unpack or uncompress the ideas back to understandability.