Complete This Drawing!

This is too wonderful NOT to share. That would be "cheating," as I noted in my previous post.

Creativity takes time! Seriously...I am NOT kidding!!!

(Source: Ads of the World.)

Making Sense of Innovation: Three Questions to Ask Yourself

A lot has been written about innovation - perhaps too much. As a topic and as a practical matter, it can be hard to your head around it. To that end, here are three questions to ask yourself as you try to figure out how make innovation happen in your organization. 

1. Which "pathway" to innovation is best for your organization? 

It turns out there are a number of pathways to innovation (as illustrated below). The trick is understanding which will make the most sense for your kind of organization. 

• The "Expertise" Pathway:  Developing superior knowledge and expertise to gain leverage. Consulting firms, when they are able to establish a clear intellectual leadership in a particular field, are a good example.
• The "Re-mixing Common Elements Uniquely" Pathway: Innovation is realized by how an a company packages or presents its products or services. In its heyday, for example, The Gap's clothing was not impressively unique, but its method of merchandising and presenting were.
• The "Unmet Customer Needs" Pathway: This reflects the ability to match products with unfilled consumer needs. Church & Dwight, maker of Arm & Hammer baking soda, has expanded it sales by finding new, unfilled needs for its sodium bicarbonate: toothpaste, carpet freshener, and mouthwash.
• The "Leveraging Functional Excellence" Pathway: The ability to execute, consistently, a certain function better than one's competitors. The Ritz-Carlton defines functional excellence for customer service in the hotel industry while Procter & Gamble has mastered the skills to excel in consumer packaged-goods marketing.
• The "Pure Imagination" Pathway: Using imagination to see possibilities that are not always logically evident. Walt Disney Company has given the lexicon of marketing a whole new term - "imagineering."

2. Do you have a well-defined approach to Creative Problem Solving?

It is not sufficient to simply say, "let's get together and brainstorm a solution" and expect consistently good results from your innovation efforts. Staff needs to be in-sync about how to proceed with Creative Problem Solving. .For that reason, a number of organizations train their staff in the Osborne-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Model, which consists of six well-defined steps:

1. Determine the objectives or desired outcome.
2. Assemble the facts. 
3. Define the problem that needs solving.
4. Generate ideas for possible solutions.
5. Determine the best ideas leading to a solution.
6. Determine strategies to make sure the solution will be accepted and implemented within the organization. .

3. How will you manage the team?

Execution is the name of the game, here. This requires a framework for managing a team working on an innovation project. One approach is to use the the C.A.R.E. Profile® -- an instrument that identifies five key roles in innovative team performance:

1. Creator: Generates original concepts, goes beyond the obvious, and sees the big picture. Hands off tasks to an Advancer.
2. Advancer: Recognizes new opportunities, develops ways to promote ideas, and moves toward implementation. Hands off tasks to a Refiner.
3. Refiner: Challenges and analyzes ideas to detect potential problems and may hand plans back to an Advancer or Creator before handing off tasks to an Executor.
4. Executor: Lays the groundwork for implementation, manages the details, and moves the process to completion.
5. Facilitator: Works throughout the process to ensure tasks are handed off to the right people at the right time.

The C.A.R.E. Profile enables a manager to choose the right people to fill each of these roles so a team has a balanced mix of skills needed for success.

Related articles:

• Solve the Right Problem! 
• An Innovation Challenge: Would You Implement the "30-Day Rule?" 
• A Lesson in Creative Problem Solving

Project Build: Organizing for Creativity and Performance

Right click and "save" to download the Project Build Exercise

A few years ago I developed a fun team building exercise called Project Build. The exercise explores two different approaches of organizing people into teams and makes an important point about the best way to organize teams for creativity and performance. It's been a big success every time I have used it. Feel free to use it!

Related articles: 

• What would a "Membership Happiness Machine" look like?
• Innovation: Got Focus?
• Learning to Create the Future
• Motivation Begins Before You Hire

Solve the Right Problem!

Click on the arrow, let the  viewer  load, scroll over 

"More" and click on "Full Screen, then use the arrow on the bottom to advance the slides.

Thiss exercise in problem-solving that requires you focus on the real problem at hand. It is based on a true incident from World War II.

Group Excericse for Download:  Here is a group exercise version you can download and use with your volunteers or staff.

Happy problem-solving!

How Do You Put a Giraffe into a Refrigerator?

This is a fun quiz to stimulate your creative problem solving ability! Scroll down to find the answer beneath each question.

1. How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?

  

 

 

 

Correct answer: Open the refrigerator, put in the giraffe and close the door. (This question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an overly complicated way.)

 2.  How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?

 

Wrong Answer : Open the refrigerator, put in the elephant and close the refrigerator.

Correct Answer : Open the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in the elephant and close the door. (This tests your ability to think through the repercussions of your actions.) 

3.  The Lion King is hosting an animal conference, all the animals  attend except one. Which animal does not attend?

  





Correct Answer : The Elephant. The Elephant is in the refrigerator.  (This tests your memory.  OK, even if you did not answer the first three questions, correctly you can surely answer this one.)
 

4.  There is a river you must cross, but it is inhabited by  crocodiles. How do you manage it?

   

Correct Answer: You swim across. All the crocodiles are attending the Animal Meeting! (This tests whether you learn quickly from your mistakes.)

A Lesson in Creative Problem Solving

Once again the subject of Innovation is making the rounds and there is a lot of serious and somber discussion taking place. I would like to add a bit of levity to make an extremely important point about creative problem solving: it requires flexible thinking and the constant search for alternative solutions.

Enjoy the story and learn!

Subject: Physics Exam

The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen:   "Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."
  

One student replied: "You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then  lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."

This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an  independent arbiter to decide the case.

The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer that showed at least a minimal familiarity with  the basic principles of physics. For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use.

On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:

"Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer."
 

"Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.

"But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T=2pi sqr root (l /g).
 

"Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up." "If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building.

"But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor's door and say to him 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper'."
 

The student was Niels Bohr, the only Dane to win the Nobel Prize for Physics.