Innovation is Creativity x Risk Taking

Innovation is impossible to achieve without taking a necessary amount of risk. In a world where the success rate of new product entries in the grocery business is 1 in 100, it is inevitable that every success sees failures along the way.

An effective innovation leader should encourage creativity and risk taking, while also practicing a tolerance for failure.

To foster initiative and innovation, ask yourself these questions.

• Do you allow free research and development (R&D) time?
• Do you invest in innovation: money, people, resources?
• Do you celebrate failure and risk taking?

In a tough economy the willingness to take risks can wither, so it’s critical to let team members know that failure will not result in punitive measures.

A strong leader practices failure management by setting and agreeing on the risk taking bandwidth or budget. It is ok to fail but that failure should be seen and recognized as a learning experience.

Fear of failure is an innovation killer, so here are some simple steps to develop a failure management plan that will lead to a culture of sustainable innovation.

1. Clearly communicate the risk profile you are asking your people to adopt and state why it is important to the organization’s success. This limits your potential loss, while opening up the floor for creativity and risk taking.
2. Never allow an unsuccessful risk to hamper a team member’s opportunities and advancement. A culture of innovation depends on trust.
3. Create and communicate the results of an award program created with a high intraorganizational profile. It should, ideally, reward risks that pay off and “gee, nice try’s” that don’t.
4. Establish a formalized, non-accusatory process for harvesting key learnings from unsuccessful risks. Distribute these lessons learned. The key here is that all risks, whether successful or not, contribute towards the end goal.
5. Give your people the situational risk assessment tools they need to help them improve their risk-taking decisions. This can include risk scoring systems to identify different levels of risk, and ways to deal with adverse situations as part of a preventive strategy.

Harnessing the Power of Infographics - YouTube

Jay Baer interview Mark Smiciklas about The Power of Infographics and how to make inforgraphics that make sense, and get noticed.

Creativity: Everything is a Re-mix

Sir Ken Robinson on How Finding Your Element Changes Everything

Ken Robinson on Passion from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Sir Ken Robinson has previously challenged and delighted us with his vision for changing educational paradigms to better optimize a broken system for creativity.

In this wonderful talk from The School of Life, Robinson articulates the ethos at the heart of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything — one of 7 essential books on education — and echoes, with his signature blend of wit and wisdom, many of the insights in this indispensable collection of advice on how to find your purpose and do what you love.

Creativity: Copy, Transform and Combine

"The most dramatic results can happen when ideas are combined. By connecting ideas together, creative leaps can be made, producing some of history’s biggest breakthroughs." ~ Kirby Ferguson

Thinking of Creativity - Hold a meeting - Cartoon

Social Media In the C-Suite: Listening, Learning and Creating a Strategy from the Top Down

As social media becomes more pervasive in the modern business landscape, creating a strategy for its use can no longer be confined to the tech or marketing side of any operation.

In the recently released Social Media Leadership: How to Get off the Bench and into the Game, author Michael F. Lewis, chairman and CEO of business services company ILD and consulting firm Social Strategy1, offers managers a guide to understanding and leveraging tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Groupon.

Knowledge@Wharton sat down with Lewis, along with Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow and Steve Ennen, president and chief intelligence officer of Social Strategy1, to discuss the opportunities and potential pitfalls of implementing a social media strategy.

An edited version of the transcript appears here

Why we reject creative ideas

Most people view creativity as an asset. So why do we reject creative ideas so often in real life?
Researchers sought to understand this phenomenon and found that the uncertainty of creativity often led to the rejection of such ideas — even when creativity itself is a stated goal.

To find out, Cornell University professor Jack Goncalo, University of Pennsylvania professor Jennifer Mueller and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s Shimul Melwani put participants through a series of mental association tests that revealed their reactions to certain words and situations, such as winning a lottery.

They found that study participants associated creative ideas with negative words — such as “vomit,” “poison” and “agony” — even when they said outright that they favoured creativity.

Simply, there was a subtle bias against creativity that favored practicality. And it was motivated by a need to achieve certainty, even in the face of novel new products, such as a nanotechnology-infused running shoe (said to better cool the foot and reduce blisters) used during the study.

The researchers write:

Uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most. Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. …

The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.

Their results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, but you can read the entire paper here.

29 ways to stay creative - YouTube

Available at 29 ways to stay creative inspires redMOKA - YouTube

A Brief Review of Creativity

"Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found." -- James Russell Lowell

Often times creativity is thought to be artistic, lofty, intelligent, out-of-the-ordinary, and beyond understanding.

However, creativity comes in much simpler forms such as formulating a solution to an everyday problem; if someone runs out of fuel on the highway, the person must think of a way to get to his/her destination, and this requires creativity even if it is in its simplest form.

Creativity can be observed in the unusual as well. For instance, Craig Wallace, now a college freshman, developed a nuclear fusion reactor out of junkyard parts and cheap finds. Creativity is not just the writings of Descartes or the oil paintings of Klimt, so what is it?

What Is Creativity?

After exhaustive research, Morgan (1953) listed the universal factor for creativity to be novelty (Cropley, 1999). Novelty requires originality and newness. There must be something fresh to the idea.

Sternberg and Lubert (1995) proposed that novelty must be coupled with appropriateness for something to be considered creative. Novelty can be the coalescence of any two or more different things or thoughts. For instance,

Damien Hirst is a controversial artist who has sliced animals into fragments, but many people do not consider this creative even though it is novel and original. Many people do not recognize the factor of appropriateness in his work and consider it to be feckless.

Although creativity can be seen in the products, it can also be considered in terms of the process. Weisberg (1986) proposes that creativity can be defined by the novel use of tools to solve problems or novel problem solving. Dr. Gunther von Hagens has in the past few years started exhibiting the dissected and transfigured bodies of people.

Professor von Hagens is a medical professor at the University of Heidelberg who perfected plastic injection into bodily tissue. This is a novel use of tools to solve the problem of decay and distortion from old methods of preserving human tissue. The end product is creative because of the creative use of tools.

Ward, Finke, and Smith (1995) defined creativity in the products made, the differences in people, the pressures that motivate, and the processes behind creativity. The products made are new and fresh which is the clearest example of creativity.

However, there are defining subtleties in people; for example, some people are considered to be more creative than others, and in addition to inherent differences in people, there are different motivations for creativity (e.g., some people are driven to create).

Finally, the process for creativity can be different. Some people seclude themselves while others seek guidance and dialogue.

While there is debate over the guidelines for judging creativity, two things remain: novelty and appropriateness. These two things may be viewed in the product, the tools, the people, the motivation, and/or the processes, but these are the two necessary ingredients.

Conclusion

Once considered to be the result of insanity or divine intervention, now the mystery behind creativity is slowly being revealed. There has been much debate over what exactly creativity is, and now creativity is believed to be characterised by novel and appropriate ideas, products, and/or use of tools.

It was once thought that creativity was caused by psychoticism, but now it is considered to be a series of cognitions following some sort of process. The process is not precisely known, but there are thoughtful speculations which remove the mystery from creativity and the stigma that it is only being possessed by geniuses.

With all this new information, there is a great deal of implementation. AI is now being considered to be more alive if it possesses creativity, and theories are quickly being developed as to how to program creativity.

Education is attempting to encompass creativity in addition to the acquisition of hard facts and other skills, and business is noticing the importance of creativity in furthering growth of individual companies and departments.

To read more visit.....................A Brief Review of Creativity

Creativity - John Cleese

Where do Good Ideas come from? - Steven Johnstone

Where do good ideas come from? Places that put us together. Places that allow good hunches to collide with other good hunches, sometimes creating big breakthroughs and innovations.

During the Enlightenment, this all happened in Parisian salons and coffee houses. Nowadays, it’s happening on the web, in places that defy your ordinary definition of “place.”

In four animated minutes, Steven Johnson outlines the argument that he makes more fully in his soon-to-be-published book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. The video is the latest from the RSAnimate series.

Leadership; more skills needed in recession

Trust me! I'm a Leader!

The only way out of a difficult situation is through good positive leadership. It has been a long time since I met a leading figure that I respected. Now I would be satisfied with meeting one that I liked and can spend more than 5 minutes in their company. What qualities do you look for in a good leader in these challenging times? Intelligence, foresight, sobriety, etc.

Re-Introducing
You have heard this introduction before in many guises; money is tight, employee layoffs loom and spirits are dwindling, we're in a recession. So where are the great leaders and orators that will lift us out of this or are we those great leaders, playing out of position. Maybe you should stop looking out for help and start looking inwards. You, as an IT consultant, subject matter expert or executive have the insight and determination to develop and expand your powers to take on the qualities of a good leader. Why do you not take it to the next level?

Same old same old
You have spent all those years keeping your staff engaged and motivated through numerous spirit breaking projects; company mergers, legacy systems upgrades, application server integrations, etc you are well used to meeting the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune seekers. Managing changing expectations in uncertain times is what you do as a day job. Why do you expect others to do it for you? They are far too busy with more important things, like growing their egos, cubicles and their expense accounts.

You, as the leader
Find within you and develop further, the ability to lead and inspire. In times where fear and instability raise their scary heads, people need someone they can feel confident in. Someone who knows in what direction they should be going, in what direction they are actually going and the potential impact of this delta.

All is questions
You don't have all the answers, no-one has but you have a team of experts around you that do. If not then expand your points of reference. There is a vast array of knowledge resources out there. Use them.

When all around are losing theirs
Make yourself the go-to guy, the point of contact and voice of reason. A safe haven where people can go and talk freely. Somewhere they can brainstorm without being rained on. Somewhere they can workshop with sharp tools and smart products. It is your job to make them feel good and go away feeling better about who they are, what they're doing and how they are contributing. People want leaders (strange but true). Look around you and then take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself 'Who else is going to do it?

Develop your listening skills
Be consistent, be effective, be a frequent communicator, but most important of all, be an intelligent listener. Ask good questions, absorb what's being said and appreciate the issue that's being passed to you with the same level of attentiveness and concern as you expect from them.

Short Term benefits
Find the quick wins and short-term benefits to help the team and the organisation. You also need to communicate upwards with the entire leadership team, ensuring that the whole organisation is in agreement and aligned.

Develop your voice
The leadership team as a whole needs to be very committed to the new roadmap. Ask for their buy-in and a demonstration of their unity. After all, you're asking everybody else to do more with less, why not include the management team. There is no room for passengers and overweight expense accounts on this voyage.

Is there real credibility in the operational results you're striving for. Be honest, set achievable expectations and execute on promises, if you want to be taken seriously. You can easily declare 'We pay on results and performance' but don't say it if you can't deliver on it yourself.

Be Captain credible or Rupert realistic
This means striving to deliver better results on projects, more quickly than you may have been accustomed to in the past. How is this possible? No long term projects or milestones allowed. Two- and three-year projects in these recessive times are doomed to fail. The impact on the bottom line has to be shown within 6 - 12 months, for their credibility to be sustained.

Caution, do not pull in the delivery dates too drastically but look at the credible re-structuring of them. Break them into smaller modules, more agile projects, with regular, smaller deliverables that add up to a realistic whole. If you do it right then the sum of the parts will exceed the original whole. It should help you get through the tighter change management and more stringent implementation criteria. You will have witnessed the rapid construction of these recently, safety barriers thrown up by the business to protect themselves from criticism.

Prioritise your priorities
The ability to prioritise is key in these situations, but you have been doing that as a routine anyway. Now think about priorities differently, more like the leader you are. Leadership in a recession requires strong prioritisation skills. Look differently at the expense and capital side and what can get done, as a priority. Look differently at the organisation as a whole and find the core functions that will deliver the short-term results but provide a platform for growth in the future.

The Pareto Principle
Using Pareto's 80-20 principle, closely examine your IT portfolio and determine which 20% of your investments will give you the 80% benefits.

Innovation re-invented
Innovation, creativity, flexibility and the ability to embrace change, isn't that where we have been for the last decade. Unfortunately it was aimed at technological solutions but now its concentrated on finding ways to cut expenses without layoffs. If you let people go now when the financial pictures gets murky, where is the rapid growth and steady recovery going to come from? So, for now, you have to be extra creative in trimming your budget, again.

Jettison excess cargo
Big fat overweight expense accounts are underoing a slimming program. Creative scheduling and cutting executives' perks and pay need to be considered before contemplating employee layoffs. The most agile and productive companies, are completely opposed to layoffs but this is delaying the decision not fixing it. It may lead to having to chew their own limbs off, at a later date.

Layoffs unplugged
Although they believe that layoffs are damaging to motivation i.e. the worst things you could possibly do, and the last tool in the arsenal to pull out, it may become inevitable. A company who begins laying people off, believ that the rest of the people stop worrying about their work and start worrying about themselves and their future. Thus there is a noted drop in productivity in those who remain with the company. Unfortunately they seemed to have accepted the example of a badly handled layoff and I am afraid to say that this may be the norm.

Knowledge losses grow
In past recessions companies laid off workers to please the banks and Wall Street, but when the economy rebounded the costs of finding new hires; recruiting, training and getting them up to speed, was more than the savings that were realised during the layoffs. They also lose the "tribal knowledge" of how things are done in the organization and are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Leadership qualities
The conventional model of a leader is rather dictatorial. One where they believe themselves to be omnipotent; all powerful, larger than life and always sure and definite in their manly stance. They are defensive, secretive and avoid any signs of weakness or criticism. Doors are locked, blame is dished out and examples are made to 'motivate' the others.

A good leader, is humble, self-effacive and expresses positive self-doubt when appropriate. He is honest in his praise and criticism alike. They admit to their faults when necessary, but if they do this when it is not appropriate, then it will be interpreted as a weakness.

Tigers caged
You may have read recently, if you were not on a tour of another galaxy, that many conventional business executives have been found out to be no more then paper sabre-toothed tigers and have been easily captured in the news; as willing players in long term corporate scandals, requiring mammoth bailouts. Given those negative headlines we are all dearly wishing that our new 'leaders' will aim to provide us with something different.

Teach a man to swim
"'Fish swimming upstream' is a good way to describe people who buck conventional wisdom and don't just go along. The ability to position yourself and your organisation as a sanctuary for good talent. You can spend a lot of time, money and effort seeking out the good people but it is much better if they come to you. Develop the ability to attract, develop and retain top talent.

Networking, networking, networking
Develop a world-class network of your top peers from the IT world, as well as providers and others you've encountered in your business dealings. Get the most out of the resource pools that surround you, whether it's your team, a potential hire, an executive, etc and do not neglect the greater technology community. This is the source of your new promising land.

Don't go overboard
Moderation in all things! Remember that the knowledge, wisdom and resources at our disposal are far bigger and greater than we ever let ourselves imagine. Just scratch the surface and stand back. These are dangerous waters full of monsters and pirates but having jettisoned excess cargo and found all the stowaways, shored up the leaks and established a true course, be prepared to accept eager boarders on this voyage of discovery. Captain, my captain!

Is Blind faith the best approach when not seeing good results?

Creativity and Innovation

The the creative art of any deal can be enhanced by the art of creativity and innovation.

In truth, "art" is overstating it. "Visualization" is more accurate: if you can draw basic geometric shapes, lines, arrows, and stick figures, you have all the creativity skills you need to put your ideas into practice and produce a vast array of concepts and network models, diagrams, schematics, flow charts, tables, and other visual representations. Welcome to the world of Pictorial analysis.

In 1969, Rudolf Arnheim's Visual Thinking made a compelling case that while perception and reasoning may seem like two distinct mental activities, neither one can occur without the other. More recently, in the business world, the concept of "strategy maps" has been advanced by Robert Kaplan and David Norton (creators of the balanced scorecard) as providing a "visual epiphany" that helps business leaders connect processes to desired outcomes.

Executives should reach for the pencil not only when addressing a discrete task such as drawing a strategy map, but in myriad situations in which "the problem [or the solution] is hard to see." That may be a challenge for finance people, who are accustomed to believing that, 'all answers can be found in the numbers if one simply drills down far enough'.

Those in finance are often "red-pen" people, who question the entire idea of visualization, right up to the point where they grab a red pen and redraw everything. You will need to work harder to convince finance executives, than any other group but, once won over, they will become the most ardent backers of the concept.

The other two classes of people are "black-pen" people, those who are instantly drawn to visualization and "yellow-pen" people, who are happy to build upon someone else's initial stab at visualization.

It may help to know that the finance department at Microsoft, where, not surprisingly, employees can "make spreadsheets do pirouettes in ways mere mortals can't," nonetheless, they "understand that insights often depend on looking at the data from different angles and in a more visual form."

Drawing Conclusions
Most business problems can be framed as a variant of the five W's, or, more accurately, four W's and an H: who, what, when, where, and how.

Use your given creativity to show innovation in your ideas and concepts and engage your audience by involving them in, what should be an organic process.

So for your next meeting, leave the laptop behind and instead bring a few whiteboard markers. You may find that even a lousy picture is worth a thousand rows and columns.