Go Wild!

Often the ideas we come up with aren’t very useful simply because they don’t go far enough. One of the best ways to get good ideas is to get wild ideas. Ad Exec, Alex Osborne, credited with inventing brainstorming, always encouraged his staff to generate outlandish ideas. He’d often say that it was easier to tame a wild idea than invigorate one that had no life to begin with.

Time and time again, working with clients, I’ve observed that the very best ideas are often the ones that would normally be rejected at first blush because they appear foolish, abrasive, politically incorrect, or just too weird. But weird is often where the diamonds hide.

Several years ago a senior executive — I'll call him Harry — in one of the country’s largest corporations told me the following story:

Harry loved his job. He loved the business he was in. He loved his company. He had advanced about as high as he could in his profession. He had just one more rung to climb.

But Harry had a problem. His boss was a year or two younger than he was — so the chances of Harry getting promoted were slim. And it irked him to think he'd probably retire as number two, just shy of his goal.

So Harry brainstormed. He went through all the regular, “sane” ideas (look for a new job in the company, go to a head hunter, work incredibly hard, etc). None held much promise. Once he’d run out of sane ideas, he moved to what I call third-third ideas, where the wild and crazy ideas live.

One of the ideas he came up with was “Kill my boss!” Now this isn’t politically correct, and it certainly isn’t legal. Besides, Harry actually liked his boss.

Most of us immediately discard ideas like this, but in Think Better, I recommend plumbing “unacceptable” ideas for their hidden value. One of the thinking tools I use is called What’s UP? (the UP stands for Underlying Principle). So what’s the underlying principle behind “Kill my boss?” Well obviously, it’s to get rid of him in some way.

Could Harry sabotage the boss somehow, make him sick, get him fired? None of those answers seemed useful. In what other ways could he “remove” his boss?

In the end, Harry thought of a truly brilliant idea. He wrote the best resume he could and sent it to a head hunter. But the resume wasn’t Harry’s. It was his boss’s. The head hunter was impressed, contacted the boss, and put him in line for a fantastic job at another company.

With his boss out of the way, Harry got the job of his dreams.

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” - ALBERT EINSTEIN

The Right Stuff

Almost everyone would agree that athletes can learn skills and train themselves to perform better, but we rarely give credence to the notion that people can learn skills and train themselves to THINK better. I often hear corporate folks say, “If only we had the right environment and the right leadership, if only we celebrated and rewarded our people appropriately, then we could be more innovative.” That might feel nice, but it’s simply not true.No one would assume that you could transform a bunch of untrained, out-of-shape folks into international basketball champions just by cheering them on and rewarding them for their efforts. You don’t win gold medals with good intentions. You win with skills and training and discipline.

Just as in basketball, innovative skills are not homogeneous. There are guards and forwards, centers and free throw specialists. Each of them is critical to the team’s success. And each of them needs to learn, develop, and practice their skills in order to be the best they can be.

So the number one pre-requisite for stimulating innovation in an organization is people who know how to think creatively. There are specific skills required to do that. They’re not terribly difficult to learn, but it’s amazing how few of us have them naturally. Just telling someone to feel free to compose a musical score won’t produce the musical score, let alone a good one. First they have to understand the language of music.

“There is a vast difference between training and education. Training teaches skills and competencies. Education teaches insight and understanding. If you don’t see the difference, think about the difference between sex education and sex training. Which would you send your kids to? Which would you go to yourself?” - MICHAEL HAMMER