Build Your Creative Confidence with a good process.

Google

By Gary Peacock

Do you need to unlock your creative potential?

Have a look at this 12 minute long video about how you can be more creative with your business problems. David Kelley is founder of legendary design firm IDEO, the company that created many icons of the digital generation like the first mouse.  But what matters even more to him is unlocking the creative potential of people and organisations so they can innovate routinely.

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_how_to_build_your_creative_confidence.html

We agree with David that you can be far more creative when solving your business problems. Try solving your strategic problems with our one day process: Solve Your Impossible Problem. You won’t believe what you can do in just one day, contact us on +61 2 9450 1040 or at www.gordianbusiness.com.au.

Take a different view and solve your problems faster

Google

By Gary Peacock

Do you have a problem that seems impossible to solve? One reason could be how the problem is stated. Typically, you see a problem from one view: from one perspective. But as JK Galbraith says, sometimes this protects us from thinking.

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

John Kenneth Galbraith

One way to get a different view

Imagine you have a problem with the productivity of your team.  You might state your problem as: Increase the productivity of my team. To get a different view, a simple technique is to rewrite the problem as a bigger problem and rewrite the problem as a smaller problem.

A bigger problem might be: increase the productivity of my department; A smaller problem might be increase the productivity of Barbara. So summarising you now have three different views of the problem.

 

Now you have three different views to choose from.  When you do this you will find this simple exercise forces you to create different views of the same problem.  This may make you realise the fastest way to solve your problem is to solve a bigger problem. Or you may find the fastest way to solve your problem is to solve the smaller problem. Even if you choose to solve the original problem, you have three different views of the problem and will solve the problem faster. This simple tool helps us quickly get different points of view.

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”

 George Eliot

Other ways of getting a different view

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world."

John le Carre

A quick way to get a different view is to leave your desk and talk to others, especially customers.  A client was recently complaining about an unresponsive and inflexible IT department not being willing to make it faster and easier for salespeople to access systems when out of the office.  A quick way of getting IT to change is to send them out for a day or two with a salesperson to visit customers.  As they see and experience the pain of using systems outside the office, they will start to find ways to improve the systems, fast. 

As Margaret Attwood says, Reality simply consists of different points of view. A quick way to get a different perspective is ask others from different departments how they see the problem. In every organization there are people who always have a different view to most other people. Find those people in your organization and have a coffee with them. They will always give you a different view. Remember the words of Comedian, George Carlin: 

“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty.

I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.”

What is your innovation appetite?

Google

By Peter Browne

If you want to achieve breakthrough change to grow revenue and profits, why not try innovation? However, Innovation has become an overused buzz word, and there are many assumptions made when the term is used.

Before undertaking any strategic planning with innovation in mind, it is critical to be clear on your organisation’s innovation appetite. At a minimum the innovation appetite must be agreed between the board and CEO.

The Innovation Spectrum

At one end of the spectrum innovation simply means doing what we currently do better or differently. In many industries incremental improvement can be enough to keep current customers satisfied, and maintain an edge over competitors. This approach is very low risk, easy to implement but has lower upside potential.

The other end of the innovation spectrum is developing new products and services that solve unmet needs of the marketplace, for example; products such as the iPhone/iTunes/App Store or low cost airlines. New products for unmet needs are typically much higher risk and higher return if they meet the needs of the market, but equally pose the risk of being abject failures.

So your organisation’s innovation appetites and risk appetites are closely correlated. It is almost impossible to introduce a more risky kind of innovation into a traditional, risk averse organisation, without some burning platform for change (and by then it is usually too late).

Developing Strategy

Understanding what innovation means to your organisation and your industry is essential. Being clear on this makes the process for developing strategy far smoother, as the boundaries can be set at the outset providing a framework for developing strategy.

For example, before undertaking strategy work we ask organisations to consider these questions:

• Will our focus be limited to existing products and services, or are you open to identifying new products and services?
• Are you focusing on the currently geographies served, or potential new geographies, even global?
• If new products and services are to be scoped what it the minimum potential market for them to be worth pursuing?
• What funding is available to fully evaluate and commercialise a new product or service?

Answering these questions up front provides clear boundaries for the strategy development team, and prevents wasted investment in time and money pursuing strategies that ultimately don’t get past the first hurdle.

Whether working with a customer on a Blue Ocean Strategy or change that is more incremental, we apply our expertise to set the foundations for developing strategy successfully. Contact us on +61 2 9450 1040 to discuss how adopting a different approach can help your company achieve a breakthrough change to grow revenues and profit.

Do your people feel responsible for innovation?

By Gary Peacock
The last question Gary Hamel asked in his short 9-minute video was: Do you feel personally responsible for innovation? How can you do this?

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To solve impossible problems faster, be unreasonable.

By Gary Peacock
Gary Hamel recommends working on a prototype and recommends freeing up 50% of available time and freeing up some money to work on the project. All the businesses I have worked with are already pushed for resources: they don’t have enough time, money or people to do what they want. So, how can you get the resources—time, money and people – to work on some of your organizations problems?

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