Strategy Talk: How to Help Your Team Get More Creative
Dear
Ken,
I’ve
been asking my leaders to get more creative in how they tackle the biggest
challenges and opportunities for our strategy. I might as well be telling them
to get taller. They either bring me outside-the-box ideas that are wildly
impractical or stuff that’s much too small to move the needle. Is there
something I can do to help my team generate ideas that are both big and
practical?
—Stuck
in a Creative Rut
Dear
Stuck,
I applaud your efforts to demand creativity
from your team. Creativity is essential to innovation, and innovative strategy
is the only way to avoid long-term stagnation, no matter how good your
execution might be. Fortunately, creativity is a skill that you can foster.
Yes, just as some of us are, to your point, inherently taller than the rest,
some people instinctively exercise more creativity than others. But unlike
getting taller, anyone can get better at generating new and useful business
ideas. The key is to reverse engineer how creative breakthroughs actually
happen in the business world, and then ask your team to mirror that when they
need genuinely new thinking and ideas.
Albert
Einstein observed that creativity is an exercise in “combinatory play,” which
requires a willingness to recombine what we already know. Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” Mark Twain told
us, “There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas
and…make new and curious combinations.” And Pablo Picasso is often quoted as
saying: “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.”
For
example, Reed Hastings created Netflix by combining the models of monthly gym
memberships, centralized warehousing of boxed software inventory, and online
ordering and payment. Warren Buffett, longtime CEO of Berkshire Hathaway,
turned a failing textiles company into a value-creating juggernaut by
connecting two insights: one from legendary investor Benjamin Graham on the
“intrinsic value” approach to investing, and the other from Lorimer Davidson,
then an investment officer for Geico (and later its CEO), on “insurance float”
as a source of free capital. Hastings and Buffett — and their strategic innovations
— exemplify what Henry Ford said about his then-innovative model for building and
selling cars: “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of
others.”
Ford’s reflection tells you in a nutshell how
creative breakthroughs actually happen and thus how to get more of them: Find
the most relevant discoveries of others and assemble them into a novel solution
to whatever problem your challenge or opportunity presents.
To do this well, you must escape the trap of
industry thinking and domain expertise that will inevitably constrain your
team. The best way to do this is by getting away from the specifics of your
particular situation. And this means recognizing that whatever your challenge
or opportunity might be, you are not the first to face it.
For example, if your opportunity is launching
a new product and your challenge is doing so in a crowded field, you might look
into how JetBlue differentiated itself in a highly commoditized sector. Or if
your opportunity is changing the way an industry works and your challenge is to
avoid the buzz saw of established-industry inertia, investigate how Intuitive
Surgical changed the practice of surgery in the face of enormous resistance to
da Vinci, its robotic surgery machine. Or if your challenge is a growing,
perceived stigma associated with your product — because, for example, its
ingredients are being questioned, or it’s associated with labor abuse, or it
has lost its “coolness” factor, or it’s gained a reputation for being dangerous
— study what McDonald’s Australia did about its Big Mac, how Nike addressed
protests over its overseas production, how Lego became cool again with kids,
and how the city of Medellín turned around its tourist industry.
William
Duggan, who teaches strategic innovation at Columbia Business School, has
recommended that, to think outside the box, you
should look in other boxes. What you’ll find in those other boxes is the
feedstock for reassembling the old into a new idea that’s both big enough to
crack your challenge or opportunity and whose antecedents also have been proven
successful.
Coming back to your question, here’s what you
can do: First, turn your challenge or opportunity into domain-agnostic
questions. For example, if you are looking to commercialize a novel solution
that goes against the grain of an established industry, here are six questions
that might fit the bill:
1. Who has successfully commercialized a new
category of products or services in an industry with pervasive inertia, and how
did they do it?
2. Who successfully moved an industry from
one pay or contracting model to another, and how did they make that happen?
3. Who successfully transitioned an industry
from buying products to buying an outcome, and what made it work for them?
4. Who successfully changed the way an
industry works by introducing a new technology, product, or service, and what
changes did they make?
5. Who successfully changed the standard of
customer service, and how did they succeed?
6. Who successfully made a complex product or
service as easy as possible for customers to implement, use, buy, etc., and how
did they do it?
Next, ask your team members to search their
memory banks, talk to others (particularly those outside your particular
domain), crowdsource, or do whatever it takes to find innovative precedents
guided by specific questions such as those listed above. Once you feel
satisfied that your team has looked in enough other boxes and found a rich
enough set of precedents that are relevant, applicable, and proven, challenge
them to recombine the most promising of those precedents into new ideas for
solving the business problem you face.
These three steps may seem like a simple
answer to your question, but beware: Doing them well is cognitively taxing and
inevitably entails multiple dead-end searches for inspiration that feel like a
waste of time. It’s much easier to default to incremental improvement based on
what you already know or to blue-sky brainstorming that has no grounding in
what’s worked before. I can assure you, though, that the more your leaders
practice these steps, the better they’ll become at bringing you ideas that are
big, novel, and practical. They might even stand taller as a result.
Ken Favaro
https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Strategy-Talk-How-to-Help-Your-Team-Get-More-Creative?gko=5a932
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