What If

Is brainstorming still an effective way to innovate?

I’ve been a little tardy in updating this blog but it is a new year and with that comes a renewed sense of purpose, strength and resolve. So I’ll be trying to update this blog more often. Also there are plans to get guest writers to contribute to the whatif blog. If you are interested to share your thoughts, drop me a note!

My first post of the year will be about brainstorming and innovation. In The Marketing Society Forum, 4 individuals were asked to comment on whether brainstorming is still an effective way to innovate. The comments ran the gamut from one individual saying that the right facilitator is the most important thing in pulling off a great brainstorming session, to someone who said that brainstorming is dead and Six Sigma is the way to go in this day and age. Another individual also commented that brainstorming should be incorporated into company culture and be a continued process rather than isolated sessions. To read the full article click Download Dave_Allan_Marketing_Sept_07.pdf

So what are my thoughts on this topic? Well, firstly I think the question posed is just too wide and should be narrowed down to the following - “Is brainstorming still an effective way to generate ideas?” I say this because the word ‘innovate’ encompasses too many different aspects and this revised question gives the topic a stronger focus. Going back to my question - is brainstorming still an effective way to generate ideas in this day and age? In my opinion it is an emphatic yes! However, brainstorming is not the only effective ideation tool out there. What is important is to pick the correct ideation tool for a given situation.

Besides the actual ideation session it is also important to look at the front end of it. Namely, how do we get inspiration for good ideas? In my opinion, one extremely good way is to do observation. How about the tail end of brainstorming? What do you do once you have narrowed down the hundreds of ideas to a couple of ideas? The next step should be prototyping these ideas. Make these ideas tangible in a quick and cheap manner. By doing so you can test your ideas out and improve on them. What I have described above is the essence of design thinking.

Experience Economy

Unless you've been living under a rock in Malaysia recently, you would have probably heard of the controversy regarding the 7th Harry Potter novel. Just to recap: MPH, Popular, Times and Harris bookstores decided for a brief period in time to not carry the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows novel in protest against the “indiscriminate price discount” by Carrefour and Tesco.

Now that the dust has settled on this controversy, it is probably high time that these four big bookstores started to rethink and reinvent themselves to not only focus on how cheaply they can sell their books. Because heaven forbid what if one day the mother of all hypermarkets (Walmart) decides to open up shop on our shores, or what if Amazon is able to offer free shipping or dirt-cheap shipping charges to Malaysia. What happens then? And it wouldn’t be a surprise if Carrefour and Tesco decides on a permanent basis to carry selected book titles.

So the bookstores better start to think beyond prices; they need to move away from the commodity game and start playing in the experiences economy. According to Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore, authors of "EXPERIENCE ECONOMY: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage", there are four levels of value starting with raw-materials economy at the base. Next up, the goods economy. Then, the services economy, and at the top of the totem pole is the experience economy. Examples of two companies that are reaping rewards by playing in the experience economy are Starbucks and Harley Davidson. Starbucks is not in the business of selling cups of coffee but is in the business of selling an experience referred to as the “third-place” between home and work where customers can find refuge, unwind, chat and connect with one another. Harley Davidson is not in the business of selling motorbikes but is in the business of selling an experience that Harley calls the “Rebel Lifestyle”. According to a senior executive in Harley, “What we sell is the ability for a 43-year old accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns, and have people be afraid of him.” Former Harley CEO Rich Teerlink's success in changing Harley’s “persona” from “motorcycles” to “Rebel Lifestyle” has added billions of dollars to Harley Davidson's stock-market capitalization.

Some in Malaysia might argue that people here are only concerned about the prices of things and nothing else; especially not this touchy-feely thing about experience. Well, if that is really true then the most sought-after portable music player should be the cheapest player that one can find in Low Yat and not the iPod. And if Malaysians are truly only concerned about prices, then coffee places like Starbucks and the modernized kopitiams (traditional breakfast and coffee shops found in Malaysia) that are popping up everywhere should be as empty as ghost towns but they are not. This goes to show that the experience economy is alive and kicking here in Malaysia... and local companies need to realize this fact.

So the “Big Four” bookstores that flexed their collective muscle by boycotting Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows novel should take heed of what Managing Director of Penguin Singapore and Malaysia said, “Avid fans are looking for a magical atmosphere rather than just cheap price”. Or in the words of Tom Peters, “Experience is the Beginning and End of Value Added. Not just at Disney World. Not just at Starbucks. But in every kind of company and for every kind of profession... from fur trapping to high finance.”

What is simplicity?

" Pare down to the essence, but don't remove the poetry." Leonard Koren
Now that is what I call keeping it simple ... with style.

Want to settle or not?

Having come back to "boleh"-land after a long hiatus overseas, I’ve not had the pleasure of enjoying certain experiences in a long time, and one of them is to be stopped by an unscrupulous traffic cop in this country. But that changed recently. After the usual formalities of telling me my grievances towards the law and asking me for my driving license, the cop proceeded to utter the following words - “want to settle or not?” This basically translates to “do you want to give me a bribe or do you want me to give you a traffic ticket?” Anyway that got me thinking about that phrase with respect to the topic of innovation in general and three thoughts came to mind:

1) Firstly, should SMEs in this country innovate or not? After all it seems that for the time being, businesses here in Malaysia can just kind of follow the trends set by developed countries or just adopt them wholesale and still be successful. What do I think about this? I think a quote by Niccolo Machiavelli shared with me by my business partner puts it best - "Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times." So the question that should be asked is “Should SMEs settle or not settle for the status quo?” 


2) Secondly, is there a need for an appropriate innovation champion for a project or program? Let me begin by saying that having an innovation champion is definitely wise when starting a project or program that is innovative in nature. I say this because when one embarks on a project or program that is even slightly radical, there will be a lot of people in a corporation that will act like corporate antibodies and try to kill off the project or program. That is why there is a need for an innovation champion to push ahead and fight these battles. It is important also to identify the most appropriate innovation champion. I think Steve Jobs captures the spirit of an innovation champion well when he said the following upon reflecting on his current success: 

“I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with  a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that  kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” 

So qualifications and skills aside, what is more important for an innovation champion is to have passion, commitment and the resourcefulness to make the program successful. This is because any project/program that is radically innovative will have its ups and downs and will encounter a lot of internal resistance. Therefore, the question that should be asked is “Should a project/program settle for an inappropriate innovation champion or not settle and keep on searching until they find an appropriate innovation champion?”



3) Finally, how big should an innovation team be before they embark on an innovative project or program? Well I say form the smallest team possible and no smaller, but probably anthropologist Margaret Mead puts it best “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed  people can change the world: Indeed it’s the only thing that ever  has.” The question that should be asked then is: “To settle on the mindset that only huge teams can embark on innovative projects or not settle for this kind of mindset and go off doing something incredible with a small, passionate and dedicated team?”

Have I put forth ideas that are not practical and reasonable? Well here is what George Bernard Shaw has to say about being reasonable -- “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all  progress depends on the unreasonable man.” So the phrase “want to settle or not?” is a phrase very relevant when thinking about innovation. Oh and by the way I didn’t settle with the  cop and in fact the cop let me go without a traffic ticket – must  have been my lucky day.

Outcome-Driven Innovation

Strategyn has developed an Innovation methodology that they call outcome driven innovation. The basics of this methodology is to build  a customer scorecard that captures what the customer values most and what the competition doesn't do. With this scorecard companies can then focus their creativity and systematically generate valuable  ideas only on opportunities deemed valuable by the scorecard.

An important thing to note is that the customer values that are captured in the scorecard are not ideas or solutions that a customer might have on a product or a service. Instead it is focused on capturing a set of metrics that a customer uses to measure value when using a product to get a job done. These metrics define what outcomes must be achieved in order for a job to be done perfectly and is termed "desired outcome". A well-formulated outcome will state both the direction of improvement (minimize, increase) and a unit of measure (time, frequency) giving it the characteristics of a true metric. For example, when looking at improving shavers, Strategyn asked companies to look past suggestions from customers such as triple blades or lubricating strips and instead uncover the metrics that define how customers measure value such as minimizing preparation time, minimizing the number of nicks, etc.

Strategyn's focus on obtaining "desired outcomes" and looking past ideas or solutions when capturing the "voice-of-the-customer" is valid since customers can easily articulate what's wrong with a product or a service but they can rarely tell you where to go from there. Even if customers tried to suggest ideas or solutions, most of it would be based on what they have seen or are familiar with. However, methodologies using only questionnaires and surveys as Strategyn has done is insufficient. This is due to the fact that surveys and questionnaires are not good tools to capture unarticulated needs and a lot of time people can't always say what they need and people don't always do what they say. This is where I believe observation-based research comes into play and will help fill the gaps left by surveys and questionnaires, especially in Asia where the culture as a whole is less expressive. An example where questionnaires failed was when P&G tested the idea of combining a small hand cleaner with a long pole and tested that idea via a survey. The survey indicated that people hated it. But when P&G tested the idea again using working prototypes, people loved it and this gave birth to Mr Clean MagicReach.

Also Strategyn's claim that "by engaging customers in conversation and  probing customers with questions, customers are very capable of stating the desired outcomes they are trying to achieve – providing more insight than well-tuned observational or anthropological techniques" couldn't be further from the truth. I say this because of the reasons given in the previous paragraph. Also, if you are engaging a customer in a conversation in the customer's environment, you are already using an observational technique known as contextual inquiry. Finally observation has a dual purpose -- the first is of course to understand the customer, and the second reason, which is as important or even more important, is that observation is a source of inspiration for ideas. For example, facing the challenge of enticing people into opening new accounts, Bank of America came to IDEO in search of ethnography-based innovation opportunities. To better understand the desired market -- boomer-age women with kids--IDEO traveled with members of Bank of America's innovation team across the United States, conducting observations in Atlanta, Baltimore, and San Francisco. What they observed was that after a day of shopping, people put their leftover coins in a jar. Based on this observation, they created a new kind of account ("Keep the Change") to help people save money. Customers who sign up for the program have their debit card purchases rounded up to the closest dollar. The amount that's rounded up is automatically placed into a savings account. There are now about two million such accounts. So in terms of techniques used for obtaining "desired outcomes", organizations would be better off using a balanced approach of surveys, questionnaires and observation-based techniques.

The other potential pitfall of solely relying on outcome driven innovation is tunnel vision. Focus is a good thing but innovation is one of those things that you need have focus and at the same time keep an eye on the horizon and things around you. An organization will always want to have a portfolio of projects that are spread across incremental, evolutionary and radical/disruptive space. For example, 3M started off as a mining company and if they had only used outcome driven innovation, focusing only on their core competency, then most of their improvements would have been in the area of mining and they would probably not have come up with Post-It notes and other notable innovations. So while outcome driven innovation helps put focus on things and I believe is really good for incremental and evolutionary innovation, it would be prudent for organizations to also include other innovation methodologies like design thinking. So I guess it seems that just like everything else in life, balance is the best.

Same old same old

I was browsing the educational section of a local newspaper recently and almost every page I turned to was focused on MBA, engineering, accountancy and other traditional educational fields. This is fine and well but what I felt was sorely missing was any mention of the new frontiers of education, its future direction, and the discussions happening among educators in developed countries. It almost seems like as a nation, we only have a pulse on the past but not on the future. So where is education heading? For one, it is heading towards multidisciplinary collaboration and combining different disciplines together to form new fields. It is looking at developing multidisciplinary centers and courses that combine management,  technology and design thinking to develop creative and innovative  graduates. Don't just take my word for it, watch the video below:

GOOD Innovation

While I was surfing the blogsphere recently I came across a post that pointed me to an LA-based magazine called GOOD. GOOD covers a whole range of topics from environment to art, business and even politics. It covers it from the angle of providing a platform for ideas, people and businesses that are driving change in the world.

There are many interesting and cool things about GOOD. But the one thing that jumped out at me right away was how it was donating 100% of the subscription fees it gets to worthwhile organizations. The way it works is that when a person subscribes to GOOD, he/she can pick from 1 of 12 incredibly worthy organizations, ranging from Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, to Room to Read that partners with local communities in third world countries to establish educational infrastructure.

So why is GOOD giving 100% of its subscription money to these organizations instead of using it for their operational costs or something of that nature? Well here is what they say:

“This whole thing is an experiment. If it works, we'll actually spend less than half of what it traditionally costs to acquire subscribers. The success of this campaign will allow us to:

a)    meet a self-selecting group of quality subscribers who find us through word of mouth, internet links, media coverage, our partner organizations, or the other crazy schemes we like to come up with; b) raise significant money for organizations that will do something important with it; and c) save resources and prove that you can do well by doing good.”

Does this make business sense? Well I’m not from the print industry but from what I’ve read on the web, most magazines do not make their money from subscriptions or newsstand sales but through advertisements; and GOOD does the same thing. Also, since GOOD does not plan to send out millions of pieces of unsolicited mail to people to get new subscribers and instead chooses to rely on “crazy” schemes, I really believe that they might just pull it off. And if numbers are any indication they have so far signed up 13,543 people, or about 25% of their target for the year, so they are in pretty good shape. Which goes to show that this venture indeed does make business sense!

The next question that popped into my mind was whether such a thing would work in Asia, or more specifically in Malaysia. Especially since most Asians or at least Chinese are well known for being “Kiam Siap” (meaning “stingy” in the Hokkien dialect) and would always go for price and be willing to sacrifice a little quality. So I started doing a survey among my friends. The survey was based on 3 kinds of magazines: a) magazine with normal subscription policy b) magazine following in the footsteps of GOOD, and c) a totally free magazine. The only other variable in the survey was quality. I also got my friends to ask their friends which magazine they would subscribe to. The results of my totally “scientific” survey was surprising, at least to me. I say this because the most important factor turned out not to be the price or subscription policy, but the quality and whether or not the magazine appealed to their interests. Even more surprising was that 99% of people preferred to subscribe to a magazine that followed in the footsteps of GOOD rather than magazines with a regular subscription policy -- even if the quality of the former was a little lower.

So maybe the tide is changing in Asia and maybe quality is more important to Asians than businesses think and maybe good business can be made out of “good” innovation…

The next frontier: Design Thinking

Design thinking is the latest and hottest methodology talked about to help a company innovate. GE calls it CENCOR (calibrate, explore, create, organize and realize). The Mayo Clinic calls it SPARC (see, plan, act, refine, communicate). My new company calls it GIP (Gather, Ideate, Prototype). Its most obvious and direct power is in the creation of new products and services. Design thinking allows an organization to differentiate its products and services in an avenue other than pricing.

Design thinking is very people-centric - it is all about making a product or service relevant and meaningful to people. It is a method to tap into the unmet and unspoken needs of the people. Up until now, most organizations have used focus groups to figure out what people want or what to make or build next. A focus group is a great tool but it is limited to what consumers already know and it is not suitable to mine consumers’ unarticulated needs. This is where design thinking comes into play. It acts as a tool of empathy that can be used to understand what consumers really want. Consumers can easily articulate what they do not like about a product/service but they can rarely articulate what is needed to remove the element that causes dissatisfaction or to create delight. "Design thinking can offer greater, deeper, and faster insight into users' lives to help businesses know what to make in the first place," says Patrick Whitney, a 54-year-old Canadian native who is the director of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago.

Design thinking has other less obvious applications. For example, Samsung is using design thinking for their strategic thinking and Proctor and Gamble has set up an innovation “gym” which is a place to train its managers in design thinking.

So what makes up design thinking? The basic concept of design thinking is simple. It starts off by observation – going out into the world to see how customers shop at retail outlets, how they wash their clothes at home or how they are treated in clinics. By using observation, Gap Inc. and others have noticed that shopping in pairs and threesomes is common, and from this insight, they are making dressing rooms larger.

The next step is to try out lots of ideas quickly and cheaply by prototyping. This prototyping step allows ideas to be tested, improved and refined. It also makes ideas tangible and helps managers visualize them in order that they can make better decisions on which ideas to improve, discard and ultimately help launch products faster. Finally, the last step is to make design thinking part of the organization’s process to ensure that it is done all the time.

Even though the basic concept is simple, the devil is always in the details. So how does one start? The best place to start is by honing one’s observation skills. The next time you are at Coffeebean, stop and look around, try to notice where things are placed, ask why items are placed in certain areas, ask what catches your eye and why. Is it the color or something else? Look at how people are interacting and behaving with respect to the item. Another exercise you can do is to pick an item and deconstruct it mentally in simply understanding why. Do this over and over and soon you will start seeing patterns. That is when you know that you’ve got the first part of design thinking down.

Killes Phrases

The week before Chinese New Year I led a dialog session at HP Malaysia. The session was loosely based on the picture below which I took while visiting a friend's company that does a lot of creative branding work.

At first glance I think most of us can identify with all or most of the phrases on the whiteboard. In fact we might be guilty of actually saying one or more of those phrases at some point in time.

If you looked deeper into those "killer phrases" you can actually group them into 4 main groups and one of the groups is known as the Devil's Advocate. Hiding behind the Devil's Advocate persona you will hear people say things like:
    "… let me be the devil's advocate …"
    "I can give you five reasons off the top of my head why this isn't going to work"
    "Yes, but …"
    "Hah? That's stupid …"
    "Can meh? …"

The Devil's Advocate persona most often rears its ugly head during ideation sessions. Don't get me wrong, critical thinking is needed but not when an idea is at its infancy. Think about it - if ideas are the source of innovation, then ideas are actually like seeds for innovation. If every seed gets killed off even before they see the light of day, then there will be no innovation! Instead of killing these seeds (i.e. innovation) right off the bat, let them grow a little and see where they go.

A good way to let an idea grow a little is to do quick, cheap and dirty prototypes. These prototypes can be sketches, plasticine models or they can take on any other shape or form as long as they let you make your ideas tangible and let you test them out. Prototyping should always be about testing your ideas out, seeing what parts of your idea work, what parts don't work and how it can be improved. Prototyping should never be about putting all the polish and shine on an idea or making it look good or getting it to a close approximation of the final product. It should not be done to be exhibited at a stage gate/approval meeting where "higher ups", who probably know zilch about your project anyway, try to determine the goodness of your project and whether or not to fund it. So when you think ‘prototype’, always think iterative, quick, cheap and dirty.

In any case I digress… but I do want to end with a quote from a very wise man whose words speak against the devil's advocates of the world:
"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." - Thomas A. Edison

Rules in a Storm

One of the most commonly used ideation method is brainstorming. However what many people don’t realize is that there is a right way to do brainstorming and a wrong way to do it. In fact there are rules to brainstorming that most people are unaware of. According to Alex Osborn in his 1957 book Applied Imagination the rules to brainstorming are:

1. Produce as many ideas as possible
2. Produce ideas as wild as possible
3. Build upon each other’s idea
4. Avoid passing judgment on ideas

Using these rules first penned by Osborn as the base and combining them with other ideas out there and with some of my own, stir them all together and voila! Here are the guidelines I use in the brainstorming sessions that I facilitate:

1. Go for quantity
2. Encourage wild ideas
3. Build upon each other’s idea
4. Defer judgment
5. Have one conversation at a time
6. Stay focused on the topic
7. Feel free to be visual and physical

I think most of us can understand the first six items pretty easily. Now, what does it mean to ‘feel free to be visual and physical’? Well being visual simply means to illustrate your ideas. Your illustrations don’t have to be masterpieces, they just need to be simple sketches. Sometimes a simple sketch will go a long way in helping other people understand your idea. As for being physical, all it means is to go ahead and stand, walk, act out your ideas, basically have fun during your brainstorming sessions! In all the brainstorming sessions in which I’ve either been a participant or facilitator, the best ones were usually where people were having fun while still staying focused on the topic at hand. There are also other aspects to a good brainstorming sessions like the environment, pre-brainstorming activity, a good brainstorming facilitator, etc. I will share more about these in my later posts.