Hello and welcome to your Innovation Manual

This manual is designed to help you land all the experiences you had with us, acting as a reminder of the time we spent together on the Innovation Masterclass

This will not give you all the answers, but it’s designed to stimulate you – so keep it with you and capture the things that inspire you!

COMMON LANGUAGE

GETTING STARTED

BEHAVIOURS FOR INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY

IDENTIFYING YOUR ISSUE

INSIGHT

IDEAS

IMPACT

ATTITUDE

ACTION PLANNING

Creativity is…

The habit of continually doing things in new ways to make a positive difference to our (working) lives

Innovation is…good stuff in, good stuff out

identify x

insight x

ideas x

impact

But remember…the yin and yang of innovation

Doing

(the process) Being

(the behaviours)

Creating Maximum Impact At the start of the workshop, we asked you all to sign up to set of behaviours that we all needed to role model to make sure we had ‘Maximum Impact’ as a team.

Principle: when facilitating groups of people to collaborate creatively together – think about how you want them to behave, and be explicit about it – getting them to actively sign up to a behavioural contract. They’ll have made a public commitment, so are more likely to behave in a productive way – and if they don’t, you can use the behavioural contract as the basis for a conversation around how you need them to be moving forward.

What does success look like for your participants – and what might get in the way?

Understand early on what each of your project participants want from the project personally – why are they there? Also find out what they think is going to help and hinder the project or session – right at the start. If you understand the basis for the cynicism or enthusiasm in the room, you can harness it for the benefit of the project. Principle: the unspoken agendas, or reservations of your

participants are the ones that can cause you trouble later down the line. If you know about them, then you can create a plan – but without understanding, you have nothing!

• Hello, welcome and check in with people’s energy (how they feel about being there)

• Get to know each other (if needed) • Intro session purpose – what we’re here to do • Process and Pay off – how we’re going to do it and how will we all feel at the end

(incl agenda, logistics) • Behavioural Agreements (how do you need people to be in the session?) • Cynic Clinic (if needed – ensure that you hear what concerns and enthuses the

participants about the project or session. Capture and address concerns – but don’t allow it to become a whinging match!)

Facilitation tips: • A good start to the session is critical – think through how people will

be feeling, and plot out the journey you need to take them on. • Turn up as you’d like your participants to be - relaxed, energised,

enthusiastic, on time!

Setting up any session: The first 15 minutes

Creative Behaviours: Nurturing/Greenhousing

Greenhousing is all about nurturing ideas – building them and allowing them to grow. When ideas are first presented, they are not fully formed and need help and input from others before they can be judged and assessed. Too often in business we stamp on ideas through the language we use, or wait for an opportunity to present our ideas instead. Greenhousing is the behaviour that allows ideas to get better. Use “yes, and…” instead of “yes, but…..”. Putting energy into seeing how something could work, rather than forming judgments.

Creative Behaviours: Playfulness/Letting go…

It is human nature to be wedded to the outcome. As soon as an idea is born we extrapolate forwards in time to see it happening for real in the world – this fills us with fear and we close the idea down. The more we care about the outcome the less playful we are. Playfulness though is the key to creative genius – being in a relaxed, playful state changes our brainwave frequency and allows us to tap into our best source of inspiration – our subconscious brain. By caring less you are caring more, go on, release the jazz monkey!

Creative Behaviours: Navigating/Signalling

Signalling is about letting other people know how you want them to be and navigating them through the process. People like to know where they are and how they need to be – you need to tell them otherwise it’s just guess work.

If people are in a creative session with both expansive (creative) thinking and reductive (analytical) thinking, they won’t mix. Signalling is about communicating to people whether you want them to judge an idea or help you build one. You can signal physically (through environment or props), or verbally. If someone is in the wrong behavioural mode let them know…..

Creative Behaviours: Freshness

Freshness is all about seeking new experiences and perspectives. New perspectives help us make new creative connections. This can be done in two ways.

On going Freshness is a personal behaviour that you can model in everything you do; listening to different radio channels, reading random magazines, seeking new physical experiences, etc. By doing so you will top up your subconscious brain with lots of stimulus which one day may help you approach problems from a different perspective.

Deliberate Freshness is what’s needed in sessions to help you get out of your river of thinking and help to have new ideas.

You are always

in a river of

thinking – get

out!

Creative Behaviours: Realness

Get ideas off the desk and bring them to life. Draw them, model them, walk through them or make a video about the process you are solving.

Realness helps people to understand your idea so they ‘get it’ emotionally as well as cerebrally. Realness also improves your idea.

Remember: there is no such thing as failure, just prototypes.

“If a picture says a thousand words, a prototype says a million.” Trevor Bayliss, Inventor of the clock-

work radio

DA

Creative Behaviours: Momentum

People who are passionate about an idea get it going. You can spot a team with momentum easily. If you want to kill the energy around a project, do it slowly! Too often our busy, filled, stop-start diary prevents us from getting stuck into a project.

To create momentum, hot-house: take people away from the office with the resources and time in order to solve the problem. They will do it!

Focus on one project at one time and don’t allow yourself to be spread too thinly.

Finally, create a sense of ‘crisis’. A deadline really focuses people’s energy around the problem…but beware – don’t use it too often!

Creative Behaviours: Bravery

Innovation by its very definition is risky.

It’s a courageous thing to put your idea out there and risk it being judged and laughed at. Often we feel that it’s not just our idea that is being judged, but our personality and everything we stand for too! Divorce yourself from ideas that pop in to your head and get them out there – they may act as stimulus for other people to build on. You could also inspire others to be more brave with their ideas.

People who we admire the most are often those who put their ideas out there and not worry about the response.

Acting brave will really kick-start other members of your staff and get projects in motion.

Identifying your issue We are so quick to react to a brief, or often don’t take enough time crafting them up. Before you start using your precious innovation energy use a few tools to make sure the team are aligned, have clarity and are excited moving forward to solve your issue….

Funnel of Focus Windows of Wisdom Rope of Scope Re-expression

The Funnel of Focus

A tool that allows you to check the level of focus that is available on a project. The funnel allows you to examine the level of your initial issue, giving you options for how you want to address the brief. Asking ‘why?’ pushes the project up the funnel Asking ‘how?’ places the project down the funnel. Generate alternative expressions of the project, placing the broader toward the top of the funnel, and those with less towards the bottom. Check back with the problem owner. Ideally you should have enough r room for creative exploration, but not so much that it is difficult to gain focus and get a result. Beware of leaders who like always like to talk up their own funnel!

Windows of Wisdom

A questioning tool that allows you to canvas the problem owners for information about the problem. Often we ask questions about the issue and the constraints but little about the measure of success. In covering the four areas you’ll get a greater understanding of the project and the problem owner. Context: Why now? What’s the big picture? Why is it important? What is your competition doing? Constraints: What can and can’t we do? What are the time or budget restrictions? Politics: Who are my friends? Who are my enemies? Who will help/stop this from happening Vision of Success: What do you see as a successful outcome in six months from now? How do you want this work to be presented back? What is the world saying about us if we succeed?

The Rope of Scope

A tool that allows you to gather information using ideas, proposals and suggestions. Ask the problem owner to place your ideas in or out of scope and then ask ‘why?’ they have placed them where they have. It might be that some elements of the suggestion appeal and some don’t. By giving the problem owner something tangible to react against, you will gain a deeper understanding of the principles that questions alone would not address. Any ideas/principles that are out also work as judgement constraints for later

Re-expression

This technique gets people excited and motivates your team to work on the project.

It’s a great way of injecting creative energy at the beginning of any project, using refreshing language and imagery to help focus minds on the task at hand.

A great re-expression will avoid jargon, which can introduce assumptions and hamper clarity.

Do a ‘Mum’ (or ‘child’, or ‘pub’) test - check that the project is easy to understand.

Use motivating language that engages, excites and begins to sensitise the team to the project.

Finally, use pictures to capture the essence of the information you are presenting. Remember that a picture paints a thousands words!

Getting Insightful

Be Curious – it’s all about digging deeper and asking ‘why?’, having a genuine interest in the world around us and trying to find out the meaning of things.

Intuition- Where do you feel instinct? In your heart or gut. It’s your subconscious letting you know something before your rational brain has kicked in.

Getting under the skin of your customer is essentially a human skill. As humans we are naturally nosey, instinctive and playful, so it’s just about tuning these when looking at your customer needs.

The Insight Process

1) What are the facts surrounding the challenge? Avoid the temptation to interpret and capture the data

2) Why might that data exist? Cut loose and generate lots of different interpretations/hunches

3) What patterns and areas of commonality can you spot amongst all the hunches?

4) So what? Given the themes, what are the opportunities for our business?

Clues… Start by gathering the data/clues that are close to hand and free to get hold of: • Existing reports/research – ignore the

summaries/conclusions and go back to the source data

• Find an expert and get them to download on the issue

• Send an email and ask lots of people for a little information around the challenge

Facilitation tips: • Spend time explaining to your participants how you need them to

capture data • Get everyone in the project involved – no matter how senior (it’ll

help with buy-in later on) • Set achievable tasks – so people feel good about being involved

and not over whelmed • Put the clues up some where visible to the whole project team

Talk to customers and consumers about the issue – but try tuning yourself and your project participants up to the assumptions you’re making – by role playing them before you meet them.

Getting new clues… If you always get your data from the same places you’ll end up with the same insights you’ve had before, the same that your predecessor had, the same the competition are having…. You need to get out of your river of data sources – splash yourself out with an Insight Bomb!

Speak to people who have a deeper or more weird/tangential relationship with the issue. With the right mind-set you’ll learn loads. • Be them – how can you live the life of your

consumer? Follow their diaries, pretend to be them – put yourself in their shoes.

• With them – don’t take their word for it, hang out with them. Be there when they wake up and go to bed, live life next to them.

• About them – speak to people who know lots about your consumer – what’s their perspective?

Facilitation tips: • Explain the theory to your team – they’ll be

more willing if they understand why they’re doing it!

• Do a little well – rather than trying to go everywhere, and doing nothing properly.

Go Hunching… Your hunching session is a creative session, allow proper time for it – and ensure your participants understand they need to let go of the ‘right answer’ and live in the world of possibility. Encourage people to capture their hunches in the first person and use the word ‘because’. Push beyond the surface hunches, by asking ‘why?’ Maintain the energy in the session by • Mixing up the groups throughout the session • Getting groups to change environment • Mix and clash the clues in different ways • Go for depth as well as quantity

Facilitation tips: • Warm up the group by getting them to

have fun hunching around a silly, but unrelated piece of data

• Make sure clues are marked off as they’re used – so you know you’re covering the ground

A4 paper

Theming… Lay out all the hunches and allow people to browse and read them all. Encourage them to do this in silence – so they can form their own opinions. Ask people to capture the themes they spot looking for: • Things which genuinely interest them or

make them go ‘ooooh.’ • Themes often have an edge or

contradiction ‘dirt is good’ • Could be an interesting expression of

something familiar • Only capture things which are genuinely

interesting/inspiring! • Get them to note down the supporting

hunches

Facilitation tips: • Play some relaxed music to get people in the theming music • If you can let people sleep on the hunches – they can often spot

more themes • After they’ve captured their themes give the participants a

proforma to help them push their thinking (see next page) • Get the group to share their proformas back on the funnel – playing

theme ‘snap’

What are people doing?:

Title

WHY are they doing it?:

So…what’s the opportunity for us?:

Flipping themes into Idea Springboards/Opportunity Areas After you’ve taken the groups themes – let

them go, and then sit with the core team to work out which themes you’d like to progress with. Progress the themes you think are the most interesting, and are springy for ideas Re-express the themes – bring them to life with: • A catchy title • ‘How to…so that’ statement using simple

motivating language • Use pictures • Find the supporting hunches and clues

Facilitation tips: Give yourself to get this stage right. You might need to sharpen and push the themes if you don’t think they’re quite right. If you can’t have an idea off an opportunity area – it’s unlikely anyone else will either!

Ideas: Productive Idea capture We often find that the ‘traditional’ way of capturing ideas - lots of people around a big table shouting out words to a person who captures them on a flip chart – is not very productive. The result is a list of thoughts – undeveloped ideas that you can’t ‘do’.

There is a much more productive way of capturing ideas that helps to encourage the right creative behaviours and produces a stack of ideas that are formed well enough for you to later judge and implement…

Greenhouse one idea at a time.

Capture one idea per piece of paper.

Sit on the pen – don’t write straight away!

Park any ideas that do not fit with the idea you are working on

Draw it – allow others to build on the idea.

Headline it at the end.

If the idea is not tangible, draw a spider diagram.

Get your ‘Jazz Hands’ out, and have fun!

Breaking the rules/Revolution Our brain is hardwired to hinder creativity, yet it holds all our experiences from which we could draw creative connections. Our everyday lives and habits keep us in a river of similar thinking. We must always assume that at any given time we are stuck in these rivers of familiar territory and we need deliberate stimulus to get us out and thinking differently. The Four Rs are deliberate stimulus and they allow you to take different principles and apply them back to your problem.

1. List the rules. These have to be absolute fact and not generalisations or assumptions. 2. Provoke these facts by asking what if? The more extreme the provocation, the more dynamic your ideas will become. 3. Ask under what circumstances could your provocations then occur to make real new ideas.

Revolution: Challenging the rules. This is a great technique for exploring an entire issue or process at once.

Example: We were looking for new ideas for a Vehicle Recovery Business’ breakdown operation. Everyone in market was competing around: • Response Time (eg: we’ll get to you in 22min v. 25min) • Priority to lone women • + promotional, incentive/discount offers We planned in an exercise based around ‘Revolution’ and realised how ripe the potential was to focus on helping people avoid breaking down. It led to a large number of ideas under the banner of XXX: the ‘Don’t Breakdown’ company.

Parallel (Related) Worlds – Stealing! Related Worlds: Steal solutions from other places and apply the principles back to your issue.

Example: We were looking for new ideas for a Driving School. One of the challenges was how to help 17 year old rebellious teenagers get along with old, bearded Driving Instructors. To help us in this we looked at how this relationship works in well known films, looking at the role of ‘master and student’ in films such as Good Will Hunting, Dead Poets Society, Star Wars, Karate Kid. From this we understood the need for RESPECT and used that to stimulate ideas. What was ultimately rolled out was to have online profiles of instructors with more ‘interesting’ facts about the Instructor (eg: has flown a jet aircraft, was a drummer in a rock band) and info to help teenagers select the one they liked the sound of. A little change which has had a great impact.

Remember that using a Naïve Expert is a great way to get rich information about a new world.

Where else has a similar issue been solved? 1. It’s important to establish what it is you’re trying to do. 2. Then brainstorm lots of other places in the world where that issue has

been solved. 3. Dive into that world and find out as much as you can about how they

solved the problem. 4. Apply the principles back to your issue – use this as stimulus to have

ideas.

Re-Expression

1. Words/Metaphors: Use different language to stimulate different thinking

2. Senses: We live in a world of words! Experience the

problem using different senses smell, taste, touch. Draw it…Act it out!

3. Perspectives: View the issue from a different perspective – an alien, a child, an inanimate object.

Re-expression: Use alternative words/metaphors, senses, perspectives to describe your issue.

Example: We were looking for new ideas to develop new products to drive growth in a stagnant Shoe Care market. One of the first exercises we did was using re-expression. We acted out a day in the life of a shoe. This showed that one of the main problems a shoe can have is smell…and the way that the inside of the shoe (the in-sole, the toe, the leather) acted stimulated the idea for, a deodorant spray for shoes which was launched in 2004.

Random Stuff

The two stages of this technique are:

1. Find a random piece of stimulus – a picture card, an object, a word, a piece of music – using a system to ensure that it is truly random: blindfold people and pick up the first object, turn to page 17 and choose the first word on the 4th row, 5 words in.

2. Force a connection - allow your mind licence to freely explore new possibilities. Play around, dig deeper and go beyond the obvious.

Random stuff!: Take completely random stimulus and force a connection to your issue.

Example: We were looking for new ideas for a meat-based snack. Using picture cards placed face-down on the floor, we asked a person to pick one up. The picture was that of a donkey. Associations placed with donkeys were explored: they’re stubborn, they’re beasts of burden, they’re associated with Christian Biblical stories. They’re also ‘well hung’. Other things that are well hung include: paintings, curtains, chandeliers and Game. Finally an idea based on the idea that Game is hung to increase flavour over time lead to a product whose packaging can be peeled back to reveal the food, allowing it to increase in flavour as desired.

Anatomy of an ideas session

Selecting Ideas At the end of your ideas session, get your participants to say which ideas they’re most passionate about. Use a voting system – and encourage people to vote for ideas that aren’t their own. This isn’t the selection – it’s a reward for effort and a useful first indication of what might be useful.

When running a selection/harvesting session: • Convene the core team - committees don’t make

good decisions, so limit numbers. Consider bringing in some fresh eyes.

• Theme the ideas – there is bound to be lots of overlap (you might want to do this before the harvesting session)

• Reconnect with the brief and success criteria for the ideas – but score ideas with your heart as well as you head

• Creatively push ideas that are lagging but you think might be interesting – sometimes the least promising ideas provide the stimulus for genius

• Keep stepping between analysis and creativity – until you’re excited with what you’ve got

Harvesting

Stargazer: • Plot the judgement criteria as a spider

graph. • Judge each idea using your stargazer • Have a creative session to work out how

you can improve each idea, where they’re weak

• Recapture the new ideas that you’re developing.

Idea DNA • For every concept you intend taking

forward into development get clear on: • The insight that underpins the idea • The DNA, without which the idea

would cease to be compelling – the aspects which CAN’T be lost

• The executional elements of the idea as presently captured/visualised

Tune up your attitude • Engineer positive experiences for yourselves and

others. Celebrate people when they do great work, or exhibit innovation behaviours – and let yourself take baby steps and build your confidence up

• Visualise success – think through your sessions beforehand in real detail, making your pictures positive ones – it’s the best preparation.

• Re-frame things that don’t go to plan. What have you learnt – and what will you differently moving forwards?

• Question our own and others self-limiting beliefs. We tell ourselves things that aren’t true – what’s the actual data?

• Harness cynicism – people who care, but have had negative experiences are bound to be cynical. If you understand, care about, and address their concerns, you’ll soon have passionate advocates.

• Role model – you’re now the person will look up to around innovation. What you do is more powerful than what you say.

Attitude Attitudes towards creativity are shaped by our experiences over time. Our input as ninjas affects belief and attitude, so how can we confront attitudes and reframe perceptions? We need to help people create new habits and develop a positive and productive way of being around creativity.

What positive experiences can we engineer and celebrate to help build belief within the organisation?

Environment Over 80% of our ideas are directly affected by the environment in which we sit.

By creating a stimulating environment for our people, we give them a better chance of having great ideas.

Allow people the freedom to personalise their surroundings at work.

Be conscious of how our working environment impacts on our ‘state’ – which impacts on everything we do.

What can be done to create an even more stimulating working environment within your business?

Structures

What structures need to be put in place or removed?

For a culture of innovation to be created and sustained we need to put structures in place.

Thank you for throwing yourself into the workshop – but of course what matters most

is what you do next!