Is it always the best policy to chase efficiency above being effective in our work? Sometimes we are guilty of trading away effective working practices in favour of efficiencies and this leads to problems providing our products and services to the best of our ability and can be short-sighted. The reason it can be short-sighted is that it can be less efficient in the long-term, even though we see short-terms gains.
Why is effectiveness more important than efficiency?
As a teenager at school I was in a band with some friends. This being the late 80s or early 90s we measured ourselves up against some of the biggest bands of the day. So when it came to naming ourselves, naturally our witty wordsmith, Michael came up with the idea to name the band The Prevention so we could proclaim we were better than The Cure (of course we weren’t and we never gigged and only rehearsed a handful of times).
What has this to do with effectiveness and efficiency? Well, it is more effective to treat the cause of a problem than cure the symptoms. Let’s take a look at some stories of where effectiveness has triumphed over efficiency.
How did effective private healthcare save the Netherland’s government money?
Jos De Blok was a nurse employed within the social healthcare system in the Netherlands. But he identified a problem, a problem that a lot of other nurses were worried about too. The mechanisation of healthcare in the community meant that nurses got a lot less time with their patients as time and motion studies were used to timetable their care schedule. This meant they had less time per patient and so were unable to support patients in the way that would have been effective.
This lead Jos to start a not for profit named Buurtzorg. In a study by Ernst & Young Buurtzorg were found to use less than 40% of the hours prescribed by a doctor to support patients. This was because they supported patients in becoming more autonomous enabling them to be proactive about their care. This also lead to 30 percent of all emergency hospital intakes being avoided. This organisation saves the Dutch Social Security system hundreds of millions a year.
Now that is effectiveness beating efficiency. The time and motion studies prioritised efficiencies, and Buurtzorg prioritised effectiveness. You can read a much better account of this in Frederic Laloux’ book Reinventing Organisations, which I highly recommend.
Getting upstream of the problem
What really happened here was Buurtzorg got upstream of the problem and found a solution that offered a prevention rather than a cure of the symptoms.
It is difficult to make the business case for effectiveness over efficiency, as it is difficult to measure the outcomes. It is much easier to measure for efficiency, as there is usually monetary savings to be made. This is how we get stuck in a cycle of being responsive rather than proactive. We can however, explore solutions to problems using the tools, structures and games we use for problem solving.
Get in touch with us and we can co-create new strategies that can help your organisation and teams be ready for whatever comes around the corner. Let’s play!
Isabel Behncke Izquierdo appeared on the BBC Radio 4 show the Museum of Curiosity in 2014. Isabel Behncke is an eminent primatologist and an adventurer scientist from Chile. During the discussion she had much to say on the importance of play for building relationships and creativity.
The conversation between the guests on the show, including comedian Neil Innes and explorer Dr Bradley Garrett, alongside show creator John Lloyd and co-presenter Phill Jupitus, was circling the idea of play in nature.
Dr Garrett opined that it is a shame that as we grow older, we lose the importance of play. At that point, Isabel Behncke said:
Transcription of clip
“Play wants, cements and builds relationships. It also builds your creativity. Because it’s like you are enhancing your internal repertoire of things and then you are under positive emotion. Positive emotion literally opens your mind.
Play is kind of the chemistry of yes. We like to contrast it to the physics of no. The physics of no is the state that you find very often, especially when confronting health and safety committees and so on. It is just the basic starting point, and play is the chemistry of yes. And then things are possible, it’s the only space where uncertainty is really fun. I don’t know the end of the joke, I don’t know the end of the game. Let’s find out. Otherwise, uncertainty is awful, it’s scary.”
In the work we have done, we have found this is true.
How this relates to our work
Isabel Behncke’s words are interesting as it points to the power of play to allow solutions to emerge in a less scary environment. Play and game-spaces allow us to explore in a safer environment, which in turn allows more ideas and, importantly, more original ideas to come out into the open. This makes play the optimal environment for creativity.
To find out more about Isabel Behncke, take a look at the Wikipedia article on her here. She is doing some interesting research and conservation work, she is well worth paying attention to.
]Get in touch with us and we can co-create new strategies that can help your organisation and teams be ready for whatever comes around the corner. Let’s play!
It is difficult for us to get an objective look at ourselves without the stories of ourselves, notes that we have created getting in the way.
In essence, we are unable to see ourselves as others see us.
But, how can we change that? Well perhaps we need to get our Yoga Pants on and stretch a little.
One of a million stories of ourselves about ourselves
This happened just this week, a friend of mine, who will remain anonymous, posted to her social feed:
“I have officially failed as a parent
Son’s diet consists mainly of pizza and pasta. Now he’s added pot noodles to his food choice! Although this was prompted by the ramen he had at Yo Sushi! At least he’ll be able to feed himself when he goes to uni/moves out “
The actual post was tongue in cheek in that self-deprecating way that so many British people are experts at. I assume the British are not the only nation adept at this but it certainly seems a trait.
Let’s change the story
I took the cue to delve into this by looking at it another way, I replied:
“He’s added noodles. This is not a failure in parenting, this is an expansion of his diet and cultural horizons. Noodles from the far east added to his Italian cultural intake during a time of national inward navel gazing is a feat of magical parenting. Expanding horizons and embracing a global culture is a huge win, if you choose to tell the story in a different way.”
My friend replied to my comment with:
“Oh I like that version way better
Go me”
How quickly this went from a story of her being a “failed parent” to celebrating herself was great to see. But, as I say this was tongue in cheek.
Changing the stories we tell ourselves.
Many of the things I think about myself are stories I’ve gotten into the habit of telling myself about me. And as they are just stories, I can choose to change them.
I’ve seen this in action and used it with friends, clients and teams.
Playing games with money
The first time I was aware of this was during a money game, a friend was running. The game based on the Findhorn money game allows the participants to explore relationships to money. It is interesting to see people have strong reactions to money, which doesn’t intrinsically have any value or power. It has an acquired power or value because we tell ourselves it has through a story we all decided was true. But in fact the money we were playing with was just bits of paper with pictures of the queen and numbers on.
Not only did we explore this shared story we told about money but we also explored some of our personal stories about money. It seems that people can have a very strong emotional connection to money. It can be a fear of too little money, it can be the feeling of power too much money can have over us.
For me, I took all the cash I had for the weekend and laid it in front of me and in the first round of the game, where participants are allowed to take money from one another stacks, I sat and watched all my money disappear. I didn’t visit other people’s piles of cash. I just watch mine go.
Fear and loathing…
At first I felt fear as the money left, calculating how much was still there and if it was enough for the weekend or for fuel for the car on the way home. That fear you can feel in your body as a physical presence, for me it was like a lump in my throat.
But once all the cash had gone another feeling took over. It was a realisation that nothing bad had happened, yet my fear of having no money at all had come true. I was still OK, I was still able to get on with everything I wanted to do. This feeling felt like a relief, a weight lifting out of my chest and unblocking my throat.
I had just rewritten the story I tell myself.
This is where we get our Yoga Pants on
My friend Charlie developed this technique from the Money game to other areas of life. He calls it Identity Yoga and it is a way of changing the story we tell ourselves about ourselves (or about how we relate to things e.g. money). It is a powerful technique and is useful in stopping beating ourselves up about a story we can change. We can stretch ourselves to find that new identity.
This technique can be used to help us defeat Imposter Syndrome or explore our relationships to work, teams, family, or even our parenting techniques.
Get in touch with us and we can co-create new strategies that can help your organisation and teams be ready for whatever comes around the corner. Let’s play!
We can have fun, yet be productive, and take things seriously. Fun and serious work are not mutually exclusive.
Let us look at ways we can do this and what benefits are gained.
What are the benefits of having fun?
On the most basic level, by having fun together we can build social capital within the team. This is a cosmetic level of fun and many organisations only ever aim for this level of fun and play in the organisation. These organisations will be the ones who have:
Bought a Foosball table
Installed a coffee machine
Held company Karaoke nights.
This level of fun within an organisation will undoubtedly bring some benefits as shown in the excerpt from an article on Psychiological Science. Yet, these organisations might be missing out on potentially bigger benefits. There are greater rewards to be gained both personally and for the organisation if play is allowed to become part of the work.
And research suggests that the upsides of play extend beyond the individual. Teams of workers can benefit from play via increased trust, bonding and social interaction, sense of solidarity, and a decreased sense of hierarchy. Furthermore, findings suggest that play at work can benefit whole organizations by creating a friendlier work atmosphere, higher employee commitment to work, more flexible organization-wide decision making, and increased organizational creativity.
I love the company W.L. Gore. Most people have heard of GoreTex the textiles arm of this most innovative company. The business was founded more than 60 years ago by Bill and Vieve Gore. Despite being well known for GoreTex, W.L. Gore has always had an elevated view of what it does. An “elevated view” is defined by, my mentor and friend, Jonathan MacDonald as understanding what the core purpose of your business is. W.L. Gore view that purpose as solving problems using their expertise with materials. This elevated view has allowed them to work in areas and industries one might not expect.
The heart strings of the music
I have a long term relationship with music and play guitar, not at all well, but well enough to make some music and to have worked in the music industry at times. One thing I never expected was to see Gore, that company that created textiles to stop me getting wet when climbing in Scotland, diving into the guitar strings pool and beating the competition at their own game.
The thing with Gore is they allow their people to play at work. So one of their team asked himself, “what if I could use some of these polymers and materials to make some guitar strings?” Through doing this, he could fuse an interest with his work.
The outcome of Gore’s approach is that after some iterations, this guy found he had something worth pursuing. Gore then allowed a team to form around him. This happened through people voting with their feet. If they liked the look of a project they followed the leader (or Source as my friend Tom Nixon calls this type of leader). If people believe in the project and join, then once there is a critical mass of 50 people, according to Jonathan’s book Powered By Change, Gore will spin out a new business. So it was in this case. This is how Elixir Strings was born. By allowing their people the freedom to play at work, Gore ended up with a new business. And the guitar players of the world had access to a new technologically advanced string that lasted longer.
Play is an innovation super power
Taking Gore as an example and how Elixir Strings formed exemplifies how allowing play to become part of the work can bring benefits. These benefits include:
Greater innovation
Greater opportunity
Allowing teams to emerge through shared interests – this is akin to using the wisdom of crowds to make better decisions.
This is one example of how play has allowed a business to innovate and lead. I will be sharing many more in future articles.
Get in touch with us and we can co-create new strategies that can help your organisation and teams be ready for whatever comes around the corner. Let’s play!
It seems a simple question, and many people have instant answers. I’m scared of spiders, I’m scared of sharks, I’m scared of heights.
But the height is not what you’re scared of, the falling from that height is what you are likely scared of.
What is my fear?
My fear is failing. I worry that I am not good enough and not able to do what is needed. Many people label this Imposter Syndrome, and there are many ways to counteract it. Or it could be a fear of embarrassing myself. One of my favourite quotes on embarrassment comes from a mentor of mine, Andrew Missingham (he was literally my mentor when I was at University). Andrew is the co-founder of the fantastically creative management consultancy BandAequals. They love to play almost as much as us. In reference to embarrassment Andrew simply says “Embarrassment is a wasteful emotion.” I often bring these words to mind when I am about to do something I feel the fear from.
Fantastic Expectations, Amazing Revelations
Ian Brown – F.E.A.R – Music of the Spheres
In his book Feck Perfuction – Dangerous Ideas on The Business of Life, James Victore writes about fear. He says to make fear your BFF. This is a good thing to do, especially as our biggest fears, fear of failure and imposter syndrome, are with us for life. The trick is to not let the fear get us. We should have the fear, but not allow it to have us.
You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.
Brené Brown – Professor, Lecturer, Author, and Podcast Host
What is stopping me?
I love the work of Brené Brown, who wrote the book Daring Greatly. Her quote above echoes Andrew Missingham somewhat. If we treat embarrassment as a wasteful emotion and dare greatly to own our story, we can achieve our goals.
Centuries ago, mapmakers labelled their work “Here be Dragons“. Well, that isn’t actually true. There are no maps with “here be dragons” written on them, nor “Hic Sunt Dracones“. There is however, a globe from 1510 with those words on. The Hunt-Lenox globe contains these words.
But, why?
Perhaps we will never know for sure. The fact that it appears on this globe and other similar warnings of monstrous beasts appear on other maps, such as the Ebstorf Map, can point towards one thing. We, as a species, have always been afraid of what we do not know. This might be an assumption, but it fits well with our modern day fears. Our ignorance of the areas marked on the maps caused us to assume they were dangerous. For all we knew at the time, this area was packed with monsters.
It is our own anxiety we are afraid of. We don’t know what is likely to happen, so we might as well label it “Here be dragons“.
We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.
Franklin D Roosevelt – 32nd president of the United States
Feel the fear and do it anyway
There is a little known fact, well it is not really little known, we just act like we don’t know it. Those overnight successes, those instantly brilliant people have many failures that lead to their success. It is rare for anyone to find instant success. Remember the quote from Edison “I have not failed.I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Embrace the ability to fail without giving up and you too can be successful.
The art of failing well
To fail well, we must learn something.
Encourage criticism – Seek our criticism, including your own, but approach it philosophically rather than emotionally. This is a discipline worth developing. Within organisations, this helps stop dogmatic behaviour and ideologies taking hold.
Embrace a growth mindset – Carol Dweck has published a marvellous book on this subject. A growth mindset puts us into a mode of operating where we are constantly learning and honing our skills, ideas and beliefs. We can constantly question and improve. This works on large scales with organisations and personally.
Redefine failure – If we begin to look at failure as a point on the route to success, then we can redefine what failure is. This is done by praising the resilience of the individual or team in sticking to the task, pointing out the advantage of acquiring the new knowledge we have gained through the failure, and assessing new data obtained.
Pilot projects with veracity – When projects are piloted, it is a temptation to pilot under perfect conditions. This is a mistake, as we need to learn more about what could go wrong to avoid more costly problems further along. We need to make it common practice to pilot in normal or even worst case scenarios.
For everything a reason
Right at the beginning of this article, we quoted the song F.E.A.R by Ian Brown. I love the song because of the Acrostic approach to the songwriting. Each line is four words with the initial letter of each word spelling FEAR. But the majority of the lines in the song are positive in spirit. The song starts with the line “For Each A Road“, which signifies a unique journey into our fear. The last line before the coda is “Finding everything and realizing – You’ve got the FEAR“. Once you have the fear, it no longer has you.
Once we have mastered our fear, we can realise our Fantastic Expectations and learn Amazing Revelations.
Freeing Excellence Affects Reality
Ian Brown – F.E.A.R – Music of the Spheres
Get in touch with us and we can co-create new strategies that can help your organisation and teams be ready for whatever comes around the corner. Let’s play!
Having ideas is a matter of disciplined thinking, as we have explored previously on a post about idea generation.
But how do we make those ideas original? What can we do to move towards unique ideas? How do we avoid tried and tested, one might say clichéd, ideas?
How do some people seem to always have original ideas?
The zenith of creativity is what we term the original idea. There are many arguments that state there is no such thing as an original idea. No less a figure than Mark Twain is often quoted saying “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible.” I believe this is a semantic argument over the definition of an idea and indeed originality.
Is it possible that some old ideas can be combined or viewed in a new context to create a new idea? Here at MundoNovus, we think it is entirely possible to view such a case as a new idea and not only that, an original idea.
An idea is only a thought that points towards an opportunity or possibility. An original idea is a thought that points out a new path towards that opportunity or possibility.
There’s no chance of their having a conscious glimpse of the truth as long as they refuse to disturb the things they take for granted and remain incapable of explaining them. For if your starting-point is unknown, and your end-point and intermediate stages are woven together out of unknown material, there may be coherence, but knowledge is completely out of the question.”
– Plato, The Republic – Ancient Greek Philosopher and writer of the Republic
Originals
The book Originals by Adam Grant has some good insight into how we can find original ideas. Grant breaks down three methods for generating and selecting original ideas. These are:
When looking for new ideas it is a good start to ask fundamental questions about the way we do things. Have we stumbled into a position of accepting that things are done a certain way, because that it the way they are done? Bear in mind, if this was the way we all thought we would still be reading by candlelight. Perhaps we’d be listening to stories or news from a balladeer, as books would not have replaced the oral tradition.
Questioning the status quo is a habit that we need to consistently work at applying. By exercising this habit it becomes easier to use and something of a superpower in spotting opportunities. One of the reasons we are held back in questioning the status quo is through relying on our habitual thinking. Our brains are efficient, they will take shortcuts when one is available. This means following the connections we have made before.
These connections of B follows A or a previous followed solution to a problem become physical connections between neurons in our brain. We are seldom conscious that we are even taking a shortcut. So we need to challenge our default thinking.
I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. `{`With analogy`}` we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. `{`With first principles`}` you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.
– Elon Musk – CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Co-Founder of Neuralink and Open Ai
Thinking from First Principles
To get an original idea, building our knowledge by reasoning from first principles as our method allows us to return to the fundamental proposition or assumption we have. Aristotle describes reasoning from first principles as:
In every systematic inquiry (methodos) where there are first principles, or causes, or elements, knowledge and science result from acquiring knowledge of these; for we think we know something just in case we acquire knowledge of the primary causes, the primary first principles, all the way to the elements.
– Aristotle – Greek Philosopher and Polymath
Aristotle gives us the method for stripping any problem back to the fundamental truths. As Elon Musk points out, in the quote above, our aim is to avoid “doing this because it’s like something else”. We often accept things as knowledge when we reason by analogy without question. This is a mistake, as we effectively outsource our thinking to the origin of that analogy.
Using this method, we can also avoid many of our cognitive biases that can lead us into habitual thinking.
Having more ideas
We have previously explored the topic of generating more ideas in our blog post Don’t stop! Have at least another 20 ideas. It is important to have many ideas to pull from. Exploring each idea, even if it does not work as we need, allows us to gain insights that can help elsewhere. By generating many ideas, we are able to move our brain away from habitual thinking. We challenge ourselves to come up with more ideas once we exhaust the obvious possibilities.
The killer idea is born out of practice and rarely arrives fully formed to someone who has not worked hard to get it. Think about some of the great ideas and innovations of the past. They are usually born of many attempts.
Van Gogh painted over 900 paintings in his short career, highly prolific by most measures, yet only a handful (Starry night, Sunflowers, the self portrait without his ear and the one of the café terrace at night) are world famous.
Irving Berlin published over 1500 songs in his long life, but I’m hard pushed to name more than a few. White Christmas, Puttin’ on the Ritz, Cheek to Cheek and Alexander’s Ragtime Band are as far as I get before I have to go and look some more up.
Agatha Christie wrote 75 novels in her lifetime but other than Murder on the Orient Express many people struggle to name many of them.
This is not to say that being prolific is likely to make your work successful or original. After all, Dame Barbara Cartland wrote 723 novels (mainly in the romance genre) yet I could not name one of them.
Needless to say, finding an original idea is helped, enormously, by generating an abundance of ideas. This is because the quality of our ideas increases the more we have, a phenomena known as the Serial Order Effect.
Adam Grant, the aforementioned author of Originals puts it as “When it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality.”
For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
– Stephen Hawking – English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author
Gather Feedback
As much as we like to lionise those who have ideas, it is rare for a person to work alone, having brilliant, original ideas. There is a reason Sir Isaac Newton said he’d been “Standing on the shoulders of giants”. He worked with help from his peers. He read the papers his peers and those before him had published.
When we work with our peers and solicit their feedback, we make better choices of which ideas to pursue. According to cognitive research papers published by Hamada, Nakayama & Saiki the wisdom of crowds and collective decision-making outperforms individual judgment.
However, it is not as simple as that, as we must be wary of groupthink too.
Beware of groupthink
If everyone is thinking alike then no one is thinking.
– Benjamin Franklin – American polymath and founding father of the United States
David McRaney puts it well in his book You are not so smart.
“When a group of people come together to make a decision, every demon in the psychological bestiary will be summoned. Conformity, rationalisation, stereotyping, delusions of grandeur – they all come out to play, and no one is willing to fight them back into hell because it might lead to abandoning the plan or a nasty argument.”
So how do we embrace the wisdom of crowds whilst avoiding groupthink?
We will write a full article on this in the future. For now some ideas on avoiding groupthink are to:
Use facilitated meetings to avoid acquiescence to the highest paid person’s opinion (HiPPO).
Solicit opinions from a variety of sources.
Don’t attempt to make decisions until exploration of the subject or problem has taken place.
Explore blind canvassing of opinion.
Avoid using leading questions – this is where an independent facilitator can help.
Test the groups decision before committing to it. Treat each idea as a bad idea and actively search for the faults.
Through using these techniques, some of the faulty logic used within groupthink can be avoided.
Get in touch with us and we can co-create new strategies that can help your organisation and teams be ready for whatever comes around the corner. Let’s play!
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® was developed with Lego 20 years ago. The method had its 20th birthday this year on the 17th of September 2021.
Many application techniques have been developed over the period the method has existed. Using these techniques, the method offers many ways to help teams and organisations.
An introduction to Lego Serious Play
LSP is an experiential system. It is based on the constructivist theory of education of the philosopher Jean Piaget and the extension of that theory into constructionism by Seymour Papert. As participants build models, they start to create knowledge from their experiences. Knowledge is shared via the method using a 3D model. Using the models as the object of discussion allows communication to not be personalised. This is useful when exploring complex and emotive subjects.
You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than you can from a lifetime of conversation
– Often attributed to Plato – Ancient Greek Philosopher and writer of the Republic
How LSP works
The process of using LSP is always facilitated using a collection of application techniques. These techniques can be used in various combinations. This allows the method to be versatile enough to cope with varying degrees of complexity.
The basic process is as follows:
Start with a question to respond to. The facilitator sets the question based on the agreed focus of the session.
All participants build a model in response to the question. This encourages them to build their knowledge in line with Piaget and Papert’s theories.
The insights the participants have during the building process become the knowledge and ideas for each participant.
The participants share their insights through their model’s story.
Last but not least, the team reflects on what has been discussed and addresses questions via the model.
Additional techniques can be added to the process. This allows us to find deeper insights, propose solutions and more.
The participants have a short set of rules to follow when using the method. These are:
The facilitator asks a question with many possible answers.
Everybody builds and everybody shares.
The meaning is in the model, and the builder owns it.
Questions are about the model – not the individual.
There are many more case studies available too. And there are many organisations who have found value in using the method including:
Fujitsu
Toyota
Coca-Cola
Fedex
Google
Mastercard
Microsoft
Nasa
Nissan
Pfizer
Proctor & Gamble
Target
Telia Telco
Unilever
Waitrose
World Bank Group
Harvard University
MIT
Cambridge University
Oxford University
EU
UNESCO
UNDP
Denmark’s Government
UK Government
As certificated LSP facilitators, we can help you use the method to meet your team’s or organisation’s needs.
When you’re being creative nothing is wrong
– John Cleese – Actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer
Get in touch with us and we can co-create new strategies that can help your organisation and teams be ready for whatever comes around the corner. Let’s play!
In brainstorming sessions, thought-showers or whatever your preferred term is, the team is likely to become fixated on the first half-decent idea. This is because we favour convergent thinking over divergent thinking. The team might spend hours with that idea working at it, or maybe even days, weeks or months. The idea might even get released into the wild. The idea may have gone through some testing, if we are lucky, but, Aaagh! It doesn’t work…
Why? We spent all that time on it, why isn’t it working?
This means that when we are looking for more ideas using a divergent thinking task, such as a brainstorming session, we are likely to find that the great ideas, the more creatively divergent ideas will occur later, and the earlier ideas will be the safe, hackneyed, overused ideas we have encountered many times before. The term used by Neuroscientists and Psychologists is the Social Order Effect.
So, what we should do is push for more ideas to be laid out on the table, but there is a problem. How do we get people to lay out the ideas and not be embarrassed or reluctant to carry on having more ideas?
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
– John Cage – American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher
How do we get more diverse ideas?
It is a valid question. And there are several ways to do it, but some can bring problems. For example, a standard brainstorming session usually has several people sitting around a table throwing out ideas, but usually these ideas get shot down straight away. We are only human, and we will often react emotionally to an idea being rejected in such a fashion. This leads many of us to play safe and only bring out ideas we consider safe, which often means boring, hackneyed or overused.
If we were in a meeting together and I asked you for the best ideas you could come up with to advertise a chocolate bar, what ideas would you come up with? Take a moment to come up with as many ideas as you can now.
I did this with my partner, I gave her 2 minutes to come up with as many ideas as she can for this very loose, half thought out brief. The caveats are that we were the only 2 people in the room. so it was less embarrassing than an actual meeting would be. She is also an arts graduate who has a long history of coming up with creative solutions.
My partner’s list of ideas
Party of people
Chilling out in front of a movie with a big chocolate bar
Sharing a chocolate bar with a friend
Hiding away as a secret chocolate bar eater
Swimming in chocolate
A pig in a muddy pig pen, but all the mud is chocolate.
A huge garden where everything is chocolate, like Willy Wonka’s factory.
A chocolate person with wrappers for clothing.
Someone is asleep in a bed that looks like a chocolate bar with the wrappers as duvet etc.
This is an incredible list for only 2 minutes.
Now, some of these ideas could make good ads or be part of the process of creating a decent ad. Some of them are already creating compelling visuals in my head, which is always a good sign.
Getting to the more creative ideas
But how do we go from these ideas to the truly great ideas for selling chocolate bars? If you live in the UK and have done for the last 15 years or so, you are likely familiar with Cadbury’s chocolate and their phenomenal advert for a chocolate bar featuring a drumming gorilla
The drumming gorilla advert, created by Fallon, is still spoken about nearly 20 years later as a high point in TV advertising. Marketing magazine named it the nation’s all-time favourite advert.
The advertisement was released on the 31st of August, 2007. By November of that year, over 6 million views had been registered across online video sites. The actual ad does not feature a chocolate bar. Cadbury is referenced only by the production credited to “Glass and a Half-Full Productions.”, which is subdued, and the purple backdrop to the Gorilla, which is a nod to Cadbury’s corporate colors. Why did this idea not get shot down as soon as it was mentioned?
Well, there is a full article in the Guardian from ten years after the release of the advert, quoting the creative director of Fallon on how the idea came about and how the advert got made. In the article, Phil Rumbol, Cadbury’s director of marketing, tells how his bosses thought he was mad and quotes them as saying ‘Let’s get this right. You want to make an ad that’s three times longer than a normal ad, has no Cadbury’s chocolate in it and there’s no message?’. Yet, he won the argument. The idea go accepted, and the rest is chocolatey history.
How do we not have our ideas shot down?
One of the ways to not have ideas shot down is to forgo all judgment at idea conception. Easier said than done, you might way. It works, but only if we find ways to facilitate sessions that can turn off people’s innate ability to judge or even prejudge an idea before it has had a moment to breathe.
There are fun ways to do this too. Lego Serious Play has this built-in to the application techniques in that particular system. But what if we are a group in a cab and need some ideas quickly before we arrive at our venue? We can’t get the Lego out there, but we can use some other fun techniques, like this one described below:
“Bad” Ideas Only
This is a technique we love. It allows us to suspend judgment by subverting it into amusement. We are searching for the worst ideas to amuse ourselves.
The technique we have developed follows this format:
We write down the provocation/brief
Everyone responds with their “bad” ideas in three rounds
Round one – 2 minutes
Write as many “bad” ideas as possible.
Count ideas – winner of most ideas wins this round – reward in your own way – we prefer a chocolate (apparently it is a fixation).
Share ideas, but don’t discuss, yet.
Round two – 2 minutes
Write as many “bad” ideas as possible.
Count ideas – winner of most ideas wins this round – reward
Share ideas but don’t discuss
Round three – 5 minutes
Write 3 or more “bad” ideas as possible
Everyone with 3 or more ideas gets a reward, the one with the most ideas gets a reward
Collate all ideas and go through as a list
Treat each idea as a good idea, explore its possibilities – advantages and disadvantages
Try combining some ideas or writing down ideas sparked by other ideas.
Why Bad Ideas Only Works
By using this technique, we are telling ourselves we are looking for “bad” ideas but we are gaming that premise by using time limits and prizes to gain quick ideas. The secret is that the brain is as bad at coming up with “bad” ideas as it is with good ideas if we judge them. If we suspend judgment and search for quantity rather than quality, we will find there is actually no difference between a good idea or a “bad” idea and by searching for more, we go beyond the obvious and find the potentially brilliant leftfield creative ideas, the ones featuring drumming gorillas.
You can use this technique for writing alone, and you can also use it to beat writer’s block. The only downside if you are using the technique on your own is that you have to supply your own rewards.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
The Serial Order in effect
According to the research mentioned above, the serial order effect is unusually robust. We can look into why ideas get more creative the more we have, or we can use the fact that they do and roll divergent thinking practices into our everyday life.
MundoNovus can help you identify ways to create a more divergent thinking workspace. It is not a choice between divergent thinking and convergent thinking. We need both. It just so happens that due to many reasons, including our learned need to “get the right answer”, we tend to overly rely on convergent thinking.
Convergent thinking is useful for decision making, but not when coming up with ideas to decide between. What we need is the ability to become adaptive thinkers and use the correct one at the correct time. The structures we add through the use of play and liberating structures ensure you can become adaptive and use divergent thinking when you need it.
When you’re being creative nothing is wrong
– John Cleese – Actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer
Get in touch with us and we can co-create new strategies that can help your organisation and teams be ready for whatever comes around the corner. Let’s play!
Building trust in teams is as important today as it ever has been.
“Right! We are going to do a trust-building exercise.”
Cue the groans and the stress levels increasing throughout the team as the team leaders or facilitator break out the blindfold or ask you to pair up.
Have we been doing the wrong thing when attempting to build trust?
What do we get wrong in traditional trust-building exercises?
Traditional trust-building exercises are likely to cause more distrust than actually build trust within a team. Think of the “fall back” exercise where one participant has to trust the other and fall back into their partner’s arms, or the one where the participant is lead around a course by their partner whilst blindfolded. Instant stress for many participants.
Why is this? Well, let us look at what actually happens when you ask someone to fall back in another person’s arms.
Firstly, their stress levels increase and their anxiety starts to build, especially so if they are introverted for whatever reason. “What if it goes wrong? What if this person thinks they are funny?” The thing that is happening here is that we are explicitly getting people to question the trustworthiness of their partners or team mates. If something does go wrong, accidentally perhaps or not so accidentally perhaps, then we have seriously damaged a person’s ability to trust others and trust anything else we might do with them in the session.
But what is the gain, are we really building trust in our team or are we just testing trust?
In order to succeed in these exercises, we expect participants to trust one another without actually doing anything to build that trust. We are only testing the trust we generally have in strangers and that is not likely to be a deep trust that is conducive to being a team that performs well together.
A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him.
– Gregory David Roberts – Author
How can we actually build trust?
To figure out how we can start building trust in our teams we need to look at what trust really is. Trust has been well studied and we know that trust is deeply entwined with our emotional responses and can vary dependent on the situation. The Harvard Business School Professor Frances Frei highlight three elements that help us to build trust.
The three elements of Trust
Authenticity
Rigour in logic
Empathy
We come across these words a lot and there are emotional dimensions to how we often use them. We can get a gut feeling about someone and it is often based on these elements but we may not have been consciously viewing them in the other person.
Authenticity is apparent when someone is true to themselves and is working from their own set of values and principles, it is hard to fake and people are likely to trip up if they do attempt to fake it.
Rigour in logic is important as it allows us to see the intent other people apply to their work, relationships and so on.
Empathy is the tough one as it is the one where it takes time, the one where we need to build that relationship between us. We have to spend some time creating empathy and often we feel too busy to spend that time.
If we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress.
– Frances Frei – Harvard Business School Professor
Fun & Games to build trust
We find that trust is best built using fun games that work to put people into the same state. rather than in exercises where there is a hierarchy or power dynamic. One of our favourite games that help to build trust is one that we call clumping but may well go by other names.
The basics of the activity are that everyone is in a circle together having warmed up a little through some fun exercises. The facilitator shouts a word, for example, “Elephant”, and a number of people (5 or 6 seems to work well) jump into the middle to make a scene, like a still image version, with their physicality.
This activity helps to build that empathy as people start to align their levels of awkwardness and silliness trusting that others will join them if they lead the way and trusting enough to join a scene once someone has started it. The activity helps people to relax as it goes along too as it becomes fun and participants start to laugh which aids the release of dopamine which reduces stress.
How we can help
At MundoNovus we have many more games and liberating structures or activities and can bring these into your organisation, building trust in your teams. We will work with you to develop a team or sets of teams that actively listen to one another and build solutions together.
We also create structures and equip you with methods that will uncover knowledge within the organisation that has until now been silent or unnoticed. This will move your organisation along towards becoming as creative and forward-thinking as possible.
And, who knows? We may even create a team of creative geniuses who support each other.
Adults play too (or should).
– Julie Lythcott-Haims – Contemporary American educator
Get in touch with us and we can co-create new strategies that can help your organisation and teams be ready for whatever comes around the corner. Let’s play!
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