Creative blackhole

Back to blogging! Man, I really missed it and have tried several times to get back into the habit of blogging regularly. Typing a few lines of text, but never finalizing the post and hitting the ‘publish’ button. I’ve been wondering for some time why I could cram out a post and I now think I’ve found the source.

As I’ve mentioned I’ve been very busy with all kinds of projects. I’m happy to say that almost all projects have been going and are going great. It’s a joy to work for clients and help them improve their communication and knowledge processes using web technology.

But there’s this one project that is not going right. It’s been going wrong for months and just when you think the project is back on track it derails again. You’ve probably been there. To me this is my creative blackhole. Loads of thinking and energy is poured into this project. Every little detail is thought over. Sucking away creativity and therefore also time to blog. Horrible but true.

Of course there are all kinds of self-help tips relating to this situation. ‘Kill the project’, ‘Don’t let it take away your happiness’, ‘Don’t focus too much on the negative stuff’, etc. This can work some of the time. But everybody knows that when you have a sore finger it’s hard to not pay attention to it till it goes away. And in the case of a project it’s about people: the happiness and expectations of my client and, on the other hand, the happiness and performance of my team.

The good thing about projects is that they don’t go on forever (although it sometimes feels that way). The project seems to be better now. At least I’m blogging again and I’m really happy about that.

I’d be happy to hear about your experiences with time, bad projects and blogging. Does lack of time and/or a bad project lead to less blogging? Or do you have time to get around this deadlock?

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY on Building the Lessons-Learned Landscape #e20s

Enjoyed participating in the Lego serious play session. Some pics...

The Lego pieces we got to use

Working hard on the assignment

My tower...

Add caption

Innovatie in de 4de dimensie, de 4 ruimtes van KM door @pauliske #4ruimtes

Volgende spreker is Paul Iske over 'Innovatie in de 4de dimensie, de 4 ruimtes van kennismanagement'.
Net als de vorige spreker Pierre benadrukt Paul dat de wereld wordt steeds complexer. Hoe blijf je bestaan in de wereld? Hoe pak je een rol in deze wereld?
Het vraagt om Agility. Paul laat een leuk voorbeeld van agility zien aan de hand van dit filmpje.
Veel organisaties komen snel terecht in routines. Routines zijn een deel van leren; je kunt zo dingen sneller leren doen. Maar het kan ook beperken. Je mist dingen als je niet de moeite neemt om even buiten je routines te kijken.
In deze tijd wordt er van ons gevraagd om de snelheid van ons leren te verhogen. Want we leven in een tijd waarin de snelheid van het leren, sneller gaat dan de verandering.
Innovatie is dan het proces om (bestaande) kennis toe te passen in een markt/omgeving.
Een omgeving bestaat uit 4 ruimtes:

• social space
• virtual space
• physical space
• process space

Het klimaat is ook belangrijk voor innovatie. Leadbeater heeft 9 condities benoemd voor creativiteit, leiderschap en innovatie:

• diversiteit
• selectie
• imbedding
• co-evolutie
• ontleren
• verstoring
• eenvoud
• verspilling
• timing

Er is geen schaarste aan kennis. Het gaat erom wat je met die kennis doet. Als je aan mensen vraagt welk deel van hun kennis ze gebruiken (op het werk) dan blijkt dat het bijzonder klein is. Het hoeft geen 100% te zijn, maar wat meer zou veel opleveren.

Belangrijk bij innovatie is samenwerken vanuit verschillende perspectieven. Samen kijken naar een probleem op verschillende manieren. Uit onderzoek blijkt dat op deze manieren doorbraken worden gerealiseerd. (Heet ook wel 'open innovatie' of 'collaboratieve innovatie'.)

Maar je kunt nog een stap daarvoor innoveren. Dan weet je eigenlijk helemaal niet wat je wilt, maar door partijen bij elkaar te zeggen kun je 'combinatorisch innoveren'. Op basis van serendipity komen mensen/organisaties tot combinaties die vermarkt kunnen worden. De basis vraag is dan: Wat zouden wij samen kunnen doen?

We zijn hier ook mee aan de slag gegaan aan het einde van de keynote: gewoon met je buurman kijken of er raakvlakken zijn om samen te werken.

Can asking why also be wrong?

I enjoy reading Seth Godin’s daily posts. I share them via Twitter regularly.

Recently Godin posted a short one about importance of asking why. I agree, we should ask 'why' more often. It’s an essential question. Easy to ask and hard at the same time. It’s a great way to find out:

• what the other thinks,
• what their underlying convictions  are,
• whether someone really means what he/she is saying,
• etc.

However, can asking 'why' also be wrong?

I’ve been in an environment where lots of people asked 'why' all the time. But not for the better… Asking 'why' was a way to kill innovation and slow down the organization. It was used to make sure new ideas were not shared openly and conforming with the status quo was norm. 'Why' was used so that the questioner didn’t have to think about the idea he/she was confronted with before asking 'why'.

To me someone can ask me 'why' and I just know it’ll start a great conversation. And other times when someone asks 'why', I just feel the question isn’t asked so that both of us will learn.

I’m curious if you share my experience. And how do you handle these two ways of asking 'why'? Why? Because I want to learn from you!

Use Less of Your Product

I love challenges like in this post. Andrew Winston has an interesting post about asking customers to use less of your product. So you're in the printing business: ask your customers to print less. Or you sell hamburgers or books, ask them to buy less. Thinking in this way can open you up to new opportunities and business. Sometimes you are forced to think this way.

Let's make this concrete. If you were a printing company, would you advise your employees to add a footer to every email saying: Please don't print out this email!

Of course many would say: Hey, but this would cannibalize my business! True, but as the above-mentioned article says: It's better to do it yourself, than that someone else is doing it to you.

I think we can also flip this challenge to ourselves. Think about what you would do if your customer (member of family, friend or client) would use less of your product/service. What would you do?

The Liminal Zone #sbs2011

During the Social Business Summit we were also taken into the wonderful world of Jazz. Michael Gold of JazzImpact told us about creativity, innovation, leading and supporting in jazz. Here are some quotes from his talk. Of course he also showed us what he meant by playing wonderful pieces of jazz and getting us on our feet, out of our comfort zone...
Here are some quotes:

Lead and support are the two core roles in organizations and Jazz bands.

The Liminal Zone: threshold between what we know and don't know. Jazz constantly moves back and forth over that boundary.

Business should as well.

Elements of a good Jazz ensemble are:

A utonomy

P assion

R isk

I nnovation

L istening (listening is key)

UPDATE April 6, 2011 Added pictures, updated links and corrected text.

Enterprise Inception

Just for fun and for the weekend. :-) Have you already watch the movie Inception? I did and loved it. I was wondering: What if inception was really possible? And you could do it. What would you do? How would you change you colleague's or manager's mind? Maybe this is something to start influencing...

Organizing on Passion

It's been a while ago since I read the great Shift Index 2009 report. I've been wanting to blog about it, but haven't had time yet. It's loaded with interesting insights. One big question I had is: This report is focused on the USA; how does this compare to Europe or Asia?

One thing from the report that stuck with me, was the importance of 'creative talent' and getting them to engage in 'creative problem solving, often by connecting with peers inside and outside the firm' (p. 11). On page 70 the report goes on to talk about 'worker passion'. The findings are pretty saddening. Lots of workers are not passionate about their work and self-employed workers are much more passionate than the firm-employed. The larger the size of the firm the less passionate workers get...

I went back to the Shift Index after reading a couple of things:

1. Steve Denning's post about the H in HR, which also points to the Shift Index and the importance of engaged workers delighting clients and stakeholders in self-organizing teams.
2. IBM's Capitalizing on Complexity study (to which ReadWriteWeb also recently referred) which stresses (cultivating) creativity is/will be key to thrive in a complex (business) world of the future.
3. Gartner's post about '10 Changes During the Next 10 Years'. Pointing to businesses working in work swarms. These are like teams, but have more emerging properties. They assemble and disassemble when needed. They are based on the spontaneity of workers

Maybe this is the difference millenials will make in the future, as prof. Andrew McAfee and Luis Suarez (a.o.) were debating.

All this got me thinking. As I commented on Denning's post: If this is so important, what would happen if we organized a company (even a large company!) on passion? Of course start-ups work in this way, if they're doing things well. So all workers could bail-out of their current projects, set up new ones, work on stuff (not) related to the company's mission statement, etc. What would happen? Would this work or will the un-interesting work (whatever that may be) be left undone? Or will this just lead to chaos?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic! And I'd also be interested to hear of companies that are organized based on the passions of their employees.

Behavior is...

... motivation filtered through opportunity.

Recently I read this quote in an interesting interview/discussion betwee Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink. I've been thinking about this quote ever since. Is this true? Why am I thinking about this quote so much? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this quote. Its context can be found in the article, of course.

Another nice quote from the article that was an eye opener to me is:

I think our nature is to be active and engaged. I’ve never seen a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old who’s not active and engaged.

As a father of kids and as an old kid, I know this is true...

A Slack Day

Some time ago prof. Andrew McAfee had an interesting post about what's most important for the success with Enterprise 2.0. One of the things he mentioned was:

Slack exists in the workweek

Slack... This term has been buzzing in my head for some time. For one because of the fact that there hasn't been much slack in my agenda the last couple of weeks... But also because many people say they are "really busy" and "don't have time for social media".
I organize slack. I work from home regularly if I really want to concentrate on something, like reading and writing (a blog post). Even though I work hard from home I experience it as slack. And when I'm at work I almost always make sure I have one or two hours to read feeds and reflect on them (possibly leading to a blog post, tweet, etc.).
A couple of weeks ago we had a cleaning day at the office. We organized slack for a specific reason. I love these days. Everyone is in a different mode, we're all working on the same thing and there are clear results at the end of the day.
I was wondering: do we need 'a slack day' every week (excluding Saturday and Sunday...)? One day a week for us to sit back, reflect on your job, read inspiring and thoughtful information and share your insights. Or am I wrongly tackling a deeper cultural issue with an organizational solution? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

UPDATE 14-10-2011: Good quote and post about slack.

There's No Success Quite Like Failure

Very interesting Wired article about problem solving, objectivity, creativity and innovation. Two great (and true to my knowledge!) quotes from this article:

The best way to solve a problem? Try explaining it to somebody outside your field.

And the second one:

"But experiments rarely tell us what we think they’re going to tell us. That’s the dirty secret of science."

- Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up | Magazine (view on Google Sidewiki)

Giving Praise and Showing Empathy

Recently I read a couple of interesting posts/articles about innovation and invention.

First of all, Dev Patnaik has a nice post about what empathy has to do with innovation. Dev has seen "companies prosper when they're able to create widespread empathy for the world around them". Empathy is:

the ability to reach outside of ourselves and walk in someone else’s shoes, to get where they’re coming from, to feel what they feel.

And this should be widespread in the organization. People within the company are able to stand in each other's shoes and in the shoes of their customers. They understand what's happening outside and respond to that accordingly. In this way the edges of companies start to blur.

Dev says we're lacking empathy not innovation. This is an interesting point also related to the posts stressing the importance of an innovative culture.

One of the facets of empathy is praising others. Steven DeMaio over at the HBR blog has an interesting post on praising. Praising colleagues for who they are and the work they do fuels creativity and innovation. This is the opposite of the 'idea killers' heard too often in the office...

But how do you organize for innovation. HBR recently (Sept. 2009) ran an interesting article. Actually it's a two page visual showing how Lego organizes to innovate. "Innovating a Turnaround at Lego" tells the story. The core of Lego's turnaround is:

a new structure for strategically coordinating innovation activities, led by a cross-functional team...

The September issue of HBR also ran another interesting article about using 'mass collaboration' and 'open innovation' to find the next big idea at Cisco ("Inside Cisco's search for the next big idea"). I liked it because it shows that 'innovation by mass collaboration' is not a quick win. Cisco is open about how they sift through all the ideas (manually) and judge which ideas are keepers. But even though it is not an easy shot, they stress the results are invaluable.

We learned how people around the world think about Cisco and the markets we ought to be pursuing.

And finally Clive Thompson in the Wired magazine has a great post about daydreaming and invention.

Daydreaming isn’t just the mind’s way of processing information, though.

Other scans have found that the wandering mind also utilizes the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that’s involved in problem-solving.

Now I'm going off daydreaming!

Tags van Technorati: innovation,ideas,creativity,masscollaboration,open innovation

Inspiring Innovation Speaker

If I had no budget limitations, who would I invite to speak about innovation for my colleagues? Recently I was asked to provide a list of inspiring speakers about innovation. The focus of the talk should be in the area of creativity, innovation and invention. This is the list I came up with. If you have other's you would recommend, please leave a comment!

My list, again, in no specific order:

1. Scott Berkun, author of 'The Myth of Innovation'. Nice book about what innovation is and what it's not.
2. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of 'Flow: The psychology of optimal experience'.
3. John Seely Brown, ex Xerox PARC director, talks, publishes and thinks about new forms of learning and education and the role of technology. Wrote an interesting report for McKinsey called ‘The next frontiers of innovation’ with the next person on this list
4. John Hagel, thinker/author about mega trends (shifts) in the world and its meaning for enterprises.
5. Clay Christensen, author of the well-known books about innovation: The Innovators Prescription, the Innovator's Dilemma and the Innovator's Solution.
6. Dev Patnaik, author of book about innovation culture ('Wired to Care') and recently wrote a great article titled: ‘Innovation starts with empathy’.
7. David Murray, recently wrote a book about building ideas on other ideas. It's titled ‘Borrowing Brilliance’.
8. Henry William Chesbrough, the Open Innovation guru.
9. Edward de Bono, author of several inspiring books about creativity, invention and innovation.
10. Rene Jansen, inspiring speaker on the edge of organization, innovation and technology.
11. Someone at IBM to tell about their (Innovation) Jam Sessions.
12. Someone at Innocentive or Proctor & Gamble to tell about Innocentive and crowdsourcing innovation.
13. Dave Snowden, special thinker and practioners on the edge of innovation and knowledge management.
14. Thomas Davenport, recently published an interesting article about 'reverse engineering Google's innovation machine'.
15. Tim Brown, director of IDEO about 'design thinking'.
16. Darell Rigby, Kara Gruver and James Allen, authors of a June HBR article 'Innovation in Turbulent Times'. Interesting how they show companies that successfully and structurally innovate have paired leadership: analytic left-brainer thinkers and an imaginative right-brain partner.

Tags van Technorati: innovation,invention,creativity

Ideas Built on Other Ideas

Wow, looks like there's a new interesting book out. It's called Borrowing Brilliance. The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others by David Murray. I'm definitely going to buy it. Why?

Well, the review in BusinessWeek triggered me. This book seems to look at ideas, creativity and innovation being sparked by other (older) ideas. I think this point is often overlooked. Your idea has to be brand new to be a good idea. Your invention has to be done all by yourself or else it's not really an invention. This book says: That's not true. Lots of inventions and innovations are sparked by old(er) ideas and innovations.

And it provides six steps to help you apply this fact in your personal practice or in your business. As I understand the first step is: define the problem you want to solve. What I'm hoping is that the book will say: Try to define your problem as a wish. My experience is that looking at a problem can limit the creativity of the people trying to solve it. To get around this don't say: The problem is..., but say: It would be great if 'this and this' would be possible.

What also triggered me about this book is how well it relates to the concepts underlying Web 2.0. Web 2.0 has a lot to do with sharing ideas openly, building on other's ideas, praising others for their ideas, etc.

However, this is also the hard part. If building on ideas of others is good, how do we cultivate and encourage that? We all know employees hate it when someone else takes your ideas extends it and goes off with te success (- even though we like Truman's quote...). I think this can be done. And I hope to tell you how soon.

Tags van Technorati: innovation,book,ideas,creativity

Wonder and Fascination, It Keeps Me Going

Chris Brogan had a fascinating post some time ago, called 'The value of wonder'. 'Wonder' is a great concept. It's basically a way of life. He says:

...let’s think about those moments when we see or experience something that makes us breathe in deeply, and then causes us to pause and just be there.

And he wonders: Do we experience this enough in our work as we do when we look at our kids for instance? Very good question. Do we look around us, at the people we work with, the technology we use, the things we see happening, a colleague's great idea, and step back in wonder. Do we voice this 'wonder' to each other regularly?

'Fascination' is a comparable powerful concept. It also relates to kids and the way they do things. Blocking out all else, fully concentrated.

'Wonder' and 'fascination' are concepts that keep me going. It helps me look at things in a new ways. Do it with your mouth open, because you forgot to close your mouth, you're so fascinated. It makes my life wonder-ful, hopefully your too.

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Tags van Technorati: wonder,fascination

It's OK to be an Artist

Great pod- and vidcast by Tom Kelley of IDEO at Stanford! (Thanks for link @frogpond.) The title of his talk is "How to be an innovator for live?" He give five practical (but hard) tips to tap into the innovator in you. Yes, the innovator, the artist, is in you, Tom says. He shares an interesting anecdote about an artist who went through the classes of an elementary school asking all classes the same question. The question was: 'Who's an artist here?' As you understand in kindergarten everyone was, in 6th grade almost nobody dared to say they were. And if they did, they would look around to see what their friends thought about it.

Tom encourages all of use to stay childlike (not childish). 'It's OK to be an artist!' Don't accept the common saying 'Deja vu', but say 'Vu ja de' ('Deja vu' backward...), as they say at IDEO.

I love these talks. They inspire me to the max. Maybe because in the adult world we see so little 'Vu ja de'. On the other hand knowledge management (KM) professionals usually do have a 'big hairy audacious goal', think in ideals and want to change the world/company. That's what I find so inspirational from reading blogs and discussions in the KM area. Their ideas and thoughts are creative, build on other's ideas, thinking hard about ways to improve knowledge sharing and are not afraid to try approaches and tools, and even fail and share failures to learn from them.

Let's keep up this attitude and if we loose our childlike behaviour, kindly correct each other back into the right mode!

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Tags van Technorati: innovation,creativity