Right Ways of Working with the Left Brain

"The Heart of Innovation" is the blog for Idea Champions, the highly-respected consulting and training company specializing in creativity, innovation, team building, and leadership. A recent post titled "Right Ways of Working with the Left Brain" offered some valuable suggestions for helping to lead left-brained people (like most of us) through creative activities. The article opens with:

"If your job requires you to lead meetings, brainstorming sessions, or problem solving gatherings of any kind, chances are good that most of the people you come in contact with are left-brain dominant: analytical, logical, linear folks with a passion for results and a gnawing fear that the meeting you are about to lead will end with a rousing chorus of kumbaya."

I can relate.

The 10 practices are listed here, but check out the article for details - and fine-tune your ability to provide leadership throughout the creative process. As discussed in Architect as Advocate of the Business and The Proactive Architect, these sorts of leadership skills help distinguish world-class architects.

Ten Tips for Leading Creative Activities:

1. Diffuse the fear of ambiguity by continually clarifying the process
2. Get people talking about AHAS! they've had in their own lives
3. Identify (and transform) limiting assumptions
4. Encourage idea fluency
5. Invite humor
6. Do the right brain/ left brain two-step
7. Periodically mention that chaos precedes creative breakthroughs
8. Establish criteria for evaluation
9. Be a referee when you have to
10. Consult with the tough people on the breaks

Check out the full article here: Right Ways of Working with the Left Brain

Nurture the Freaks

"How do you build organizations that are as nimble as change itself? How do you mobilize and monetize the imagination of every employee, every day? How do you create organizations that are highly engaging places to work in?"

These are some of the questions being asked by Gary Hamel, author of the new book, The Future of Management. The latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly interviews Hamel along with Howell Bryan, a McKinsey partner and co-author of Mobilizing Minds. In this interview, they discuss an emerging model for management that enables organizations to cope with the need for change and innovation.

Of course, when I read questions like these, they're instantly translated to "How do we harness the imagination of every employee to design and deliver innovative and 'blow-the-doors-off' competitive solutions." Hamel and Bryan offer compelling insight into management's role, and you're encouraged to read the full interview here. Following are a few highlights.

Hamel: "When you look at companies like Toyota, you see their ability to mobilize the intelligence of so-called ordinary workers. Going forward, no company will be able to afford to waste a single iota of human imagination and intellectual power."

Hamel: "The combination of technology and talent is a powerful catalyst for value creation, but to take advantage of the Web's capacity to help us aggregate and amplify human potential in new ways, we must first of all abandon some of our traditional management beliefs—the notion, for example, that strategy should be set at the top. So I think Lowell is 100 percent right: in terms of managing creative-thinking people, you have to separate the work of managing from the notion of managers as a distinct and privileged class of employees. Highly talented people don't need, and are unlikely to put up with, an overtly hierarchical management model."

Bryan: "These thinking-intensive people are increasingly self-directed. In fact, they're directed as much by their peers as they are by supervisors. The management challenge is akin to urban planning. The art of it is that you must enable people to make thousands and thousands of individual decisions about how to live and work, but you have to create the infrastructure to make it easy for them to do so."

The ability to innovate - to generate creative ideas and deliver on their potential - is rapidly becoming the currency of our economy. Consider the rate of innovation in the consumer electronics space. I recently bought a new iPod. This handy little device sports a 160gb hard drive and costs $100 less than the measly 80gb model I bought less than one year ago. It makes me wonder. Is Apple's product this physical device, or is their "product" more the ability to conceive, design, and develop increasingly compelling and "game-changing" products. In other words, perhaps Innovation is their product and the iPod is merely a byproduct.

Increasingly, regardless of industry sector, innovation is the number one business need, and it's up to us to maximize the extent to which this requirement is satisfied in all our pursuits.

Our role as leaders is changing (see leadership - the secret sauce). Are we trading in the correct currency? Are we mobilizing and monetizing the imagination of every employee? Are we nurturing the freaks? As Gary Hamel puts it, "Going forward, no company will be able to afford to waste a single iota of human imagination and intellectual power."

Hidden in Plain Sight...

Sanjay Dalal at Creativity and Innovation Driving Business speaks with Erich Joachimsthaler, author of the new book Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute Your Company's Next Big Growth Strategy from Harvard Business School Press.

The book makes a case for the increasing importance of innovation in today's global economy and explains a number of barriers to innovation. It introduces the "Demand-first Innovation and Growth” (DIG) model that encourages an organized and deliberate approach to innovation.

In this interview, the author describes the DIG model like this:

The DIG model is a systematic, systemic and repeatable process to identify and execute innovation and growth strategies. It replaces the existing model of SAV or screwing around vigorously, sometimes also called the fuzzy front end of existing innovation models. In the fuzzy front end, one searches wildly for ideas that then can be put through the classic stage-gate process of new product development. In the DIG model, the focus is not on the product, it is on finding ways of creating a transformational change in consumers’ everyday life.

Also in this interview, the author offers the following essential guidance for companies looking to improve their innovation and growth strategies:

1. Innovation and growth is not a fuzzy process of screwing around vigorously (SAV) but can be a systematic process,
2. Innovation and growth is not something that happens in a department like R&D or product development – innovation and growth is a company-wide activity and only if you have a process can you also engage the entire organization,
3. Innovation and growth is not about products or solutions – it is about creating a transformational change in the way people live, work and play – and in order to achieve that, the innovation can be a product, a solution, a technology and new business model like at Netflix or no product at all. It could even just be a management innovation like brand management at BMW or a better supply chain management process.

This is intriguing to me from the standpoint of the impact the architect has in the innovation process. I just ordered the book, so more to come...