Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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they could undertake every one of the crazy, laughable ideas that they created. Amongst the ideas that Wells generated were international air travel, flying to the moon, genetic engineering, human invisibility and time travel. Three out of five within 100 years is a pretty good track record. A few maverick scientists even believe that the last two are now theoretically possible (see Chapter 11). Over the last hundred years, we can find many other ideas that were also regarded as being crazy, laughable or ludicrous when they were first suggested. For example, when Jerry Levin (the founder of AOL) first proposed in the early 1980s that every home in America could be wired by cable, and connected to online subscription media and television services, most business people dismissed the idea out of hand. In the 1970s, the corporate world thought that Bill Gates was a pie-in-the-sky dreamer when he first described his vision of having a PC in every home and in every office around the world. At the time, most senior managers in large companies such as IBM and Rank-Xerox dismissed the PC as a toy, with limited commercial applications. Single-handedly, this one innovation tore the whole of the mainstream computing industry apart and, in the process, pushed IBM to the brink. In Chapter 11, we’ll look at some other scenarios for the future that most people would currently dismiss as being crazy, laughable or ludicrous.

In spite of the importance of innovation, many leaders and managers continue to be sceptical about the business value of ‘creativity’ and ‘learning’. There is no denying that much day-to-day work in organizations is routine, and involves what essentially amounts to efficient repetition and/or the fine-tuning of productive processes that have worked well for a period of time. Creativity and innovation imply constant change and constant evolution, and many organizations and their employees can find this prospect threatening and stressful. Nevertheless, sometimes companies must embrace radical innovations in order to prosper. For example, in the late 1990s, Charles Schwab had to make the difficult decision to move its business to the Web, knowing that this move would force it to slash prices by 60 per cent. How would your colleagues react if you told them that your company would have to do this next month? Other companies, such as Merrill Lynch, dithered and delayed, but Charles Schwab went ahead and, as a result, gained a clear competitive edge over their main rivals. Only non-linear thinking, with an eye to the future, gave the company the confidence to do this (Hamel, 2000a). All of the available research evidence indicates that innovative companies benefit in a variety of ways. They are more adaptable to change, they are able to respond more quickly to changes in their environments, they are able to create change for others to follow in their wakes, they spot new opportunities before the competition does, and are consistently more profitable over

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longer periods of time, when compared to non-innovative organizations (Hamel 2000a, 2000b; Collins and Porras, 1996).

When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined actions, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline, with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.

(Jim Collins, Good to Great, 2001)

Becoming more creative and innovative

Doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different or better results.

(An old definition of madness)

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. (Canadian hockey superstar, Wayne Gretsky, 1990)

In Chapter 1, it was noted that one skill that certainly is important to leaders these days is the ability to envision the future. This ability has been described as something that often sets true leaders apart from the crowd, a unique ability to spot new business opportunities and new markets, like truffle hounds sniffing out truffles in the woods. Vision stems from the ability to see the world in new or different ways, to make associations between already existing bodies of knowledge in order to create new ideas, or to see new and emerging worlds in the future. This also implies a capacity to view the world as an oyster of creative possibilities, rather than a world of restrictive limitations. In this section there are several opportunities to try out some creative and lateral thinking exercises that will enhance your ability to envision and, later on, scenario-map the future.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then lateral thinking is the mother of creativity. Creativity refers to the ability to synthesize ideas in new ways or to make unusual or novel associations between bodies of knowledge, in a way that leads to different understandings or interpretations of reality. This is where Edward De Bono’s concept of ‘lateral thinking’ can be extremely useful. De Bono has argued for some time that ‘linear thinking’ (based on judgment, analysis, logic and argument), the dominant way of thinking of the 20th century, will have to be supplemented by ‘what can be’ thinking (based on creativity, imagination, reconstruction and redesign). However, most education, in either the scholastic or managerial sense, tends to overlook, or even ignore, the natural ability that young children have to think laterally. As we observed in the last chapter, this is why they are continually asking ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ questions and why they often learn best through play and experimentation during their

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Part 2

When you’ve completed Part 1, please answer the following questions (time allowed, 40 minutes).

1.Every morning, a fit, healthy man walks into the lift on the twentieth floor of his apartment block and travels down to the ground floor. He goes to work. When he returns from work, he gets into the lift on the ground floor, gets out at the tenth floor and walks the rest of the way to his apartment up the stairs. Why? (Clues: there is nothing wrong with the lift and, if it was raining, he did not have to get out at the tenth floor.)

2.A farmer comes into one of his fields one morning. He sees a man lying in the middle of the field. The man is dead. The farmer knows immediately how he died. How did the man die? (Clues: he was not murdered, killed by farm machinery or attacked by a wild animal.)

A ‘dissociative jump’ from:

3.An important event took place in Neufchâtel on 17 August 1968 that had a profound effect on Switzerland’s major manufacturing industry. It took some ten years to recover from this. What were the event and the industry?

to:

4.What device was first patented as ‘a harmonic frequency multiplexing telegraphy unit’? Who created this device and what was unique about the patent?

to:

5.What hybrid device was later created from the innovation described in 4, and Thomas Edison’s ‘electric phonograph’ (whose use is essentially the same as the device described in 3)?

If you can’t find the solutions to these, you may want to read through the next paragraph before looking at the answers in note 1.

Was there a mild sense of Eureka when you got the answers? In the case of the parachutist exercise, you needed to ‘think beyond the field’ and consider where the dead person came from and how he arrived there. Most people will spend all their time considering what might have happened in the field. The ‘nine dots’ exercise is a perfect example of not looking for what you were looking for (discussed further below). You might have started at each corner and joined the dots up and found that two or three dots managed to ‘evade’ your four lines every time. Through trial and error, you may have covered all but one dot using this method, and assumed that, because you were so close, you were on the right track and persisted with this for some time.

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However, it would only be when you realized that you had to, literally in this case, ‘look outside the box’, that the solution would have revealed itself. Most people trying to solve this problem would confine their lines to the box as defined by the dots. The successful problem solver would see, in their mind’s eye, that the only solution is to extend the four lines beyond the edge of the box (Perkins, 2001: 49–50). The historical questions highlight how closed people’s minds can be to new ideas and innovations, particularly those who would consider themselves to be rational, practical and hard-headed business people.

What these exercises also reveal is that everyone sees the world through preconstructed mind-sets. In Chapter 1, in the context of our views about what leadership ‘is’, we saw that we do not ‘create’ these mind-sets in any conscious sense. This is how a normal mind works and, without this automatic filtering process, we could not function in any meaningful sense. These perceptions also operate almost entirely at an unconscious level, and only a pathological mind can see the world unfiltered through prior knowledge. This is why genius is often associated with madness, or at least eccentricity, and is the main reason why almost all new ideas appear to be crazy when they are first proposed. However, we also saw that the ability not to take things for granted, and to question common-sense ways of doing things, are skills that differentiate visionary leaders from humdrum, run-of-the-mill leader/managers. Here is another exercise to illustrate the consequences of our selective perceptions. In Figure 9.1, there are a series of picture puzzles. Please describe what you can see in each of these. The solutions can be found in note 2.

These exercises have been used with several hundred MBAs over the last ten years. In that time, not one has been able to see all sixteen objects in these pictures at the same time. Very few were able to see more than half of these at first. However, with practice they could get better at this, but only by not looking for what they were looking for. This may sound odd, but is exactly what you have to do to in order to improve your ability to see the whole picture, and to look at these pictures (or, in organizational contexts, alternative realities) from different perspectives. This ability is sometimes described as ‘reframing’ and, by looking at something in a different way, ‘reality’ itself can appear to change. The next group of lateral thinking exercises will help you look for what is not immediately obvious in a specific situation.

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Figure 9.1 Picture puzzles

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Exercise 9.2

Advanced lateral thinking

Time allowed = 60 minutes

1.Two strangers meet at a party and fall into a conversation about their lives. At one point, the first stranger says, ‘I have to confess that I don’t always speak the truth.’ The second stranger replies, ‘Well that I must certainly believe.’ Yet the second stranger has not heard anything he knows to be false. Why is the second stranger so sure that the first stranger’s confession is true?

2.One day at the office, Alice says to Betty, ‘I heard this great joke from Cathy’ and she begins to tell Betty the joke. But Betty says, ‘Oh, I already know that joke.’ Alice says, ‘So Cathy’s already told you it?’ ‘No’, says Betty. ‘In fact, I’ve never heard it or read it before.’ Explain how this could be true.

3.Here is an equation: 2 + 7 – 118 = 129. Add one line anywhere in the equation to make it true.

4.You are standing in a room. Above you are two strings some distance apart. On a table, there is a dictionary, a glass, a live toad, a stapler and a clothes peg. Holding one string in your hand you can’t quite reach the other string, even when you stand on the table. How might you tie the two strings together?

5.Last, here’s a real tester. One day an old wind-up clock that chimed the hours (for example, seven times at seven o’clock) and quarter hours (one chime each quarter) struck twentyseven times within the span of one hour and one minute. Yet there is nothing wrong with the clock and all this happened in a natural and appropriate way. How could this possibly happen?

If you are struggling with these, you may like to read through the next section, and then have another attempt before looking at the solutions. These can be found in note 2.

Source: Adapted from Perkins (2001: 59–61 and 118).

Each of these exercises highlights different facets of lateral and creative thinking. For example, ‘To tell the Truth’ is a seemingly clueless exercise, but it shows how a problem solver needs to be able to ‘see the wood from the trees’. Which is the one statement that might be true and what can be inferred from this? ‘The Joke’, reminds us of the Sherlock Holmes principle: when all other possible solutions have been excluded the one that remains, however unlikely, must be the answer to the mystery. Betty hadn’t read or heard the joke before, so where could it have come from? Or, by taking another lateral step, can you work out from where Cathy might have obtained the joke? The solution to the

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equation exercise is similar to the ‘Six’ and ‘Nine’ exercises. The usual approach is to try out various permutations of brackets and plus or minus signs in order to equalize the equation. However, it is only when the actual numbers in the equation are reframed (that is, looked at in a different way) that the solution becomes apparent.

The ‘Two Strings’ exercise highlights something that psychologists have called ‘functional fixedness’. This refers to the tendency to only see the normal function of objects, rather than their possible alternative uses. So, as soon as you can see an alternative use for one of these objects, the solution reveals itself. The remaining items are distractions, which may have taken you up a number of blind alleys. The clock exercise is the perfect example of how lateral thinking can be superior to linear and logical thinking. The logical and sequential approach would have been to add up the maximum possible number of chimes in the hour between 11.00 and 12.00 (11 chimes at 11.00 + 3 chimes on each quarter hour + 12 chimes at 12.00 = 26 chimes). So, how is it possible to get an extra quarter of an hour and the one extra chime to make 27 chimes in total? Invariably, the focus is on the clock. How can it strike 27 times in an hour, when only 26 chimes are possible? The only answer is that it must be caused by something external to the clock. What could that be? What forces or circumstances could make a clock strike 27 times in the hour? Or, taking the next lateral step, what specific event external to the clock could alter time? As soon as this is taken, the solution reveals itself (abridged from Perkins, 2001: 61–3).

When you knew the answers, did you again get that Eureka feeling, ‘Well it’s obvious isn’t it!’? Maybe so, but the important point is that it wasn’t obvious before you knew the answers, and this is why leaders have to be able to question ‘common-sense’ ways of doing things. If you didn’t do so well with these exercises, don’t worry. We are dealing with creative skills that may have lain dormant for many years or have never been properly activated. As noted earlier, we can blame traditional teaching and lecturing techniques for this, where rote learning of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers and examination tests all too often stifle imagination and creativity. However, with practice, you will become better at this and you will experience more dissociative cognitive leaps and breakthrough thinking moments. When you can do this, you can start to envision the future in new, bold and imaginative ways.

These exercises highlight two other important elements of personal creativity, lateral thinking and the ability to create new visions for the future: you have to be able to look for, and find, new opportunities or realities that are not obvious to everyone else, or you have to be able to

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make bisociative links between existing bodies of knowledge, in order to reframe current reality or create a new reality.

It is often assumed that Eureka or inspirational breakthrough moments are the product of individual genius, but the previous sections show that lateral and creative thinking are skills that can be enhanced through learning and practice. Of course, in themselves, lateral thinking exercises will not be sufficient to increase your innovative capabilities, because there are three main sources of breakthrough thinking.

The first, bisociation, requires an ability to make links between apparently unrelated areas of knowledge or experience (Koestler, 1975). More often than not, a new idea is the consequence of melding two or more existing areas of knowledge together for the first time. Some reallife examples of bissociation are described in the next section.

The second, incubation refers to the process where you may have been wrestling with a problem for weeks, or perhaps months, and suddenly the solution just ‘appears’ in front of you, often at an unexpected moment. The Romans believed that, when people experienced these inspirational moments, the gods had literally ‘breathed’ this into their minds (inspirare). We now know that that these moments of inspiration, or acts of creation, are the products of the normal functioning of the unconscious mind (Howkins, 2002; Koestler, 1975).

The third source is Selective encoding, combination and comparison: this form of trial-and-error creativity results from the classical process of experimentation and falsification, as described by the philosopher of science, Karl Popper (1959). This is best exemplified in Thomas Edison’s famous saying that creativity is ’10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration’.

It doesn’t matter which one(s) you rely on because they all have their uses. However, the only way to become more creative is by ‘wearing’ what Edward De Bono (1985) has described as different ‘Thinking Hats’. This means moving out of the narrow realms of understanding that leaders and managers often mistakenly describe as ‘the real world’. For example, how much do you know about the following real worlds? A woman entrepreneur in India or Japan. An accountant working in Moscow. A Japanese salary man. A ski-instructor. A lawyer/attorney working in (a) France, (b) the USA or (c) the UK. A farmer working in the mid-west of the USA. A Web Master. A mid-ranking tax official in the Italian Civil Service. A child slave-labourer in Burma. A woman trying to break into a male-dominated profession, such as the military. An employee on an oil-rig. A young doctor working 80–100 hours a