"Hitting a Creative Brick Wall"

In honor of Jan Harness’ birthday today (Happy Birthday Jan!) and her love of poetry, here’s the closest we come to featuring some on this blog:

“Hitting a Creative Brick Wall” by @Pretty_Awkward

Work work work work, short break,
work work work work, potty break,
work work work, quick snack,
work work work, BOOM! Creative brick wall.

Yet another delightful example of the incredible creativity being shared on Twitter, if you know where and when to look for it. This one appeared in the middle of the night earlier this week.

Here’s a question: Can any of us come up with a comparably elegant and simple word depiction of getting around a creative brick wall?

I’d love to share your creations here. Maybe @Pretty_Awkward might even favor us with an answer post!

Everybody Must Get Stoned on High Velocity Radio

It was a pleasure to do a segment Monday on High Velocity Radio with hosts Stone Payton and Lee Kantor talking about a variety of innovation topics. I met Stone initially via Twitter back in January, and appearing on Stone's show was part of the prize for winning the IDEF140 contest he sponsored.

We covered a range of issues, so beyond a link to the radio show, here are links to many of the topics we discussed during our conversation.

• Slideshare link to "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" ebook


• Getting comfortable with sharing credit for innovation and the power of "we"


• Why it's important to have diverse perspectives among an innovation group


• Why it's helpful to be forgetful when it comes to innovation


• Ways to be more strategic on a personal level


• Making sure you're able to prioritize ideas


• My creative instigation partner, Jan Harness, her Creative Instigation blog and our upcoming book


• Appearing at a Sydney, Australia innovation event as a result of Twitter


• Following me on Twitter: @Brainzooming


• My Most Memorable Business Mistake

Thanks again Stone and Lee for the opportunity to be on the show, and I look forward to being able to do it again in the future!

The Week That Is

Creative Instigation

As someone described it to me last night, the much hyped “Creative Instigation” session for the Kansas City PRSA took place Tuesday afternoon.

Thanks to Tracy Richardson from Barkley and PRSA for hosting “Creative Instigation” yesterday. Several people were instrumental in helping the presentation and workbook come together, including regular readers Leslie Adams and Cory Christensen. Thanks to both of them as well!

We haven’t had a chance to go back through the comments forms to identify questions and points to clarify, but as we do, they’ll get covered here and on Jan’s “Creative Instigation” blog.

"Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye"

I talked previously about the feedback approach we tend to use in meetings where the junior most person starts with the first comment, and we sequence through by seniority and title. In that way each person conveys their point of view free of undue influence from a boss or senior team members.

It’s been a great benefit for most of the past 8 ½ years that I’ve been able to respond after Angie Davids. Doing so has always prompted new insights that I wouldn’t have gotten to on my own without her perspective and expertise. Angie is one of the smartest strategic thinkers I’ve worked with in my career.

She’s moving to a new position at the end of this week and will be missed tremendously. And beyond being a great strategic thinker, she also has a wonderful sense of humor. So if I start sounding dumber or not as funny, you’ll know what has happened! Best wishes Angie!

Creative Instigation - Shooting for the Moon

I’m not a big “shoot for HUGE and settle for what you get” person. I’d rather “shoot for reasonable” and reach it through strong planning. With the “Creative Instigation” presentation Jan Harness and I are doing today, however, I’ve tried to consciously force myself to stretch, in keeping with our message.

Early on, we imagined a “live” blog - with whatever possibilities that suggested. We translated that into writing and introducing a book on “Creative Instigation” based on common themes in our blogs. After selecting articles in April, we began editing and augmenting them with new material and illustrations.

By July, the book was in solid draft form, yet we realized that we needed to start creating the live presentation. We reluctantly put full time work on the book on hold and turned attention to building the content for today. Interestingly, because of all the effort on the book, identifying a shorter set of exercises for the presentation became relatively straight forward.

I shifted attention in late July to the session workbook. Inspired by a creative activity book from Veer.com, the design resulted in a colorful, picture-filled, 38-page workbook that looked different than anything we’d ever done. I printed a completed copy last week and took it to an EVIL copy center for a quote on producing 60 copies. The bid: $1500. Needless to say that wasn’t happening! (It’s funny though that when looking at a copy of it, Jay Liebenguth said it alone was worth the price of admission to the session. He didn’t know how right he was!)

After a few frustrated phone calls with Jan and some heavy duty anxiety, the task was clear – for now, reduce the pages by at least 50% and make it work in primarily black and white. And do it all that Sunday evening.

I didn’t think such a transformation would be possible that quickly, but because of the more ambitious work that had been done, it came together very easily. The prospect of spending $1500 made editorial decisions much clearer.

The lesson? In both cases, shooting big and landing short moved “Creative Instigation” ahead much more dramatically and effectively than if we’d started to simply do a presentation and a handout. I guess applying the lesson to the book now suggests that as we revisit completing it, we should be shooting for “Creative Instigation” as a major motion picture!

Steal this Idea!

Speaking to a graduate level class on innovation several years ago, we covered the concept of borrowing ideas from other sources, looking for opportunities to change & incorporate them into your business.

One student, a communications professional at a major local company, said his department held “Plagiarism Fridays.” They were trying to upgrade their marketing effort, and Plagiarism Friday was a bit of a show-and-tell to get employees looking at strong creative from other industries, thinking about how their company could learn from it.

Here’s a way to take this approach and adapt it for your own business:

• Schedule time and ask employees to look for examples of great ideas to share. The only rule - they have to be from outside your industry or competitive set.
• Have participants present the selected ideas – perhaps 2 or 3 pieces per session.
• Get each person to do a quick personal assessment. For each idea, identify what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s intriguing or unusual, and a recommendation for how your business could incorporate some learnings from it. Share the assessments as a group.
• Select one of the sample ideas and using the input from the assessments, have the group apply it to one of your business challenges to see what possibilities arise.
• Select at least one new possibility and do something to advance it.

Plagiarism Friday sounds like a great idea to me, so…go ahead, steal it and take it to work tomorrow (just be sure to change it and make it better)! If however, you're still having qualms about stealing the idea, check out Jan Harness' post today at creativeinstigation.blogspot.com for some great rationalizations on the creative value of stealing ideas!

Challenges to Improve Your 2008 Performance

I’ve never been big on New Year’s resolutions for a variety of reasons that I’ll spare you here. Suffice it to say that in the past couple of years, I’ve tried to do a better job personally of committing some overall goals to writing - albeit written during the Christmas holiday on a bunch of 25 year old note cards still in my room at my parent’s house.

Nevertheless, throughout January we’ll sprinkle in a few lessons and underlying challenges for you to consider while improving your strategic thinking & innovation successes in 2008. No need to take them all on or to report back on how you’re doing, but read them, grab the immediate learnings, and pick one or two of the challenges to work on throughout the year.

The first one is “Finding a Strategic Thinking Mentor.”

A mentor can be invaluable for any business person as part of your informal business team, providing a different and more experienced perspective than you’d have on your own. Not all mentors are suited to fill every role, so it’s beneficial to have various mentors to satisfy specific experience gaps.

Here’s Your Challenge – Do you have a strategic thinking mentor - one who can help you identify the things that matter in your business situation and provide new insights & perspectives on how to approach things innovatively? When seeking one out, look for the following characteristics - beyond those that any great mentor possesses. The best strategic thinking mentors are:

• Smart
• Experienced & diverse
• Adept at asking productive, probing questions
• Oriented toward innovation
• Gifted with perceptive, accurate instincts
• Able to identify “what matters” in a particular situation
• Visionary
• Open to challenging both you and the status quo
• Comfortable holding a contradictory view
• Able to make solid, insightful connections

I've had several great strategic mentors, two of whom I was able to spend time with over the holidays. One is Bill McDonald, my first boss in a professional job, at Kansas City Infobank. It would take pages to list what I learned from Bill about strategy, secondary research, and great business writing. Another is Greg Reid, who I met eleven years ago today and has been a wonderful strategic thinking mentor ever since.

In today's post on her Creative Instigation blog, Jan Harness also writes about one of her strategic mentors, Cotton Smith.

Strategic mentors are out there - find one of your very own this year!

creativeinstigation blog

Jan Harness, a great strategic writer and member of my creative team, writes about her title as Chief Creative Instigator in her blog creativeinstigation.blogspot.com. Check out how she got that title and the plethora of other creativity tips she's posted!