Better Leaders: Build purpose and get out of the way

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Your brand is a lagging indicator of the quality of your culture, and your culture is driven by the level of engagement in the organization. Positive and constructive leadership is the biggest driver of the habitat and the mindsets of the people in the organization that make that engagement possible. The goal is to draw those discretionary qualities from people in the organization – initiative, creativity, passion – that can’t be bought. You can dictate obedience, you can hope for loyalty, and you can even buy expertise. But you can’t buy those discretionary qualities of initiative, creativity, and passion that must come from all levels to create next-generation innovative value.

Since no longer loyalty, obedience, and even expertise constitute competitive advantage, your managers and leaders need to be focused on creating those environments and leading with those attributes that build creative, connected and engaged people. Only then will we find real deviation from the mediocre middle that will yield innovation – the kind of product and service innovation that creates sustainable value. Agreed?

In which case, the behaviors and influence that managers and leaders play in the organization have the ability to make a huge difference in eliciting those qualities of engagement that exist in everyone. Many companies understand this intuitively and have active policies to bring out the best in their people.

Dell Computers conducts training to help their people use social media and help them understand they are all brand ambassadors. Dell doesn’t leave the social branding to just one small department in the organization, everyone is expected to participate. Disney has famously focused on employee satisfaction, not customer satisfaction, with the recognition that happy employees create great customer experiences.

We have to thank Bob Sutton of Stanford University, for awareness of this fun study his colleague Deborah Gruenfeld conducted. Gruenfeld conducted a research study in which they brought together students in groups of three. One student was chosen the “boss” or arbiter, and the other two were asked to construct solutions to various issues on campus – making the campus more green, or improving transportation, or cafeteria services. The task itself was a red herring. What the researchers were most interested in was the role of power newly bestowed to one of the students.

During the session in which the “boss” is asked to evaluate the quality of the proposals from each of the two other students, the researchers bring in a plate of five cookies. After they each take a cookie, there’s two left. Every culture is aware of the social taboo against taking the last cookie so the cookie that’s in play here is the fourth. Consistently, the appointed “boss” was much more likely to take the fourth cookie, and to exhibit “disinhibited eating.” That is, chewing with their mouth open and leaving more crumbs.

It’s an amusing story but goes to the core of what Gruenfeld calls the Power Poisoning Effect. That is, those in a place of power tend to:
• Give greater value to their own ideas and initiatives
• Give lesser value to the ideas and initiatives of subordinates
• Think that the rules don’t apply to them
• Have greater difficulty controlling their own impulses

Sutton describes how David Kelley, CEO and founder of IDEO, the premiere design and innovation firm leads differently. Kelley frequently assembles and leads group meetings. As Sutton tells it, when the conversations are going poorly, Kelley will spend a significant amount of time at the front of the room guiding discussion and reinforcing ideas from everyone. And when the discussions are going well, he will move to the back of the room, and if you aren’t paying attention he might slip out the door. Because he understands not only that the best ideas come from the people I nthe organization but that also his presence can possibly stifle conversation.

The message for leaders is that when there is a lack or either will or skill, you are needed to step in to guide, facilitate and aid contributors. And when there is a high level of both will and skill, sometimes the best thing you can do is get out of the way.

Hit a Wall? Your Mindset Matters

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“Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.”
– Thor Heyerdahl, innovator, adventurer, and border-smasher

I have a friend who installed the same invisible dog fence I did, but he admitted he didn’t bother with the training and simply installed the underground wire and shackled his dog with the electrical buzz collar which would shock the dog whenever he got near the line. His thinking was the dog would just learn the boundaries himself and viola! – a dog self-trained to stay in the yard. I asked him what happened, and he described that as his young boisterous dog started to run and play as usual he would get shocked and, since he didn’t associate the pain with any clear boundary, he eventually sat in the middle of the yard shaking in fear, paralyzed to move. From that point on all the dog wanted to do was stay in the house.

There are many dimensions to this story – not least the owner’s choice and behavior – but what I want to address is the dog’s perspective. The dog, not understanding why the random shocks, arrived at a state psychologists call “learned helplessness.” It’s the point at which they (we) are capable of believing that nothing we do matters, and regardless of our action, we’re going to be punished or bad things will befall us. A sense of control, and a sense that our behavior matters, is one of the most important predictors of happiness, and in turn workplace productivity, collaboration and creativity.

In a 2002 study from the Families and Work Institute, researchers concluded the following six criteria for creating an effective workplace:
• Providing job autonomy;
• Creating learning opportunities and challenges on the job—where employees can grow,
learn, and advance;
• Developing environments where supervisors support employees in being successful on
the job;
• Developing environments where coworkers support each other for job success;
• Involving employees in management decision-making; and
• Creating flexible workplaces

All of the above offer workers more, not less control and autonomy over their team, their task, their technique.

Carol Dweck, author of Mindset, in a series of studies, has found that people fall into two gross categories – those who believe their intelligence and aptitude is fixed, and those who believe their intelligence and capabilities are malleable and can change over time with effort. When people are in a learning, instead of a fixed mindset, they continually keep getting better because they try harder and constantly put themselves in positions where they might fail. And keep getting better because, or despite of, the challenges they self-impose.

In the invisible fence example, think of the ways in which you bump up against boundaries and how you react to them. Do you run back to the middle quaking, or spend time probing to understand that invisible boundary and then concoct ways to circumvent, or leap beyond it? Or maybe tunnel under? And if you are the boundary-creator, ask yourself why? It could be a legitimate boundary – we do it to our kids all the time for health, or safety, or learning, etc… But in my experience, when you give trust, you get trust, and sometimes exceptional performance.

Changing Face of 21st Century Leadership

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What do you respect, admire, and expect in the best leaders tomorrow vs. yesterday? Join the effort and take this quick 5 minute survey!

The world of business is changing. No surprise there. Harken back to the days of – what appear to be – singular inspiration like 2001 Apple releasing the iPod years after the first MP4 player, or the Swanson TV Dinner smash hit of 1954, or even the classic battles of 1975 BETA vs. VHS or the 2003 Gillette Mach 3 vs. Schick Quattro. In some cases it was borrowed brilliance and product innovation, in other cases sheer marketing upmanship. As the great Peter Drucker said, “Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”

The Leadership Challenge, first published by leadership greats Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, in 1987, presents findings on leadership qualities which led, or contributed to, those singular breakthrough product events. The core findings of that study, initiated in 1983, revealed that from individual contributors to strategic executives, all agreed the top leadership characteristics are:

• Model the Way
1. Find Your Voice by Clarifying Your personal Values
2. Set the Example by Aligning Actions with Shares Values

• Inspire a Shared Vision
3. Envision the Future by Imagining Exciting and Ennobling Possibilities
4. Enlist Others in a Common Vision by Appealing to Shared Aspirations

• Challenge the Process
5. Search for Opportunities by Seeking Innovative Ways to Change, Grow, and Improve
6. Experiment and take Risks by Constantly generating Small Wins and Learning From Mistakes

• Enable Others to Act
7. Foster Collaboration by Promoting Cooperative Goals and Building Trust
8. Strengthen Others by Sharing Power and Discretion

• Encourage the Heart
9. Recognize Contributions by Showing Appreciation for Individual Excellence
10. Celebrate the Values and Victories by Creating a Spirit of Community

All based on the core findings that those surveyed in the 1980’s found the greatest leaders to be Honest, Forward-Looking, Competent, Inspiring, and Intelligent.

However, recent studies from Gallop, Bersin, and IBM reveal changing characterisitics which define the emerging leader including – depending who you read – creativity, relationship-building, global perspective, transparency, and democratic organizational structure, among others.

Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices appear evergreen, yet perhaps there are emerging behaviors and beliefs, methods and mindsets, that jive with effective 21st Century Leadership practices. This is our inquiry. Join the conversation with our quick survey.

Turn Anxiety into Positive Action

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In the always-on bottle rocket economy, in which creative contributors spend their extended waking hours in simultaneous and schizophrenic bouts of digital grazing, conference calls, work tasks, social media…it’s no surprise anxieties and hypertension have overtaken the workforce.

I had an interview the other day with Chip Conley, Founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre (and killer TED speaker) and learned a cool emotional equation trick he is debuting in his new book. It’s common to feel overwhelmed with looming deadlines, and dueling projects. Here are a few tricks you can try to take control.

Understand You Have More Control Than You Think
We tend to fixate on what we can’t control or have little influence over. Try this from Chip Conley. It’s about turning negative stress in to positive challenge. Think of a project, task, or effort you are involved in and write down all of the things you have control and power over.

Now write down the things you think you have little or no control or power over. In Chip’s experience trying this out on hundreds and hundreds of leaders, they come to realize the number of elements they do have control and power over is surprisingly higher than they realized. And by clearly identifying and sharing pieces they think they have no control over, they realize quickly the people resources and available insights are more immediate and readily accessible than previously thought.

Understand Where You Spend Your Time
One tip from Martin Seligman. Weigh what your goals are against how you spend your time. Write down three to five things you really want to accomplish. Then keep track of how you actually spend your time. You can try reflecting on the past week or looking through your calendar from the last month, but in his experience, a better measure is to actually measure. Post a white board in your office or kitchen – or places you frequent – and jot down the time you spend on activities. It might surprise you the difference between time invested and stated goals.

Take Action
Now do something. That’s right, just get in motion. I heard a cool adage recently, “the amount of time it takes you to accomplish anything is equal to the amount of time you have to do it.” In other words, if you have two weeks to do the presentation, it will take two weeks. If you have two hours, it takes two hours. So my final advice in taking control is to self-impose deadlines and act. In my experience, the big project I’ve been putting off takes very little actual time. Or as my new friend Alexander Kjerulf likes to say, we are always choosing, since inaction is also a choice. So choose to act.

Tim Sanders Intro – Cultures of Confidence

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I had the fun opportunity to introduce Tim Sanders to our SkillSoft Perspectives conference yesterday morning. Following is what I prepared. What I said in real time yesterday was probably close, but who knows. When presenting, keep your knees bent. And if you’re wondering…Tim killed. So wonderful and spot on message.

Good morning. In just a few moments we will be presenting a live interactive satellite and webcast presentation featuring Tim Sanders and produced right here from the main stage at Perspectives. If you have attended in past years you may recall we have beamed IN live presentations featuring Sir Ken Robinson, Don Tapscott and Tom Peters from distant production studios around the country. This year as a special treat we thought we would bring the event to you and broadcast live from the conference, from right here on the floor of the event.

Today’s live presentation will reach well over 600 organizations and companies around the globe and up to 40,000 individuals – including significant audiences in Europe and groups joining us in the evening in the middle east.

Tim Sanders will spend a few moments with us in advance of today’s event speaking on our specific opportunities and possibilities in the world of talent, human resources and leadership development and the power of lifelong learning. For his main broadcast presentation he will share ideas from his new book Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence. Because by understanding the source of confidence we can preempt personal and organizational recessions and begin to build Cultures of Confidence. We have all seen the engagement data from Gallop, TowersWatts that reveals less than a third of the people in organizations describe themselves as fully engaged. A Culture of Confidence builds an ecosystem of full engagement because it allows people to reach beyond the expected diligence, expertise and compliance and tap into that discretionary effort of initiative, creativity and passion that gives rise to purpose.

Consider the pharmaceutical Genentech who has a stated purpose and a mantra of IN BUSINESS FOR LIFE. Genentech has consistently been voted in the top 10 places to work for, and if you talk to the people there they will tell you the secret sauce is their culture.

In 2003 after clinical trials and FDA approval Genentech introduced the genetically-engineered intravenous drug Xolair to the asthma medication market. Unlike standard asthma treatments that stop asthma attacks after they occur, Xolair was developed to block the histamines in our immune system that trigger attacks. It was preventative and effective short and long term because it would first curb the attacks, and then allow the patient to lead a life without fear of asthma attacks, instead of using drugs that would simply stop them once started.

Genentech released Xolair with confidence because on paper they knew they had the killer app and rolled out their marketing, sales readiness, inventory and distribution in anticipation of strong sales. But strangely after 6 months into the product roll-out sales were well below anyone’s anticipation. Then the financial analysts spotted an anomaly – a big sales spike coming out of Dallas Fort Worth. Out of 242 national sales reps, two women in the Dallas area created a new sales playbook and were selling twenty times the national average.

See Genentech had previously built market expertise in cancer medicines, not asthma drugs. And if you’ve visited an oncology or pulmonary unit as often as I have recently, you’ll know the oncology specialists routinely administer intravenous chemotherapy and other medicines. But Xolair’s market target was allergists, pediatricians, pediatric nurses. Infusions require a different set of protocols not normal in your standard child-doctor visit. Clinicians administering Xolair also must be trained in recognizing rare reactions or side effects. The sales reps could spend all day with powerpoint and graphs talking about the statistical benefit and effectiveness of Xolair and they still wouldn’t get past the client’s apprehension about simply administering it.

The crux of the problem was mindset and methods of the pediatric doctors and nurses. The challenge was to expand their skillset and change the office culture to align with their goal, and remember Genentech’s goal is IN BUSINESS FOR LIFE.

So these two reps in Dallas and their team created a new playbook in which they became consultants and mentors in administering Xolair. They educated the doctors to focus on the long term lifestyle benefits – like their patients could own pets now or pick up jogging again. They taught the clinic staff how to navigate the new insurance paperwork maze to get reimbursed for this new treatment. In short, they stopped applying force and started becoming change artists working in close partnership with their clients. This kind of emotional intelligence, initiative and creativity working in service of a shared purpose is much more readily possible within environments that encourage and reward risk. In Cultures of Confidence.

But in this story let’s not get overly distracted by the process, the mechanism by which these two innovative sales reps worked with their customers. They used onsite tutorials and in-person workshops to educate their customer but they could have used an iPhone app or some other app perfect for the puzzle. In our work to create and cascade real behavioral change we can get wrapped up in the machine, the killer app, when really the mechanism should be transparent and frictionless to the user. The story line is about their mantra: IN BUSINESS FOR LIFE.

Don Tapscott has a marvelous illustration of this when one day a few years ago he was in his house when down the hall he hears his son calling out, “Dad! Dad! Come here – you’ve got to check this out!” So Don walks down the hall to his son’s room and finds him at the computer looking at images of space and his son is saying, “Look Dad, that’s quasar, and that could be a black hole, and over here are stars being born, and this light we’re looking at is millions of years old! Isn’t that amazing!”

Don is pleased with his son’s interest in the cosmos, and says “That’s very cool son, where did you get these images?” And his son says, “Oh, they’re not pictures I’m streaming live from Hubble.” At this point Don’s jaw drops, and he says to his son, “What?! Do you understand you are harnessing the most powerful telescopic instrument on earth? And it’s not even on earth?” To which his son replies, “Yeah whatever Dad, but look that’s the Orion Nebula!”

Ultimately our purpose here together as colleagues at this conference is about connecting people with ideas. Ideas that can change both their beliefs and their behaviors, which then can cascade out and change whole ecosystems within an organization. Providing people with the confidence of ideas and knowledge allows us to reach through our fears, find our passion and display it through purpose. See our passion is what we love to do, but our purpose is why the world loves you. I said, our passion is what we love to do, but our purpose is why the world loves you.

Please help me in welcoming our host for today’s keynote presentation, the witty, fun, intelligent, and always telegenic, SkillSoft’s own Tracey Matisak!

Welcome Tracey. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to recognize for a moment Tracey and our friends at D2 productions. Like the wizard behind the curtain Dave Walzer is somewhere in the vicinity listening on headphones and watching on 16 monitors. At last count, over more than a decade we have produced almost 100 of these events throughout North America and we are deeply honored to share with you such talented professionals that make this all possible. Please join me in thanking them both and everyone here behind the scenes that make this magic possible.

Shared beats Borrowed Brilliance

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Have you ever worked with a group of carpenters? Then asked to borrow a tool? In my experience it depends on the person, and the tool you ask for, but many are hesitant. Because as your experience grows, so do the selection, quality and personal connection to each tool. They want to know how you intend to use it, how long it’s going to be gone and when they’re going to get it back. More often the response might be, “Well, what are you trying to do?” or “Let me take a look and give you a hand.” Both because they want to help, and because tools are a personal kind of thing.

But what if you work in the creative, conceptual economy? And sharing ideas doesn’t mean surrendering something that can’t be recovered? Once you understand that sharing powerful ideas means creating value, and that hoarding only serves to allow good ideas to die with you, it becomes at once easy and fulfilling to give freely of the ideas you have. Often those enriching opportunities to give remain remote because we’re just too wrapped up in what we’re doing, and because often people just don’t know what to ask for. But recognition of good ideas to adopt is significantly easier than knowing what to ask. We just ‘know it when we see it.’

The other day we learned a fabulous solution when talking to a senior IT leader at a Fortune 500 financial services company. His group of engineers had a steady +/- efficiency rate of about 46%, and the needle hadn’t moved substantially in a few years. Yet he knew that from a competitive standpoint he had some of the best and brightest coders in his group. Here’s what he did: He first went around to some of the more inventive programmers in his group and asked if he could gather up and group some of their unique and valuable hacks and macros they had created in their work. He then grouped them by application and posted them internally on a wiki where other coders could go in, browse and borrow interesting and useful hacks and shortcuts to solve coding problems.

Pretty soon people in the group were adding and swapping their signature solutions and hacks in a shared environment – both benefiting from the collective wisdom of the other programmers and creating a fun environment to brand their work publicly. Efficiencies shot up to over 65% – both through the sharing and iterating on signature solutions, as well as the camaraderie and co-petitive environment created.

In the conceptual economy ideas are still tools, but we are able to share these ideas and still maintain the integrity and personality of thought, and benefit from an idea tool that comes back sharpened by another. And even if it doesn’t come back, we still get the joy and knowledge of having shared and knowing your unique ideation will live on through the work and voice of others.

The Human Factor Turnaround

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I was honored to interview Paul Hiltz last week in Cincinnati. Several years ago as the new CEO of Mercy Hospital, after a string of leaders before him had come and gone, one of the often side questions he would get was, “So how long do you intend to stay?” Paul never had any intention of leaving the hospital, even as it was losing almost 10% annually as a business. He started not only by providing a grand vision of excellence and profitability, but also by focusing on the people part.

Let me explain. You would expect the grand vision board meetings, and senior leadership meetings that happened. What you wouldn’t expect is that he spent much of his days not couped up behind closed doors, but out in the hospital learning the names of everyone who worked there, and what they cared about in their work environment. Paul first argued to the financial team that they should be investing in simple cosmetic and aesthetic improvements – paint, carpet, repairing or replacing damaged and old equipment. With these gestures of recognizing and knowing everyone in the hospital, and investing in the infrastructure and cosmetics, it gave everyone an uplifting sense of being a part of a rejuvinated place to work.

That was just one small part of the equation. Paul wasn’t done yet. The next thing he did was to hire healthcare financial advisors who conducted workshops to teach the caregivers and staff how the hospital financial model worked. People who had worked in healthcare for over a decade were surprised to find that some of the standard practices they had been engaging in to create value and positive revenue for the hospital, in fact had the inverse effect. Many of the ways in which they were working with patients had a negative financial effect, and they never knew until Paul brought in experts to help them understand how the business worked.

Throughout the last few years of Paul’s tenure, there has been very little of the headcount and project slash typically expected in turnaround efforts. True, Paul has helped to optimize some aspects of the hospital operations, but throughout the organization people will consistently say that what has been the most powerful and effective part of Paul’s efforts has been his ability to be present, persistent, genuine, honest, all despite immense financial pressures to perform.

In the face of adversity, think like Paul. Focus on the human aspect, because in the end it’s the people that make the difference.

Finding the Adjacent Possible

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paintingdrippingWhatever field you work in, your expertise is expected, it’s a given. So too your diligence. It is your initiative and creative ability to bring unique and signature solutions to solve unexpected problems that is your brand, and increasingly your company’s brand and identity. The question is how to find it? Or a better question – how can we create collaborative learning environments where we can have new ideas on a regular basis? Not in a mechanized on-demand sort of way, but rather create an ecosystem which encourages exploration of the adjacent possible.  More on that cool concept here from Steven Johnson.

Bill Taylor’s new book, Practically Radical, talks about three key elements to drive successful innovation:

  • To become the ‘most of something’. Check out the most successful organizations and people. They are all the most of something. There is no place in today’s high-pressured, rapidly-changing, killer-competitive world for anything less
  • To embrace a sense of vuja dé. Vuja dé is looking at a familiar situation as if you are seeing it for the very first time. This instantly opens up limitless imagination, and fresh insights and ideas
  • To look for fresh, new ideas in new places. Never compare yourself with what or who is considered best in your field. Learn from people and organizations that are way outside your field

If Bill is right (and I think he is) this has implications for how we develop learning environments for people in our organizations. The future of learning is must be to provide conceptual and powerful learning opportunities; opportunities which offer insight, ideas, and parables intended for inference and application by the learner. The outcomes of this kind of learning are quite unexpected, and by its very nature, bring in fresh insights and solutions. This is what makes the whole learning experience unique and beautiful.
To create the shift to conceptual learning, is to essentially balance the spoon-fed, outcome-anticipated, specific-competence results-oriented learning environments with more conceptual learning environments. This will treat learners as ready and able to distill ideas into their own signature integrated solutions, which are applicable for their line of work both internal and external. Success ensures that the experience is meaningful. This will then bring about the total shift to conceptual learning.

Tom Kelley, CEO of IDEO, a premier product and services innovation company, has been a long advocate of this approach. In his book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, he describes a particular persona called the “Cross-Pollinator”. Cross-Pollinators are those people who are inquisitive beyond their particular domain expertise and explore ideas from industries outside their immediate purview. They understand and learn the technology, device or methods employed elsewhere and figure out how to incorporate these ideas into their own work.

Go. Find the adjacent possible.

Want to Connect? Try the Power of Story

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You walk into a sandwich shop, order the yummy-sounding special and turn to the cooler to grab a drink. The usual representatives are there from major beverage providers. And then a cool photo and unique label catches your eye – something called Can of Whoopass by Jones Soda. This particular label is a photo of a horse taken by her owner in Manassas, VA, neat! You look again and each label and photo is different. And every photo label is contributed by a Jones Soda fan somewhere around the world. The labels are cool, unique, intriguing, and the soda isn’t bad either. You buy it. And the next time you come in to the sandwich shop too. It turns out Jones Soda is building the customer storyline into the product itself. You can go to their website, submit your own photo and contribute to the community experience. In his book, A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink highlights the story of Big Tattoo Red, a fine and affordable red wine made and sold by two brothers who are also donating 50 cents from each bottle sold to Hospice of Northern Virginia honor their mother who died of cancer. When presented with three equally drinkable and price-competitive wines, which one are you going to buy?

Enter the power of story. One of the greatest challenges you face as a manager, as a leader of other people, is making sure they remember the priorities that you have for them. Your goal is to get people around you to remember the core values and the way you would like them to behave, decide and perform on critical issues when you aren’t around them – which is most of the time. The problem you face, though, is the way the brain is wired. It is not wired to hold onto things. And the dilemma is that while you stand up and communicate your goals, your values, your vision for the organization, people are actually not retaining that easily. Now we know a lot from neuroscience about how the brain is wired to store information or memory. Despite the brains astonishing powers, it has a limited capacity for retention of message, depending on how it’s delivered.

Michael Hammer used to say, “The first fifty times you say it, they won’t hear you. The second fifty times you say it, they won’t understand you. And the third fifty times you say it, they won’t believe you.” Your challenge is to actually get your message, your goals, your key priorities to stick in their memory during those times when they are far from you in client meetings, strategy sessions, etc. One of the most powerful ways to communicate lasting messages is through the power of story. Stories can capture ideas succinctly and translate them to the listener through emotion. Consistent studies reveal that emotion drives behavior, which in turn creates belief. Not the other way around – it’s not that once you believe something, your behavior changes. The consistent behavior comes before belief. And one of the surest ways to ensure your message is both remembered, and acted on, is through the power of story.

Using Humor for Discovery

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I’m in Virginia this weekend visiting my mom, Bev Hunter, with my eldest son Charlie, and was reminded of the relationship between the Ha-ha of humor and the Ah-ha of discovery. Bev has been using humor as a therapeutic device for combating an illness (you can read in her blog), and I’ve been reminded of the power of using humor in finding new insights and ideas. As a gift she gave me a deck of creative thinking cards developed by Roger von Oech – each with their own little bit of creative provocation. I keep this deck in my bag everywhere I go and pull it out and try the next card in spare moments when reaching for new ideas.

Roger von Oech is a firm believer in using fun ideas to stimulate creativity. His company Creative Think was started in 1977. He is the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, and this Creative Whack Pack I keep handy. Oech believes in the power of ‘creative stimulants’ and ‘mental fresheners’. They stimulate the thinking process, and open the mind to creative ideas.

I’m in Roger’s camp, who says that humor can drive creativity and the process by which new and different ideas are produced. And, there is a practical angle to it. It has to work in the given situation, or adapted in a manner that can work in the particular situation. Oech recommends that organizations have an ‘innovation requirement’ in the performance plan of employees. This way, employees would also focus on looking for innovative solutions. Asking questions that stimulate their thinking, or putting them in situations which require them to think laterally, or giving them open-ended problems to solve would get their creative juices flowing. It is important for people to approach a problem from many and different points of view.

Having a sense of humor helps. It has been found that there is a close relationship between the ‘Ha-ha of humor and the A-Ha! of discovery,’ to quote Oech.

Employees with wide-ranging interests in fields other than their field of work, or area of specialization, or have absorbing hobbies are always more creative than those who only specialize in their field of work. How does one use peripheral vision? Here again, Oech has a suggestion: ‘Look for the second right answer.’ Most problems have many solutions. The deal is that you have to look for them – have to free the mind enough to see them. It is only then that all possibilities can be found.