E20: Stop Worrying About the Novelty of Your Ideas

What if novelty is not the key to innovation? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to getthelenses.com and with that, let's get started with today's episode. For many, they equate novelty and innovation, that being different or being new is the thing that matters. But what if there is no such thing as a new idea? Mark Twain once said, there's no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into sort of a mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and then and they make new and curious combinations and we keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely. But they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages. And when I posted this on social media, there was an uproar, especially from the people in the creativity community, because they're like, of course there's new ideas. Well, look, maybe there are new ideas. But it seems as though when I've tried to check the genealogy of an idea, pretty much every single idea that somebody came up with was built on previous ideas. It wasn't like it was a blank sheet of paper. There was some level of improvement, of course, but it was building on the ideas of others. But you know, that's not really what I want to focus on in this podcast today, because maybe there are new ideas. It's a philosophical debate that neither side, I think will ever win. But the point I want to make is that the worth of an idea is not in its novelty, but rather in the value it creates. Because here's the thing, being different for the sake of being different does not mean people will want what you offer. The past is littered, just littered with really cool ideas that died quickly. The reason is they weren't really perceived as having enough that value in the minds of the buyers. Just because something is new, different or novel doesn't mean it actually is something people want to invest in. The key is to make sure that our innovations serve a need in the market. For many, when they look at innovation, it is an inside out endeavor. And what they do is they start internally looking at what they do well, what they're able to create, what skills they have. And they figure out we will create this based on what we are able to create, what we are good at. But what if instead innovation needs to be an outside in effort? What does the market need and want Even if they haven't articulated it yet, we want to build our innovation and our solutions around that. When I was at Accenture, I was one of the leads of our business process re engineering practice back in its heyday in the early 90s. And if you were around at that time, one of the things you will remember is, you know, walk into a room and there would be walls filled with butcher paper and post it notes. And we were redesigning a company's internal processes as a way to make them more efficient. And this was valuable because you were able to reduce time and cut costs and all of that great stuff. But there was something that we missed at that point. There was something that we missed. All of our redesign efforts were focused on the processes of the the company, but they didn't spend as much time redesigning their customers or clients processes. So when you start to understand the workflow of your customers, then you can get into their head. You can see what they do on a daily basis, you can see what their workflows are and then you can simplify that and that's when you're going to strike gold. And there's three questions I just want you to consider anytime that you are problem solving. The first one is what are your customers doing that they aren't doing well? And this is more of a process improvement type of thing. So they're doing something, but they need to be able to be more efficient at it or lower error rate, higher quality, whatever it might be, they want to get better at it. It's just something they already do and they know that they do it. The second one is what are your customers unable to do that they want to do? So this is something that they realize is a need, but it is not something they're able to do on their own. So now you're not just improving what they're doing, you're giving them a new capability, the ability to do something they weren't able to do before. And then the third question to consider is what could your customers do that they don't even know that they can do? And this is where you're really going to strike gold. Because now you're actually finding problems that the customers don't even know they have. And that to me is really the key is we want to build solutions around that. We want to build solutions around those three questions. So it's not an internal inside out focus, it is an outside in focus. And what that means is innovation is not about doing something cool just because you can just, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. So innovation is about addressing your customer's wants and needs, whether they are explicit or implicit. Now a few months ago I wrote an INC article and caused a little bit of an uproar again because it was all around there's no such thing as a new idea. And if you are interested in reading that article, I dig a little deeper into that one specific aspect and I will put that link in the show notes. So. So you can go deeper into the debate on that if you want. But today I want to focus more on the same old pieces of colored glass part from the Mark Twain quote. Steve Jobs once said, and I'm just paraphrasing here, creativity is having enough dots to connect. Creativity is having enough dots to connect. Dots being ideas or experiences. And the reason creative people are so is they've either had more experiences and where they've thought more about their experiences than other people. And I love this quote and I view it sort of as a modern day version of Twain's Colored Pieces of Glass because that's really what it is is we're saying creativity is about connecting things. Something that worked in one industry, bring it to a different industry. We had an idea that was a seed of an idea, let's build on it and expand it. It really is about making connections, connecting to the past, connecting to past concepts and bringing them together with something new. So in the end it might appear to be novel, but in most cases it's really just a combination of previously considered ideas pulled together in a novel way. And in some cases we're not even sure which ideas we were building on because they're so deeply ingrained in how we think. So the result might appear to be novel, but it's still built on old ideas. And there's a part of the Twain quote that I really like where he talks about the mental kaleidoscope. The mental kaleidoscope. And basically what he said is we simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into sort of a mental kaleidoscope and we give them a turn and we make new and curious combinations. And I just love that, that concept, that visual. And this mental kaleidoscope is exactly what I hoped to achieve with the lenses invisible solution. So all it does is it allows you to take, take what you thought was the problem statement and give it a turn and you'll look at it through a new light. You'll see it in a different way. Ten years ago I published the book Best Practices are Stupid and in that there was a chapter which talked about the importance of asking better questions as a means of driving better solutions. And what I found was people really liked that chapter. But readers struggled. They struggled because I talked about what to do, but not how to do it. So right after that book was published in 2011, I started to work on the how. Every time I reframed a problem for a client, I would step back and ask myself, what question did I ask that helped me arrive at the new problem statement? And every time I'd identify a new way of reframing, I put it in an Excel spreadsheet. And I cataloged these over the years. And right now I think I've got over 125 different lenses. Some of them are more valuable than others, some of them are used more often than others. And so I decided I need to find a way to summarize them into something others could use. And so for the purpose of the book, I decided to choose the 25 most valuable lenses, the ones that I would use the most, that I think everybody could use pretty much all the time. And I grouped them into five categories. And you can go to getthelenses.com to download the lenses. You can see all the categories. But right now, today I just want to focus in on one of those five categories, which is the zero in category. That's everything that we've been talking about today. So far in today's episode, I've talked about the need to address a need to solve an important problem that your customers have. This is the basis of these zero in lenses. They're designed to help you make sure you are solving the right problem. And in this category there are five lenses. There's real problem, real business, insights, variations and observation. In the last episode I talked extensively about lens number 24, the variations lens. And I think this is a very powerful lens. Lens number 21, the real problem lens, is exactly what you would think it would be. It's making sure you're solving the real problem. And that's a lot of what I've talked about so far. In future episodes, I will most likely discuss lenses number 23 and 25, the insights and observation lenses. These are the tools for gathering information to make sure you are solving the right problem. But today I want to Explore lens number 22, the real business lens, as this one I think is really fascinating and it has personally had a huge impact on my business. We often make assumptions about what business we are truly in. So for example, Kodak assumed it was in the film business. And although they developed the digital camera in the 1970s, it was rejected because it didn't use film. If you're in the film business, it better have film. But maybe the real business for Kodak was capturing and sharing moments. Film was the how and now irrelevant how and the moments. Well, that was the why and the what. Make sure when you're looking at your business, your business isn't designed around a particular how, but it is designed around a particular why or what. And I've seen the same thing in my business. So when I left Accenture 20 years ago, I wanted to be an author and a speaker. I wanted to publish books and travel the world and give presentations on stages. And although this was a big part of my business and a viable part of my business, over time I realized it was not my business. Could be for someone else, but it's not my business. And when you view your business through the lens of being in the speaking business, you're only looking for speeches. But what I realized is that I'm actually in the innovation and problem solving business. Yes, my speeches are one way that I can deliver that content. The how, but it's not my business. My business is helping companies innovate and solve their most difficult problems. And even subtleties of language can have an impact here. So am I in the problem solving business, or am I in the business of helping people solve their own problems? One implies I do the work, which is a consulting business model. The other one means I provide tools and methods for people so that they can do it on their own. So instead of going fishing and giving them a fish, I teach them to fish. Old metaphor, consulting is not easily scalable, but developing and productizing tools and processes, well, that can be. And I really wanted a scalable business. And this is why, and I'm happy to announce here on this podcast, is that I've launched something called the Problem Solving Institute. If you go to the problem solvinginstitute.com or check the show notes for the link, you'll be able to see the suite of offerings that I have. And yes, workshops and keynotes are part of that. But they are part of it. They are the start, not the finish. So shifting away from being a speaker to someone who helps companies innovate and solve their own problems, well, now that has opened up new opportunities. And by the way, it's not just opened up opportunities for what I offer, but it also has changed the way I sell, the way I market. So getting your real business right is critical. Because in the past, if I'm trying to sell 50, 60 speeches a year, I know that I have to make a lot of connections in order to get that many. But now I'm looking for five clients a year. Where we go deep, we go deep and I make a huge transformational impact in the organization. Well, now social media maybe not quite as important. It's not the size of my list, it's not about the quantity of the people. I'm actually focusing on past relationships. So changing the business doesn't just change what you offer, it changes how you market, how you sell and how you run your business. This is a business model transformation, very powerful. One example that I love that is it really just, I think illustrates the power of this type of thinking is ups. And UPS is a great example of how sometimes technology can force you to fundamentally reevaluate. What business are you in, what industry are you actually serving? UPS is known for moving physical goods from one location to another using trucks and planes. So their investments in self driving vehicles, well that makes a lot of sense because, well, that's part of what they do and that's certainly what they do today. But what's really fascinating is they see a potentially more disruptive technology that's coming down the line. And it's not Amazon and it's not drones and it's not self driving trucks, it's 3D printing. Now think about 3D printing. You don't have to have anything shipped other than emailing a blueprint. You push a button and out of the 3D printer, out comes whatever it is that you want. And these are really starting to take off. I mean in Australia There is a 3D printer that prints the fuselage for planes. BMW has a 3D printed motorcycle frame. So these things are starting to take shape. So if you are basically emailing the blueprint and the 3D printer prints it, there's no need to ship a physical product. And so ups, what they've done is they've launched their on demand 3D printing manufacturing network. This is designed to help them get ahead of the game in the world of 3D printing. And also in conjunction with that, they've started to add 3D printing capabilities to a number of their stores. And so the real business in some respects, if you think about it, is shifting from trucks and planes, which again is the how, that's how they deliver to other forms of delivery. What do we do? We deliver, how do we deliver it? Trucks, planes and 3D printing. So in today's episode we started off with the question, is there anything new under the sun? Is there any new ideas? And again, philosophical debate can't win that one. Whether there is, there isn't, doesn't matter. The point is we want to focus on value. We want to focus on relevancy. Are we offering something of value to our customers, to our market, so that we can stay relevant? And the way we do that is taking an outside in approach rather than an inside out approach. And once we start doing that, we can play with these the mental kaleidoscope that Mark Twain talked about or connecting the dots that Steve Jobs talked about. But the key is it's not about novelty, but it's solving for a want and need that someone else has. That's the real business lens. Because the real business lens is saying, what business are you in? And in many cases, we've defined our businesses based on how we deliver, what we deliver, rather than why and what we need to deliver. So with that, we are at the end of this week's episode. As always, to submit problems you want solved in the podcast, go to invisiblesolutionspodcast.com to download the lenses, go to getthelenses.com check the show notes for the link to my Ink article and to the Problem Solving Institute. I look forward to being with you next week. Until then, happy problem solving.