E33: Don't Think Outside the Box

What if instead of thinking outside the box, you want to find a better box? 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 with that. Let's get started with today's episode. This week I bring you chapter four from my book Best Practices are Stupid. Every other week I will release a new chapter from the book here on my Invisible Solutions podcast and there are 40 chapters in total. In chapter one, I discuss the three levels of innovation, Innovation as an event, innovation as a capability, and innovation as a system. In chapter two, we explored how to create an innovation capability and what it means. And then last week we explored why asking for ideas is a bad idea. And now we get to chapter four, another cornerstone of my innovation work. Chapter four Don't Think Outside the Box Find a Better Box Leaders of organizations often use the expression think outside the box while urging their employees to innovate. The belief is that eliminating constraints and allowing people to think freely will increase creativity. Although this blank slate method to innovation is conventional wisdom, this unbounded approach actually reduces creativity and leads to abstract or impractical solutions. A television script writer in Hollywood once told me he actually liked the idea of creativity within constraints as it gave him a starting point and then he could riff from there. Instead of telling your employees to think outside the box, give them a better box to innovate inside of. These constraints will actually increase creativity and lead to useful solutions. Einstein reputedly said, if I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem, one minute finding solutions. And from my experience, most organizations spend the full 60 minutes finding solutions to problems that don't matter. Now, I do want to point out that Einstein never actually said that. What he said is equally profound. Let me share that with you right now. He said that the mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution. Let me say that again, the mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution. He then continues to say, to raise new questions, new possibilities. To regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science. The key is that well defined challenges guide innovation efforts, provide useful constraints and define that better box Challenge Centered Innovation all companies have challenges. They can be technical challenges on how to create a particular chemical compound. They could be a marketing challenge on how to best describe your product to increase market share. They could be HR challenges around improving employee engagement or today getting new talent. Or they could be process improvements. Let's face it, your organization has no shortage of problems and you can find these everywhere from your customers, employees, shareholders, consultants, vendors, competitors and more. An organization's ability to change, that is Innovate, hinges on its ability to identify and solve these challenges and obviously ultimately implement them. So why do we care about challenge centered innovation? Well, there's a number of inherent advantages to using a challenge centered approach over an idea driven approach to innovation. Now we talked about some of the downsides of idea driven innovation in the previous chapter, Chapter three. There are really three primary advantages to challenge centered innovation. And the first one is that challenges are the best way to ask your employees, customers or any community for help because it allows them to focus their energies on finding solutions that will ultimately be relevant to the needs of the organization and the market. The second reason is because of the nature of challenges, there are tools we can use to actually evaluate the amount of time spent finding solutions. So when it's done properly, you can measure the ROI of each challenge and your overall challenge centered program. And the last advantage is that with a challenge centered approach, you can actually flip things on its head. You can actually assign owners, sponsors, resources, funding evaluators and evaluation criteria before, before you start investing valuable time into looking for and implementing solutions. So let's explore this last point a little more deeply. What are the things that we want to do up front before we start trying to find solutions to challenges? Well, the first thing is we want to assign an owner and sponsor. In nearly every situation a challenge has a home, someone who wants this problem solved. Therefore, you want to assign the owner of the challenge up front because this ensures that when you get a solution, you can move things forward quickly. And having an executive sponsor also means that you have somebody who will provide that support from an executive level. Next, you want to make sure that you have resources and funding to implement any solution. You will need people and money. Given the importance and scope of a challenge, allocate these resources up front so that when a solution is found, you don't need to scramble, you have everything ready. Next, you want to have evaluators. When solutions are submitted, you want to have a team of people to evaluate the submissions. So you want to have evaluators in place who understand the big picture and will help ensure that the best solutions are selected. And finally, a critical one is evaluation criteria. And this one's really important. You want to establish the evaluation criteria before posing the challenge, essentially creating a self vetting process. This helps the people providing solutions know the boundaries that their solutions must meet, preventing fluffy or irrelevant answers. It also allows you to be very objective when choosing the best solutions. Let's face it, the idea driven approach to innovation does not allow for any of the above. With well defined challenges, all of these are possible. The difference between the idea driven approach and the challenge centered approach is analogous to two different fishing techniques. The idea driven approach is like choosing a random spot in the middle of the ocean and casting an extraordinarily expansive net. While using this untargeted approach, you might get some fish, but you're also going to get some shoes, tires, seaweed and a bunch of undesirable items. And the fish you do catch probably are not the specific type you want. Contrast this with the fishing approach where you purposefully locate a school of fish and then deliberately select the appropriate rod, reel, line, leader, bait and hook for catching exactly that type of fish, effectively minimizing waste and maximizing effort. As the old expression goes, if you want to catch fish, go where the fish are. This is the challenge centered approach. Establishing boundaries does not necessarily put constraints on innovation. In actuality, if done correctly, it has the capacity to dramatically enhance creativity and increase organizational effectiveness. So the next time you're tempted to say think outside the box, think again. Since writing this book, coming back to Hollywood for a moment, I had an opportunity to pitch my own TV show based on personality poker. And we had 10 major networks interested in this show. Never happened, but it was an awesome experience because I got to work with an agent, a major agent in Hollywood. And I remember this one meeting and we were talking about thinking outside the box and creativity. And at some point he smacks his hand on the table in the conference room and he said, in Hollywood, we don't think outside the box, we think around the box. And the room went silent. And then he continued and he said that in Hollywood, the networks buy what they know. They're not looking to buy something that's new, novel or creative. They're looking for formula that's going to work. So when pitching a show, it has to be connected to something that they already understand. Think around the box, think about a past show, and now add your own unique and special twist to it. Now, as you're listening to this, you might be thinking, wow, that really limits creativity because now we're just going to get formulaic television shows. But keep in mind the definition of innovation. It's not about new, novel, or different or even creative. The definition innovation is value. And how do Most networks define value. It's a combination of eyeballs watching shows and advertising revenues. So if you are able to convince an audience that a show is going to be related to something that you like, well, then they're going to make money from it. And you could have a long philosophical debate as to whether this is good for television, bad for Hollywood or whatever. But the point is, this is how people make decisions. So even in Hollywood, a place where you think at least there's some level of creativity even there, they don't think outside the box. So that is chapter four, with a few extra thoughts there at the end in chapter five. In chapter five, we're going to cover a perspective that I believe is critical for driving breakthrough innovation. It is why expertise is the enemy of innovation. And we'll explore different strategies for leveraging what you know and tapping into the knowledge of others. And with that, we are at the end of this week's episode. To submit problems you want solved on the regular problem solving version of this podcast, go to invisiblesolutionspodcast.com and remember to download the lenses, go to getthelenses.com I look forward to being with you next week. And until then, happy problem solving. It.