creativity Archives - Planet Positive Change

Fast Failure For Innovation

December 7, 2016 by Gill Thackray Leave a Comment

Failure makes an uncomfortable bedfellow. Many business spend their time focusing upon performance goals avoiding mistakes or trying to shift them elsewhere when they happens. In many start ups and established businesses the resulting blame culture stifles and shuts down innovation as employees fear the aftermath of failure. The problem with this is that innovation is an inherent unknown, it’s value lies in discovery by trial and error and that path is littered with the carcasses of failure.

Celebrating Failure

Many start ups, especially in the tech world are turning the traditional paradigm of failure avoidance on it’s head. Google subsidiary, X, the company’s research lab led by Astro Teller, or “Captain of Moonshots” is a failure evangelist. X works firmly in the future rather than the present. Think AI, Google Brain, the driverless car, Project Loon or Project Calico researching life extension none of these would have come into being if Google fostered a blame culture. With a fail fast mantra firmly focused on the future, this culture incubates the art of possibility, of what could be rather than what is. In fact, Teller goes one step further actively encouraging experimentation by celebrating and rewarding failure (see our blog on Moonshots for more on this). This organisational culture embraces error reporting, shunning shaming and cover up. Proving Stanford Business Professor, Baba Shiv’s claim that failure truly is “The mother of innovation.”

Creating a No-Blame Culture For Innovation

Researchers at the Johannes Kepler Universitat (Rami, U. & Gould, C. 2016. From a “Culture of Blame” to an Encouraged “Learning from Failure Culture”. Business Perspectives and Research) found 3 drivers necessary to shift away from a blame culture.

Act on covering up errors. If they’re hidden you can’t learn from them. This comes from the top and is usually influenced by leadership style. A punitive, authoritarian leader is less likely to persuade employees to discuss and learn from failure than a delegative, authentic leader who listsens. Genuine conversations need to take place around the value of error and it’s inherent correlation with innovation. Take a leaf from Google’s dream leader, Teller and throw a failure party.
Error communication. The research found that employees in fast paced organisations with elevated workloads were more likely to report their errors. Where error was caused by lack of knowledge or training it was less likely to be reported. One of the most important factors in error reporting was peer support. This requires a people focused leadership style along with trust, transparency and openness.
Social backing. This is really about buy in and trust. Employees need to believe that their colleagues have bought into no blame, error reporting. They also need to trust in the leadership team and that there is a real investment in innovation through fast failing. If employees secretly believe that the honesty required for error reporting will come back to bite them on the ass, your culture of innovation will fall down at the first hurdle.

12 Steps to Creating A Failure Friendly Innovative Culture

If you’re building a start up or leading an established business these steps are necessary to shift from a blame culture to an innovative learning culture.

Model the behaviour you want to by admitting your own mistakes. A learning culture instead of a blame culture starts at the top.
Discourage your managers from promoting a purely task focused performance culture.
Promote open error reporting for large and small errors equally.
Examine your systems, do they support or reward error outing rather than creative discussion?
Ensure that all employees prevent error cover up.
Place the spotlight on error management rather than people blame.
Make sure that you have buy in from your leadership team to create a constructive error culture
Cultivate a culture of discussion, creative debate and non-judgement
Shine the light of error responsibility on procedures and systems rather than people.
Make sure than competency and knowledge deficit is reduced by training your people.
Celebrate and reward failure in a tangible way.
When you enjoy a success borne out of failure communicate it to all levels of your organisation.

Want to know more about creating a no-blame culture or building innovation and creativity? We offer consultancy, training, bitesize, half day or one day training courses along with conference sessions on how to build effective organisations. Contact us at admin@planetpositivechange.com to find out more. We’d love to talk with you.

What’s Your Moonshot?

November 29, 2016 by Gill Thackray Leave a Comment

Are You Shooting For The Moon?

Maybe you’ve thought about your core values, your mission statement or your vision but what about your moonshot? Yes, your moonshot. Mission, values and vision can often sit on a shelf gathering dust with barely anyone other than the people who came up with them knowing what they are. A moonshot is different.

Originating from the Apollo and Soviet lunar programmes aiming to land humans on the moon, the term is now common business parlance. A moonshot is a long term business goal, an audacious ambition or innovative project. Google subsidiary, X, the company’s research lab refer to their most ambitious projects as moonshots. Led by Astro Teller, or “Captain of Moonshots” X works firmly in the future rather than the present. Think AI, Google Brain, the driverless car, Project Loon or Project Calico researching life extension. Like Google X the moonshot is firmly focused on the future, the art of possibility, of what could be rather than what is. A moonshot is something to aim for. It inspires your organisation at every level.

Moonshots are bold. They look beyond strategy towards the future. They are extraordinary projects or proposals that fulfil the following criteria;

It addresses a problem, a big one
It proposes a radical solution
It utilises innovative thinking & technology

Teller takes the moonshot one step further by;

Addressing the hardest part of the project first. This is a kind of natural selection, culling unsuitable projects in this phase. Teller describes this as identifying the Achilles heel early on rather than wasting time and money only to discover it later.
Rewarding failure. We know from the work of Carol Dweck that learning by failure is the way to go. When a project is killed off in the culling phase, staff are rewarded. Failure is celebrated rather than brushed under the carpet.

Moonshots are game changers. They design the future rather than simply following the herd. So if you’re a business, start up or tech company looking to innovate, forget business as usual and follow our 6 step plan.

Identify the problem – think huge ideas rather than bitesized.
Along with your big idea there needs to be the potential to overcome the problem (this part is mission impossible rather than mission tricky)
Form a team of committed, motivated, collaborative experts.
Work out what the most difficult aspect of the project is and set to work.
Foster a growth mindset. Learn from and celebrate failure.
Get buy in to the project at every level of your business.
Get to work and reach for the stars.

Want to find out more about innovation, moonshots, growth mindset or anything else involved in reaching for the stars? Contact us at admin@planetpositivechange.com we’d love to hear from you. Check out our creativity and innovation training on our courses page to find out more.

Tools to fire creativity and Innovation

September 16, 2015 by Vivienne Dutton Leave a Comment

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Einstein.

Firing creativity and innovation

When you want to make a change in life, be it at work or at home, knowing where to start can be a challenge. When you want to ignite your creative spark and come up with groundbreaking, exciting and innovative ideas, which is more important, imagination or knowledge?

How existing knowledge can block new ideas

When faced with the challenge of finding new ways to do something that’s very familiar, our existing knowledge can hold us back. When you’ve already completed a task, like brushing your teeth, thousands of times before, it can be difficult to imagine how the task could be completed differently. When we’re engrossed in familiar tasks and situations we can even fail to register new and unexpected things that are clearly within our field of vision. A classic example of this is the following video, watch the ball closely and count how many times it is passed between players wearing white t-shirts.

Did you notice anything unusual about one of the players? This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness , and is a psychological inability to see something unexpected that is plainly in our sight.

Taking a fresh look at the familiar

One of the key techniques for developing creative thinking and innovation is practicing the ability to view the familiar in different ways. So what practical tools can be used to fire creativity and innovation?

One great tool that enables us to look at the familiar through a fresh lens is a technique created way back in the 1950’s by Professor Robert Crawford, known as the Attribute Listing technique. You can use this technique by following these three simple steps:

Attribute Listing Technique for creativity and innovation

List the attributes

Take the object, concept or item that you’re working on and list as many attributes as you can. So, for example, an envelope has attributes of ‘paper’, it ‘holds something’ etc.

You might want to reduce the object to its separate parts and examine the attributes of each part in turn. So the envelope can be further reduced to the attributes of paper, glue, folds. The paper can the be broken down further and more attributes describes, such as ‘large’, ‘smooth’, ‘expensive’, ‘coloured’, ‘strong’ etc.

Consider the importance of each attribute

Examine the significance and value of each attribute by asking what it provides or offers. For every attribute, ask ‘What is the real value provided?’ and ‘what does this give us’? You may even find some negative attributes during this part of the exercise.

An example might be that the envelope has the positive attribute of being light and flexible but it may also have the negative attribute of being weak or insubstantial. Another negative attribute might be that the envelope can only be re-used a limited number times.

Modify attributes

Next, choose the key attributes and establish ways in which they might be modified. Examine how you can increase value, establish new value and eliminate or reduce negative attributes.

With our envelope example, we could modify the negative attribute of the paper being weak by changing the material the envelope is made of into something more durable, like thin neoprene. Using thin neoprene could also make the envelope much more reusable.

Attribute Listing works by reducing the problem to its smallest components and examining each component in a way that, ordinarily, we would never do. When we look at a familiar problem, with this fresh approach, we gain a new insight and perspective that leads to creativity and innovation.

For more great tips on developing creativity, see Julie Burstein’s Ted Talk:

5 top tips to unlock creativity

May 11, 2015 by Vivienne Dutton Leave a Comment

When confronted with a creative problem what can be done to encourage the creative process?

A connection between mood and creativity

Psychologist, Adam Anderson, explored the connection between mood and thought processes by inducing a positive, negative or neutral mood in 24 study participants. Specific moods were induced by playing specially selected pieces of music to subjects. After each piece of music, participants were given two tasks to complete, the tasks focused on creativity and concentration.

In one example of a creative task, used by Anderson, participants were asked to think of a word that links the following set of words:

Mower, Atomic, Foreign

Participants were asked to think beyond words commonly associated with the above words, words like “lawn,” “bomb” and “currency”. Instead, participants were encouraged to think creatively to solve the puzzle and reach the less obvious answer of “power.”

Looking through a porthole or choosing a panoramic view

Anderson found that participants in a happy mood were much better at completing the creative task. Anderson explains, “With positive mood, you actually get more access to things you would normally ignore …instead of looking through a porthole, you have a landscape or panoramic view of the world.” Others have likened the effect mood has on thought to a powerful torch beam; a negative mood creates a narrow, sharply focused beam, whereas a positive mood creates a broad, far reaching, wide beam.

In another test, Anderson monitored participants brain activity whilst showing them a picture of a person’s face with a house in the background, such as the picture below.

Participants were asked to establish whether the face in the picture was that of a male or female and told to focus solely on the face. Anderson wanted to establish which areas of the brain would be active when participants looked at the picture, the area that showed focus on the house or the area of the brain that revealed focus on the face.

Anderson discovered that when a positive emotion was induced, the focus was on the house. Even though participants were instructed to only focus on the face, a positive emotion compelled them to take in the bigger picture. When participants were placed in a negative mood, they paid no attention to the house, focusing firmly on the face.

Weapon focus

How a negative mood impacts the way we process information is clearly illustrated by the well known phenomenon of “weapon focus.” The phrase describes the concentrated focus of someone who is experiencing negative emotions. The term “weapon focus” originates from the behaviour of those held at gunpoint, when fear and anxiety is extreme, individuals are often able to describe the gun in detail but unable to describe the person holding the weapon when questioned after the event.

5 tips to boost creativity by promoting a positive mood

1. Create a positivity soundtrack. Anderson selected specific music to induce positive or negative moods. Use this technique to your advantage by creating your own positivity soundtrack.

2. Collect positive quotes. When you find yourself inspired, motivated and energised by the words of others, make a note of them. Place your favourite quotes where you can see them often and replace or add new quotes regularly as this can stimulate our creative senses more than looking at the same words each day.

3. Focus on pictures that make you happy. For some of us, pictures ebonite and make our passions soar. Make sure that your favourite pictures, that prompt happy feelings, are prominently places.

4. Compile a list of happy activities. When you need to get creative, it can be helpful to have a list of activities to hand that you already know will put you in a positive mood. You might want to divide the list into quick activities and those that require more time. Activities often noted for inducing positive emotions are spending time in nature, going for a run or watching a comedy.

5. Spend time with others. Socialising with friends who have a wide range of interests can both broaden our perspective and induce a positive, creative mood. Regularly build time into your schedule to spend time with friends that leave you feeling inspired or develop new connections that broaden your outlook.

Like some more tips to develop creativity? Watch Julie Burstein & Kurt Anderson sharing how creativity works.

Get creative to improve your memory

April 30, 2015 by Vivienne Dutton Leave a Comment

Do you dream about following your creative passions? Have you ever wondered if you could be the next Annie Liebowitz, David Hockney or J.K. Rowling?

Maybe you’re yet to explore your creative side or perhaps you already spend time flexing your creative strengths? New research suggests that pursuing creative activities can guard against dementia by maintaining and improving memory.

Can creative activity make a difference to memory?

The Mayo Clinic’s National Institute of Aging studied 256 patients, with an average age of 87, over four years. The study, led by Rosebud Roberts was recently published in the American Journal of Neurology. Roberts found that people who regularly followed their creative passions were much less likely to experience memory and thinking problems (known as mild cognitive impairment or MCI) in later life.

The participants in the study reported how often they spent time on each of the following activities:

1. artistic activities such as painting and sculpting;

2. craft activities, like woodworking, ceramics and sewing;

3. computer activities, such as playing games, using the internet and making purchases online.

4. socialising, for example, travelling or attending activities such as the theatre, cinema and concerts.

The positive effects of creative activity on memory

After four years, Roberts found that 121 of the patients had developed mild memory and thinking problems (MCI). The participants who reported undertaking artistic activities in mid and later life were 73% less likely to experience memory and thinking problems than those who did not engage in any artistic activities.

Participants who socialised through activities like travelling, going to the cinema and theatre in mid and later life were 55% less likely to develop memory and thinking difficulties than those who didn’t socialise.

Those who engaged in craft activities in mid and later life were 45% less likely to experience mild cognitive impairment than those who did no craft activities and those who used computers in later life were 53% less likely to experience MCI.

Why are creative activities good for the brain?

Researcher, Rosebud Roberts, explained,“Our study supports the idea that engaging the mind may protect neurons, or the building blocks of the brain, from dying, stimulate growth of new neurons, or may help recruit new neurons to maintain cognitive activities in old age.”

So time spent pursuing creative passions is not only fun but may also provide the additional benefit of maintaining memory and guarding against dementia.

3 tips for adopting a creative routine

1. Choose one creative activity.Whatever your age, choose one creative activity that you are passionate to try and work out a plan to fit it into your schedule on a regular basis.

2. Make time to try different activities. A variety of activities will use different parts of the brain, this not only protects against mild cognitive impairment but also ensures new neurons develop.

3. Socialise. Accept opportunities to socialise or invite others to try a new activity or simply enjoy the benefits of time spent together.

Want to build your creative confidence? Watch this TED Talk by David Kelley:

4 powerful steps to spark creativity

April 24, 2015 by Vivienne Dutton Leave a Comment

Do you long to develop your creative side but don’t know where to begin?

Can you develop creativity?

Psychologists have long delved deep into the world of creativity. The research delivers good news – creativity can be developed. Robert Epstein, psychologist and author of “The Big Book of Creativity Games”, explains that there is little evidence to support the existence of an elusive ‘creativity gene.’ Instead Epstein suggests that creativity is a skill which, with effort, we can all develop.

Fellow psychologist and creativity expert, Jonathan Plucker, agrees that we can develop creativity. He explains, “As strange as it sounds, creativity can become a habit.” Plucker’s research also suggests that developing the habit of creativity can also help us to become more productive.

The evidence for building a creative habit

Epstein’s research suggests that by developing certain habits we can build creativity and generate a host of new ideas. Epstein worked with seventy-four city employees from Orange County in California and actively engaged them in creativity training seminars. The city employees participated in games and exercises developed by Epstein to strengthen their abilities to perform four skill sets. Epstein followed up with the employees after eight months and found that they’d increased their rate of new idea generation by 55 percent. The employees new ideas resulted in $600,000 in new revenue and saved approximately $3.5 million by implementing innovative cost saving measures.

4 steps to a more creative you

So how can we develop the habit of creativity and reap the benefits of a creative mind? Epstein’s research points to four key skills:

1. Don’t let your new ideas slip away. Make a note of all your great ideas as they come to you. Keep your ‘new ideas’ log in a way that works best for you, send yourself texts, use a notebook app on your phone or tablet, record your ideas or carry a notebook.

2. Take on challenging tasks. Seek out tasks that don’t present an obvious solution. Part of the creative process involves combining different ideas and things that we’ve learned to create new ideas. When old ideas compete to find a solution, new ideas are born.

3. Broaden your knowledge. Take an interest in a variety of subjects rather than focusing on one specialism. The more subjects you understand, the broader your knowledge base is for connecting subjects. Epstein believes this to be the linchpin of creative thought. Epstein’s research suggests that this approach improves performance in all areas of life.

4. Surround yourself with interesting people and objects. Spend time with friends and colleagues who have interesting passions. Friends with different interests to your own are a great source of new information. Surrounding yourself with objects of interest can also help to develop new ideas. Explore new activities and places. Visit a city, attend a play or watch a film to promote new ideas.

Hear Robert Epstein talking about his work on creativity and explain how pigeons and bananas ignited new ideas for his creativity research.