Ideas

Ideas by Peter Freeth


What do you do with ideas? Do you nurture them and let them become new products and services, or do you dismiss them because they're not what you do? Come on, be honest with yourself…

It's really quite amazing how naturally creative we humans are, and it's equally amazing how completely demoralising and demotivating it is for us when that creativity is stifled.

If you're about to say "but we encourage creative ideas with our suggestion scheme" then I'm going to be ruthless and say that a suggestion scheme hinders creativity. If you have to create a business process to handle ideas then there's something very wrong, because you're effectively saying that the people who have ideas aren't able to pursue those ideas. An integral part of our creativity is being able to test our ideas and suggestion schemes prevent that from happening. Here's the sequence of events in a suggestion scheme:

Person A has a great idea so they submit it to the suggestion scheme (person B)

Person B dismisses the idea because it wasn't theirs and testing other people's wild ideas just means more work.

Person A is trained to suppress their creative urges.

So if you want to foster creativity, let people try out their own ideas.

Remember that people naturally learn by modelling behaviour - just as we all did as children. The most efficient way to train people isn't to tell them what to do - it's to get them doing it, regardless of what you think their learning style may be. Learning styles are what people do with their conscious brains whilst they're learning. If you promote an ideas scheme and then do nothing, you will train people to keep their ideas to themselves, regardless of the effort you put into the scheme.

Back in the 1970s, Blue Tits all over the UK started breaking into foil topped milk bottles. Scientists at the time couldn't figure out how the birds were learning this behaviour because their thinking assumed that birds are stupid, therefore one bird must have accidentally discovered that the milk bottle tops could be pecked through and all the other birds must have copied it. Cases of milk theft should start in one place and spread out over time, but what scientists actually saw was the behaviour emerging randomly, and they couldn't figure out how the birds were learning from each other so quickly.

The answer, as with all good answers, was very simple. The birds weren't as stupid as the scientists had thought, and they were properly motivated.

That particular winter was harsh and there wasn't a lot of food about. Blue Tits all over the UK were learning to steal milk from the bottles on people's doorsteps because it was the obvious thing to do. The idea had come of its time. There was no magic, no telepathy and no amazing leap in creativity.

Ideas have a time. No one person invented the wheel, or fire, or anything else. Darwin wasn't the first person to think about evolution, he was the first person to be famous for it. Some people throughout history have clearly been more prolific in writing their ideas down, and so we often think that some people are creative whilst others aren't. It might be more useful to think that everyone's equally creative, some people just have more faith in their own ideas than others.

Ideas are the currency of competitive advantage, and here's why:

Right now, all over the world, your competitors' employees are having the same great ideas as your employees. All that matters is who gets those ideas to market first.

Your employees aren't necessarily unique, but the culture in which their ideas flourish is.

Getting an idea to market means developing an idea to the stage where it positively impacts your business performance. It may be a new product or it may be a business process or even a new office layout. What's important is that it creates advantage. Sooner or later, all your competitors will have the same idea, so all that matters is the lead you have over them, and how you make the most of that lead.

Your survival depends on you being just one small step ahead, all the time.

Peter Freeth on Revelation