Are ideas really ‘a dime-a-dozen’?
The case for more robust idea generation.
This article highlights a common tendency to underrate the value of starting with good ideas or underestimate the importance of having a robust system for more conscious and creative thinking at any stage of the innovation journey.
THE story of the Russians solving the problem of biros not working in space with a simple lead pencil while NASA wasted piles of money on research into a ‘space pen’ is a much-shared tale. One which is slightly less known is its own lightbulb moment…
After having landed a man on the moon, the United States and the then Soviet Union were competing in a quest to explore the dark side. Some of the smartest engineers in the world were put on the project. Unable to send up a manned ship, the Soviet Union decided to launch an unmanned lunar probe to take an autonomous vehicle over to the dark side. The light source was the incandescent lightbulb. The problem was that they would not survive the impact of landing on the lunar surface; the lightbulbs kept breaking!
Even the toughest bulbs cracked during tests. A major project was launched to figure out how to strengthen the glass bulb. The situation was reported to the director of the moon landing project who queried the role of the lightbulb. Clearly the bulb served to seal a vacuum around the filament. However, given that this was an oxygen-free environment, it wasn’t required.
The solution was simple: they needed to remove what they had thought was an essential component: the bulb. The filament burnt happily in space without the bulb and the team were left looking at each other wondering ‘Why on earth didn’t I think of that?’.
How could they have reached this point faster? How could they have checked for biases and blind spots earlier?
We often hear innovation experts say:
‘Everyone has ideas.’
‘Coming up with ideas is not a problem. The problem is implementation.’
‘Ideas fail because of poor testing.’
Methods such as agile and lean start-up have put a great deal of focus on testing, learning from mistakes, failing fast and seeing the cycle as iterative and not linear.
This has been an invaluable shift in that it has put the spotlight on the user, has helped avoid ideation hallucination and may protect us from subsequent commercial failures. It may also counter risk aversion by encouraging iterative learning. Between this trend, however, and the fundamental rule of brainstorming that ‘no idea is a bad idea’, we may have forgotten that there is time and money and a competitive edge to be gained by starting out with inventive ideas from the outset, in what we call the ‘ideation phase’.
There is also a lot to be gained from knowing how to de-bias our ideas throughout the lifetime of a process or a project. Applying a rigorous approach to busting biases and challenging assumptions is just as important mid-project as at the outset.
‘INVENTIVE STRESS TESTING’
I was invited to speak at a conference in Auckland. Most of the attendees were engineers from construction companies. A speaker stood up and shared the work he and the team were doing in managing a major tunnelling project. It was extremely impressive. The guy clearly knew his stuff. We applauded him warmly as he left the stage and I made my way over to chat with him before he left.
“So that was great!” I began. “But do you have a way of constantly challenging and checking your work to ensure that a more elegant or creative solution has not been missed?”
“We do, but we don’t have a specific method or process to do it in a systematic way,” he replied.
We demonstrate extreme diligence when it comes to project management and safety. We set up monitoring and the means to check our work but we are not applying the same rigour to the inventiveness of our ideas. Why wouldn’t we do inventive stress testing on a regular basis?
IDEATE ROBUSTLY — ON DEMAND
Not only does ideation need to be undertaken with more rigour but teams should be coming up with de-biased ideas and ‘inventively stress testing’ their systems, services, processes and concepts throughout the life of a project or the implementation of an idea.
In December 2019, I was working with a long-term client and one of the senior project managers gave me a new brief. Her email to me showed that she had understood the power of scanning for bias. It read something like this:
“I want to have done my homework and be sure that the Basis Of Design is as good as it can be. We want to be certain we got this right. We need to eliminate any issues with the structure before the execution phase. Let’s check for our biases and flush out all the inventive ideas we can. I do not want to realise six months in that there was something clever right under my nose that could have improved the weight, the schedule, the cost or the operational safety.”
So how would you go about doing this while the wheels are turning? Here are four simple thought experiments to try at any stage of a project. Each one is a simplified version of a Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) thinking tool.
i. If you suspect you might be missing something or making assumptions about what can go and what must stay, try systematically removing elements that you consider essential, one by one. Visualise the new virtual system. Describe it. Stay with it for a few minutes and then check on the desirability, feasibility and viability filters. Make any necessary adaptations. What are you left with?
ii. If you are on a tight budget (who isn’t?) and feel that you might be missing something that could solve your problem, work systematically through the resources you already have and explore how each one might be repurposed to do a different job. This may help identify a resource that could be given additional function and may spare you substantial costs and time. As with the above, don’t reject this too soon: visualise the new virtual system. Describe it. Stay with it for a few minutes and then check on the desirability, feasibility and viability filters. Make any necessary adaptations. What are you left with?
iii. If you have a process that you need to rethink, explore what new opportunities you unearth if you randomly move a step in time or space. Visualise the new system. Expect to f ind it absurd or dysfunctional. Describe it. Sit with it and then check on the desirability, feasibility and viability filters. Capture the idea and test it out if it survived the filtering process. Reiterate the process with another step.
iv. If you are exploring alternative business models you may find it powerful to learn to apply the same thinking. Many organisations are familiar with Strategyzer’s ‘Business Model Canvas’ that helps you illustrate, summarise and develop core building blocks of your business model. Play with some of the ideas above in your canvas to see how it helps you innovate your business model or just challenges your thinking. As with most tools, the value lies in the quality of the questions you ask of it. For example, in a given business model, what if you now have two distinct and different value propositions? What would they be and for whom?
Or what if you were to subtract your most essential revenue stream or activity? What would you do instead?
Or if you apply Division as in iii, you could explore the impact of dividing any of the building blocks into parts and moving
them in space or time or, alternatively, moving a segment in time. What if, for example, revenue came first?
I have not yet encountered an organisation where this sort of thinking didn’t help shortcut to more creative ideas; ideas that have already been ‘bias-tested’.
Ideas are not cheap. Good ideas are hard work.
Regardless of the stage you are in a project or the implementation of an idea, and whatever the area of application (system design, process, productivity, marketing…) this type of scanning for bias and ‘inventive stress-testing’ will improve ideas and could save you time, money and the agony of a good idea too late.
Rachel is a facilitator and coach in strategic marketing and innovation. She is a certified trainer in Systematic Inventive Thinking. She is the author of ‘UNBLINKERED — The quirky biases that get in the way of creative thinking…and how to bust them’ available here.
