Shake up your Thinking with Dr Ken Hudson

Enter The Speed Thinking Zone

I have discovered something that I believe can have a profound impact on most people’s loves. It is called Speed Thinking and I believe it is the perfect adaptation for anyone who is caught up in a time-poor existence.

I am so confident of Speed Thinking that I have bet the house on it (not quite that dramatic but it is a big bet). I have formed a new business that revolves around this concept. It is called The Speed Thinking Zone and the new website is: www.thespeedthinkingzone.com

My new email is: kenhudson [at] thespeedthinkingzone [dot] com If you have any comments on the new site then send me an email.

The purpose of The Speed Thinking Zone will be to help you to think in a better and faster way. You can see the latest results, interviews, research, blogs and news on Speed Thinking. You can also enroll in one or all of our new training courses which are:

• An Introduction to Speed Thinking
• Speed Decision Making
• Speed Problem Solving
• Speed Brainstorming
• Speed Team Building

Each training module is 1.5 hours in length and participants in the Introduction Course will also receive a copy of my new book; The Idea Accelerator - How to solve problems faster using Speed Thinking (Allen & Unwin). It is due out in July.

As you can see there are very exciting times ahead and I hope that you can speed along with me.

Best wishes,
Ken Hudson,
Founder & Chief Starter,
The Speed Thinking Zone.

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The business world moves in cycles and I am wondering if we are entering a new era. With the US perhaps in a recession in seems to me that business leaders have pulled their horns in and are cutting back. Here we go again. Short term it makes the numbers look good. But where are the leaders with vision? The leaders that want to take a risk and invest in the future? Perhaps they no longer work in large businesses anymore.

 This made me think. What is the next phase after innovation? Does anyone know? I would like to hear from anyone what they think the next era is? We have had customer centric, quality, six-sigma, or innovation. What is next? Are these all a fad or just passing ships in the night?

Perhaps we are entering a new age–one in which people have to learn to think better and faster. By this I mean generative not process thinking. The second type of thinking can be done better by computers. But the first, Generative Thinking (at Speed) is the way of the future. Any employee should be judged on what value they generate for a customer, supplier, partner, employee or shareholder.

But here is the rub. Most people do not know how to do generative thinking. Most managers love precedent; to follow what has been done before; to avoid mistakes. But this is the opposite of generating original insights and ideas. Thus most leaders are caught in a bind of their own making. Value is created more and more by generative thinking which is the very type of approach they are not comfortable with nor encourage.

Generative thinking creates exceptions rather than conformity, experiments rather than follows procedures and asks new uncomfortable questions and does all this at lightning speed.

This is an uncomfortable reality for most leaders. So if you are a generative person go and form your own business or at the very least, go and find a leader that appreciates you. You are entering the generative thinking era so don’t waste your talents on managers who have never generated a thing in their life.

Ken Hudson, Founder IdeaSpace

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In Australia, the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has just held a two day summit to create a number of big ideas for the year 2020. He invited 1000 of the nations so-called best and brightest to discuss ten predetermined themes.

If nothing else it turned out to be a political masterpiece. There was widespread (largely) positive coverage, he differentiated himself from the previous prime minister who by comparison is stuck in a time warp and completely marginalized the opposition leader.

As for the ideas, we will have to wait and see. The Government has committed to having a reply by the end of the year. In a previous post I have suggested that this is not good enough–participants and people generally have a right to know how the ideas are to be evaluated.

But what can business leaders learn fro the summit?

1. Firstly it is a big idea in itself. I love the idea of taking some dedicated time with a range of smart people and to think about the future rather than the day-to-day.

2. The time frame of 2020 encouraged participants to think bigger because by then anything might be possible rather than saying what can we do next year?

3. My suggestion is that every large business should run one. Invite a range of partners, employees, suppliers and customers and randomly divide these people into smaller groups and give each group a topic or challenge. The randomness is important because creativity emerges from the interactions of people with diverse mindsets (this was one of the faults in the design of the government summit because there was too little variety in the groups).

4. Some of the challenges might be:

Where will our revenue come from in ten years?

Who will our customers be?

Who will be our competitors and how might they gain an edge on us?

My only suggestion is that the group works on 3-5 challenges rather than ten which is far too many. Sometimes having too many ideas is worse than too few.

5. Bring in an outside facilitator

This is important because you want someone to challenge the group to go into areas that may be uncomfortable or politically sensitive. The 2020 summit I thought made a mistake in that the co-chair was a government minister. The danger is that if a minister does not like an idea then he/she can stifle debate.

The 2020 summit was a bold idea that I hope gets repeated every two years. Every business leaders should be equally as bold.

Ken Hudson, Founder IdeaSpace

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Dear Prime Minister & Professor Glyn Davis.

Good luck with the Australia 20:20 summit. It is a great idea and I hope it is a wonderful success. But as someone who helps create breakthrough ideas for a living, I cannot help but feel that you have made some fundamental mistakes. I list these only in the hope they are not repeated if such a summit is ever run again.

1. The Steering Committee

What were you thinking? Nearly all men—let’s agree now that if there is a next summit the steering committee is all women.

2. A week-end

This is a summit that aims to tackle the long term challenges confronting Australia’s future. This sounds important and worthwhile yet it has been relegated to the weekend. Symbolically this sends the wrong message because it is not considered worthy of a spot during the week and in a practical sense it is a poor decision because people are not fresh. Let’s not even think about the message it sends in terms of work-life balance.

3. The Participants

 Looking through the list, it indeed represents the best and brightest. But that is the point. It is made up of experts in their field. In the Long Term National Health Strategy section, for example, over one third of the participants are professors. On the surface this makes sense but where are the people represented by the failure of the health system? My suggestion is that one third of the participants should be people who have been negatively impacted by our health system. Just wander down to the local hospital and ask the people who have been waiting hours for treatment if they would like to attend the summit. This would certainly ground the discussion.

4. The Groupings

Again it seems logical that experts should be included in their specialist area. But breakthrough ideas emerge when there is a dynamic tension between the expert and the naïve. I would mix the actor with the doctor and the actor, the economist with the climate change scientist all in the one room. Then see what emerges. This would also ensure that the experts rather than defending their knowledge are placed in a situation where they can make unforeseen, new connections.

5. The Location

Canberra makes sense for the politicians but no-one else. Why not have day one at a venue which was relevant to the group. The health strategy group should convene at any hospital that is struggling, for example. Day two all the participants can reconvene in Canberra.

6. The Number of Topics

1000 people and ten topics—this is about seven too many. Why not focus on three this year and three next year. Could you imagine the power of the group that all were focusing on trying to address the imbalance in life expectancy between indigenous Australians and the rest of the community.

7. The Co-Chair

The government cannot have it both ways. It cannot position the summit as a vehicle to invite all ideas and yet have each summit area being co-chaired by a Federal Government Minister. What are the chances of a new idea being accepted if it does not fit with the government’s or minister’s agenda?

8. What does success look like?

There are some laudable objectives but what does success look like? How will we know whether this summit has been a success and should be repeated? The aim is to harness the best ideas from the group but how will these ideas be evaluated? I believe that if you create an idea it is only reasonable to know how the idea will be judged before the summit starts.

9. If it does work, run it every two years

This is a wonderful opportunity for the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader to agree that if this summit is a success, then it can be held every two years.

10. Future participation

My suggestion is that if you have been invited once then you are automatically barred from attending the following summit (the politicians excepted). This would ensure that new faces and ideas are constantly on show.

Good Luck with the summit—I genuinely hope it is a huge success. Australia desperately needs big thinking.

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 We have a natural tendency when solving a problem to start from what exists at the moment and add incremental improvements. For the most part, this approach works. Occasionally however when you need a breakthrough new product or solution you need a different approach. For example, if you were trying to design a new kid’s computer you could try and adapt the lap tops that exist by adding new kids software or using bright colours. But would that be enough? What about a kid’s computer that you could roll from one room to another or that you could sit on?

The answer in these circumstances is to design the perfect product first. Ask yourself in an ideal world what will the product look like, feel like etc. What is the ideal price? What is the user experience? Keep pushing until you have designed really the ideal or perfect solution. Once you have done this then work back to what exists at the moment. You should first identify the gaps with the current offering and then how you might address these gaps. This type of approach will give you an edge in the market-place and give you a jump on your competitors. Dr Ken.

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When faced with any sort of challenge (i.e. a problem, issue or opportunity) I have found that you have two key creative strategies.

1. Try and redefine the challenge and/or

2. Look at the challenge in a new way.

Otherwise you are doomed to repeat a cycle which can only deliver you incremental ideas. For example, let’s imagine that you were trying to improve your customer service (or what i call P1). Another way of defining this challenge might be to; what can we do so that our customers love dealing with us (or what I call P2)? Now which problem excites and engages you? Which problem definition is more likely to open up new possibilities? Can you see that by simply using a different way to define the problem you can become unstuck?

Your second creative strategy is to look at the challenge with new eyes. In the previous example, you can use a financial lens (or L1) which might lead you to reduce your service to your unprofitable customers or if you used a different lens (e.g. as a restaurant owner–P2) it might lead you to think about how to make every customer feel special.

You can use either or both of these powerful creative strategies at will.

Does anyone have an example from their life?

Yours in ideas,

Ken

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This is a story of how breakthrough new products can emerge from the most unlikely of places.

‘After September 11th, one of our researchers, Krishna Bharat would go to 10-15 news sites everyday looking for information about the case. And he thought, why don’t I write a program to do this? So Krishna, who’s an expert in artificial intelligence, used a web crawler to cluster articles. He later emailed it around the company. My office mate and I got it, and we were like, this isn’t just a cool idea for Krishna. We could add more sources and build this into a great product.

That’s how Google News came about.’

Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience (as quoted in Fast Company, March, Page 79).

I like this story for a number of reasons:

1. Breakthrough ideas, insights and products often come about by accident. This is not to say that many stage-gate, formal processes are not useful but their importance is over-rated. What is more important is to have creative, passionate people that are willing to try new things.

2. Creative organisations like Google (rated the world’s most innovative company) are places and spaces where not only great ideas are produced but there is a culture of idea receptivity. In my work with leaders I constantly stress the need to encourage idea production at the same time as idea openness. An open door policy does not always translate to an open mind policy.

3. Google also has a policy of encouraging its engineers to spend 20% of their time on working on things that interest them. The actual percentage is not important nor is how it is implemented of much more value is the notion that people work at their creative best when they are passionate about what they do.

What are you passionate about?

4. Creativity is also found at the most unexpected of places, people and times. The lesson? Don’t make any assumptions about who you should invite to a meeting for example. Have the experts mix with the newcomers and see what happens.

 Yours in ideas,

Ken Hudson,

Founder, IdeaSpace

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On my business card I have called myself The Idea Space: Chief Breakthrough Thinker. This begs the question what is a breakthrough thinker and why is it important?

I will deal with the second question first. To be a breakthrough thinker is the most important qualification you can have on your resume. In an information rich world, the ability to create new concepts from existing information is vital. More and more, the nature of work in organisations today is generative rather than process. In other-words the people who can generate new ideas, insights and concepts to adapt to a rapidly changing world will be the most valued.

But what is a breakthrough thinker? If you can answer yes to the following five questions then you probably are:

1. Do you generate a regular flow of original  ideas?

 2. Can you escape from what has gone on in the past?

3. Do you challenge existing assumptions, beliefs and conventions?

4. Can you create big, new ideas quickly?

5. Do you ’see’ opportunities before others?

If the answers are yes to all these questions and you are working for a large organisation. Ask for a pay rise immediately and/or leave. You will have a much better and more enjoyable time running your own business.

Ken Hudson

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Just attended another innovation conference. It was a mixed bag but as always there was one special nugget that eclipsed all the other presentations. It came from Brett Jackson, Director of Product Management and Design, from Atlassian Software Systems. This company formed five years ago is one of the world’s fasting growing companies.

For me it mattered less what they do but how they went about it. Here are some of the features of their culture:

1. They experiment all the time.

Someone thinks of a good idea they test it and see what happens. If it work then well and good. If not then move on to something else.

2. But they measure everything

Metrics are important to them. You can only tell if something is working if you can measure it. But it is not measurement for measurement’s sake. Metrics serve business objectives not the other way round. My Phd research found the same thing. Creative organisations are not fluffy ones–they are not for the faint hearted. Creative people want their ideas to be tested.

3. 20% of time free.

Google talks about it but they are trialling the idea of giving everyone the creative feedom of 20% of their time free to work on projects that interest them. If it works great, if not then move on!

4. The Stand Up Meeting

Most of their meetings are short, punch affairs with a pre-arranged agenda. These meetings are also held standing up. Novel, original, fresh –their is no comfort factor here. This is also consistent with my new book out in July which highlights the importance of Speed Thinking.

5. Regular User Groups

Thye also meet regularly with their user groups for four hours at a time. These are meetings that are open, transparent with a view to genuinely co-creating new ideas and solutions.

My message? There are many innovative organisations around that are not the usual suspects. (think Apple, Google, 3M etc). Anyone can copy or adapt the practices I have highlighted here. These are innovative and more importantly seem to work.

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I just came back from the annual American Creativity Conference held for the first time in Singapore where I was one of the speakers. Over 200 people attended from all corners of the globe, the only thing we had in common was an interest in creativity either in business, education or government.

I have listed below my impressions as it was my first conference:

1. I am very impressed with what the Singapore government is trying to do on the creativity and innovation front. The leaders realise that Singapore has no natural resources and therefore must rely on the intellectual and creative energy of their people. It also must compete on a world stage when it is such a small country compared to its neighbours. This has led to the establishment of the Singapore Management University where creative thinking, for example is considered a core subject.

2. As I was sitting through my 15 th presentation I was struck by the notion that most of the presenters could have been talking about the workings of a car engine rather than creativity. Surely a conference on creativity would encourage presenters to be more inventive in their presentations I pondered. That is why with my graduate students they must present without any powerpoint slides.

3. I thought the most interesting presentation was from the principal of a junior college who had totally reimagined the type of learning that would harness the benefits of technology and engage the minds of the young e.g. they were using teacher Avatars from Second Life as a way of stimulating discussion in class. It struck me that the education sector was way ahead of the business sectors which talks about innovation all the time but sometimes I feel that this is all it does.

4. The most engaging presentation was from the former curator of the Singapore Zoo who talked about the difficulty Singapore was having trying to transform itself from a rule-bound culture to one that challenges and provokes. There is a clear parallel with business leaders. They say they want more creativity and innovation but only (it seems) within limits. They seem scared of unlocking the creative potential of the organisation. It reminds me of the fearful expression of an innovation manager of a large well-known company who was aghast at my suggestion that everyone in his organisation should receive a copy of my new book (The Idea Generator, Allen & Unwin) for fear of the creativity it might unlock. ‘Everyone would have all these ideas’ streaming around the place he offered in clear desperation. I shrugged, surely that was the point I suggested and then left wondering that perhaps this person was in the wrong job!

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