Shake up your Thinking with Dr Ken Hudson

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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