An overview from my keynote on innovation culture at MI EXPO...

Love, hate and desire drive innovative cultures, says Beswick!

Only 3% of businesses can consider themselves to be truly innovative, according to Cris Beswick, innovation, strategy and leadership expert. Addressing  UTalkMarketing’s MI Expo, Beswick said that despite the fact “businesses are all competing for the same things”, only a few can say that they offer something truly unique to customers.

“In business, we are all here to differentiate, yet the reality is we all compete for similar things, in similar ways and at similar prices,” said Beswick.

“The ones [businesses] that don’t subscribe to this notion and step outside of it – the Googles and the Apples of this world, are the ones that innovate. I believe that any person in any organisation has the potential to do amazing things. Average companies do not innovate – fact.”

Beswick said he believes that the key to becoming an exceptional brand is to create a “culture of innovation” by employing the right people and by focusing on the three emotions that drive the success of a business – love, desire and hate.

“Everybody in an organisation has to love what they do. Managers cannot contractually make staff become energetic and inspired – it’s about having people working in a company that they believe is going somewhere,” he said. On the point of desire, Beswick cited the example of people queuing for hours to get hold of new Apple products.  “That’s desire – people buying with their hearts and not their heads. There are comparable products out there but people have fallen in love with that round little Apple symbol,” he said.

“And hate, [that’s about] your competitors hating you guts. You want to have them scratching their heads and saying ‘how did those guys do that?’”

Beswick outlined seven key traits that he believes can drive innovation in business; strategy, people, community, communication, environment, creativity, risk and leadership; and cited Richard Branson as an innovate individual, illustrating the point that it is often people’s quirks that allow them to innovate.

“Branson was dyslexic at school and a bit of an outcast – look at him 30 years later”, he said. “It’s often more eccentric people, who might not appear to quite fit in, or who look at the world in a different way, that have the ability to innovate,” he said.

He also stressed the importance of an organisation working as part of a team, and working flexibly, to achieve goals. “Create a team spirit, create as flat a structure in your organisation as possible,” he said, adding that getting rid of departments and silos is one of the ways organisations can encourage innovation.

“In terms of innovation, too many people want quick wins. It’s bloody hard work and won’t happen overnight,” he concluded.

10 Innovative New Year's resolutions for your business...

As most of you will know my aim is to revolutionise the way organisations approach strategy, leadership and innovation.  My advice has helped to put innovation into business, helping to instigate bold visions and objectives. I help organisations have meaningful conversations about what it takes to be exceptional and create real innovation capability. The New Year is an opportunity for a clean slate – people are refreshed and more susceptible to change instigation than in a stagnant or negative mind frame, which a difficult year may have incited.

So, here are my top ten tips for implementing change in 2011, and the New Year’s Resolutions your business can’t afford to ignore. 

Get Strategic! - Leave the past two years of negativity behind and create a new vision for the future and the legacy you want to leave. Make sure the challenge is bold enough but achievable enough then communicate it to your people.

Get Ahead! - Give your HR, OD or talent leader a seat at the board table. If they haven't got the business acumen, teach them so they can become a more strategic part of the organization.  Cultivate talent and understand the importance of finding and nuturing great leaders.

Get Real! - Employee engagement 'HAS' an impact on business success, FACT! If you haven't got a strategy, create and implement one as fast as possible. 

Get Creative! - Banish the 'status quo' from your organisational vocabulary and start looking at embedding a 'culture of innovation' as a strategic way forward.  Strive for the exceptional and others will follow.  Creativity is an attitude, and one that considers experimentation, repetition and trying things out to be the norm, not the unusual.  Creative people are always wondering how to improve the ideas and solutions they come up with, striving for better results.

Get Inspirational! - Communicate to your people that the 'performance' you want from them is less to do with financial targets and more to do with their desire and ability to be exceptional.  In my experience results will follow once this culture is created.

Get Talking! - Create a format to allow regular conversations with your people about what they want and need in order to inspire and engage them.  This will create an open market for ideas that will ultimately benefit your business and increase the personal and job satisfaction of your employees.

Get Connected! - Double-check your organisations internal relationships are aligned. If they aren't, find out where the tension lies and create a route to the 'breakthrough culture' you need.

Get Practical! - Create a sincere and sustainable way to tick the two main drivers for your employees, 'involve' them and 'appreciate' them.

Get Emotional! - Check that the following are present in your organization every day; Vision, Passion, Engagement, Creativity, Shared Purpose, Collaboration, Risk & Sincerity. If they're not, add them in!

 

Get Sensible! - When doing all of the above, find a way to embed my three sense checks into every process. LOVE; if we do this will our people love it? DESIRE; if we do this will our customers desire it? HATE; if we do this will our competitors hate it?

Good luck!

How to create innovative organisations?

February sees the launch of my new book, The Road to Innovation co-written with David Gallagher of www.chapterandverse.co.uk who for the last six months has painstakingly helped me dot my i’s and cross my t’s.

The book is as valuable to business and organisation leaders as it is for HR practitioners and employees because it’s a practical guide to the business buzz word de jour ‘Innovation’. Because of the current economic downturn it’s come to even greater prominence and in the boardrooms of large organisations and in meeting rooms of small and medium-sized businesses up and down the country, the call from business owners, directors and managers is unanimous:

“We need more innovation”

But what does innovation mean in the modern business context? Can a business become more innovative? What do these organisations actually want to achieve? How will the leaders in the business make the changes required? And where on earth are they going to start? Innovation isn't embedded into a company’s DNA by reading books on how to brainstorm or play creative thinking games. The Road to Innovation finally gives business leaders clear, practical and actionable insight into the seven key areas that are fundamental to creating a company capable of thinking differently and innovating.

Cris Beswick is an accomplished speaker, advisor, author, non-executive director and consultant. Having founded several successful companies over the last decade and following the sale of his last award winning design consultancy, he now works with businesses and organisations to help them understand innovation, helping create the right strategy for it and developing an environment and a community in which it can thrive. The results are great places to work for your people, added value for your customers, and sleepless nights for your competitors.

The Road to Innovation will be available on general sale from the 20th February but if you’d like to order copies in advance for you, your colleagues or your team please email orders@ltbpublishing.com and we'll be glad to help...

To discuss Cris's availability for consulting, advising, facilitating and/or speaking please feel free to call Nikki on +44 (0)8453 72 44 22 or email her at nikki@crisbeswick.com for more information...

Thinking Differently about Innovation...

Innovation is as vital to a business as a desk and telephone, but many only realise it when they lose touch with customers, spiral into decline or lose position to a competitor. Only then do they appreciate the importance of using design and creative thinking to generate fresh ideas, manage them and re-connect them to their customer.

Innovation should be a never-ending process, a part of company culture, embraced by all and not seen as a magic wand wielded only by the creative team. It should be a cornerstone of strategy and have a place in ongoing business development with its own budget. According to Design Council research in 2003, 47% of rapidly growing businesses had introduced new products or services in the last three years, compared to 26% of companies overall.

This kind of evidence suggests that innovation isn't something you'll get round to when you can afford to take on more staff or when you have time - it's an essential, without which a company can only maintain the status quo. But how does it work in practice? How do you increase the odds in favour of good ideas emerging in the first place, let alone turn them into commercial winners? A recent study by the Design Council and the DTI showed that innovative businesses have remarkably similar attitudes, be they blue chip manufacturers or creative industry start-ups. For these companies, innovation is part of the culture. Instead of shutting people away in a room marked 'ideas' or ‘brainstorming’ while the rest of the operation trundles on as before, they ensure innovation permeates every aspect of a business. People working for innovative businesses are inspired to pursue innovation with genuine passion that goes beyond simply doing a job.

Many creative companies place too much significance on their creative departments to unearth ‘aha’ moments of brilliance yet stifle them of creative freedom and thinking time in place of getting ‘stuff’ out of the door. Real creativity and innovation that delivers a step change to create real competitive advantage takes time, money and effort. The latter is the only one most companies count on whilst not allowing people the time and freedom to be creative and not setting creativity and innovation budgets.

As a class leading example, Google’s employee job description states that each person must spend 20% of their time on something creative and innovative that they believe will benefit the company and its customers and they even have someone who heads that initiative up on a global scale. He has the title of… Director of Other.

The truth is that people generally think of creativity and especially innovation as an ‘aha’ moment. A tiny spark of light that hits you out of the blue without warning; Eureka is the common phrase. In fact creativity and innovation are about habit, repetitive thought processes and a culture created by a team that promotes constant questioning and incremental development of everything they are doing. This is what the Japanese call kaizen, ‘Continuous Improvement’ or literally ‘Transforming Value’.

It’s the ‘aha’ moment that people search for and think that they can turn on as and when they want to be creative or innovative. It’s this conventional idea that many people define what creativity is. The reality is, you can’t ‘manufacture’ ideas as they come from constant thought about problems and they come from habits. Creative people generally have different habits for how they use ideas, how they play with ideas and how much time they spend seeking alternatives (experimenting). It’s also about how low their inhibitions are about filtering things out we would filter straight away and how much longer they will entertain those ideas to see what value they have. That’s why they’re creative.

So in essence, the ‘aha’ moment isn’t as important as the habits that lead to the moment. Unfortunately this means there is no creativity pill but a realisation that creativity and innovation will take time effort and resources and will be achieved by incremental changes that will create sustainable and commercially viable points of difference.

I help facilitate all of the above by mentoring in a hands on, sleeves rolled up way within a company or team. I like to get my hands dirty and create relationships with the people I work with by helping solve real problems or briefs, using them to illustrate alternative viewpoints and ways of approach. I don’t believe you can expect a step change from a two day workshop or creative thinking course as that’s not enough time to change a culture within an organisation to embrace innovation and creative thinking. My approach is Kaizen based, incremental, sustainable and commercially viable.

Cris Beswick

Creative Leadership...

Creative leadership is about process not product! Let me explain; Creativity and problem solving is about thinking, thinking differently and wider, using different perspectives than everyone else, yet traditionally creative individuals and teams are measured on the end result not their mindset or their process.

Organisations that embrace creativity and different ways of thinking should also have real vision, not a mere mission statement but something that calls people forward to be part of something bigger than they are as individuals. Human nature pushes people to aspire to being part of a great story. That’s when you get emotional attachment from your team, when they feel they have a stake in the big picture.

It’s no different than what all designers do in any field whether it is the latest Aston Martin, iPhone or Sony TV. We try to achieve emotional attachment and experience to products, services and brands. So, creative leadership should be about the company’s own brand and what it means to its team members as individuals. What does it mean to work here? What’s the ‘Signature Experience’ and how am I emotionally attached?

I believe a lot of this comes back to honouring the process as much as the end product. Encouraging entrepreneurship in individuals is crucial as it breeds confidence to take small calculated amounts of risk. That means people push boundaries and feel confident doing so, without fear. That’s where innovation comes from. The outcome or product could actually be wrong but creative people are motivated just as much by the process or the journey as they are about the end result. The job of the creative leader is to make that journey inspirational, publicly highlighting ‘on-vision’ behaviour and attitude.

All this serves to create loyalty and engagement and when people are engaged they are more often in line with the company vision so the whole process becomes self perpetuating. Just like a brief from a client creative teams (and others for that matter) within an organisation must have a brief that leaves no room for interpretation or misdirection. They must understand what the core company vision is so they can align everything they do to it in a long term strategic way. With those defined boundaries set they can concentrate on what they do best, being creative, answering the brief and enjoying doing it.

However, here’s the word of warning. This vision must constantly be reinforced because different people within any organisation will have different roles and tasks that seem removed from contributing to that vision. They will also let their day to day task list overshadow the big picture letting the pressures of delivering the ‘product’ distract them from the reason why. Everyone must be shown where they fit into the strategy and how they uniquely contribute to the big picture as without the engagement of everyone the vision isn’t achievable.

Every business should look at itself as if it were a client and constantly look to add value by answering an internal brief. What do we want to do, what’s our vision? Why do we want to do it, what’s our reason? How are we going do it, what direction do we take? Then how do we constantly communicate that to our clients and our people?

Part of what I do as a creative consultant is to help business leaders define ‘What’ and then be the one that champions ‘Why’ and ‘How’ as part of the strategy for creating an internal culture that is highly creative, motivated, engaged and is the perfect ‘Greenhouse’ for cultivating innovation. A company’s point of difference should be significant not only because of its ‘products’ (what it delivers to clients) but its ‘processes’ (how its people deliver). In a corny way maybe what I’m saying is beauty really could be on the inside!

Cris Beswick

Critical Thinking...

So, what is critical thinking and why is it so important? Well in simple terms it can be defined as thinking that involves applying judgement and the putting aside of subjectivity and pre-conceptions in favour of a more logical, real life approach.

Critical thinking helps us separate issues and prioritise them by balancing them against the problem at hand. Modern business teams now have many tools and techniques at their disposal, critical thinking being just one of them. The buzz surrounding these new paths to insight and innovation can cause confusion about which tool to use for what purpose. Inappropriate use of the wrong tool/technique only generates poor results and then lack of confidence in these new, unconventional approaches.

Over the years a lack of real understanding of brainstorming techniques and when to use them is a good example of this very issue. The term brainstorming is now used as a general expression when teams want or need to gather round a table and discuss problems or create solutions. In some ways it is to business what the word Hoover is to vacuum cleaner.

In reality, brainstorming should be used as a creativity tool, to generate ideas, not to gather information or try to build a better picture of a problem or brief. Using brainstorming to solve problems merely produces opinions, statements, and general conclusions but not specific points or a deeper understanding of a problem. For listing problems you want factual observations based on reality and for that you need specific tools to help you such as the 5 Whys problem-solving technique.

Problem solving or answering briefs although generically branded as a creative process actually requires a rational and systematic approach, some elements of which require creative, irrational and random thought. The process should start with insight which requires critical thinking and judgement. This then provides the creative stage with a solid brief/foundation from which to develop. However judgement comes back into play when you need to evaluate creative ideas in order to move towards developing and implementing one of them.

Adopting a systematic approach to the way you think and how you think about problem solving and idea generation and adding critical thinking into the mix helps determine a deeper understanding of a problem, thus helping avoid straying from the intended purpose which commonly results in merely solving symptoms not causes.

The general perception is that when poor or no decisions/ideas are made by a team then they lack creativity. However poor decisions or ideas are usually down to poor thinking habits, more often than not due to pre-conceptions and assumptions gathered over time.

People generally play down the insight stage of any problem solving process on the basis that their assumptions are enough in order to progress with. This just means their understanding of the real problem and hence the starting point will be way off. If the end result (destination) to any process is determined by the starting point (origin) the solution will be commensurate.

What I’m trying to say is that being creative is only part of the story. The road to innovation involves several stages and several different tools, critical thinking being just one of them.