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CHAPTER 5

Seven habits for the Man-Machine age

In a world where many things can and will be automated or handed over to machines, we have a unique opportunity to maximise those things that make us uniquely human. Through a combination of research, practical empiricism, experience and future gazing I thought it helpful to set these out as a framework for leaders and future orientated people wishing to prepare themselves to operate in the Man-Machine age. The seven habits are, in no implied order of importance:

1 The head, heart and soul of leadership

Whereas the manager’s primary function is to optimise the work of an enterprise, making it as efficient as possible, the leader’s job is to induce change in an enterprise to increase its effectiveness. The distinction is perhaps an artificial one, as both management and leadership are needed for an intelligent and vibrant enterprise. In other words, most managers need to be leaders and vice versa. We explore questions of team leadership in Dialogue II of this book but we start with the question of self-leadership and the thoughts of Jennifer Sertl, author of Strategy, Leadership and the Soul and network colleague from the US. Jennifer dares to use the other S word . . . not strategy, but soul in a business book. We have been playing with ideas of ethics, sustainability and spirituality in leadership for several decades and perhaps the S word has finally come of age. To paraphrase:

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What the world needs now is beyond leadership; what is required is Transleadership. So many books are written on leadership and strategy. Here are some terms I’d like to anchor:

Strategy: We are convinced that in order to lead your company in the business environment of the 21st century, it is essential for you to master the ability to invent your company’s future, particularly in the current rapidly changing strategic landscapes of your business. Therefore, the old ways of designing a strategy need to change. You will need to constantly rethink your strategy, not just once every few years.

Leadership: Leadership styles and challenges have dramatically changed and will continue to change from the old world models. In order to handle successfully the age’s enormous complexity and to improve your ability in the role of a leader, you will need to become highly skilled at sensing relevance in all areas of life and business, and to create synergistic relationships between all parties.

Soul: To accomplish the alignment between strategy and leadership, we contend that your values and inner beliefs should be in harmony with that of your organisation and vice versa. Only in this way, we believe you can maximise your organisation’s power and efficiency and create a working environment that allows you and your people to find satisfaction and fulfilment in your work and your lives.

At a personal level or what Jennifer calls the soul, leadership comes down to the balance of passion, purpose and profit. It is impossible to achieve this for your enterprise unless you have balance in your own life. What then can we do about balance and wellbeing? We have access to more data about their health, wealth and happiness than any previous generation. But does more data give us a greater sense of wellbeing? Data is estimated to be rising by 40% per year, and is expected to reach 45 ZB by 2020. For a balanced life (swimming with information, knowledge and wisdom rather than drowning in data), we need to feed all aspects of our being, in other words our minds, bodies and souls. Here is my best advice for achieving balance in a busy world, based on sound research in the area and a healthy dose of experience in ‘what works’.

Time to think

Wellbeing is all about good time management. Yes, you can work flat out for ‘eight days a week’, but one of the trade-offs of working in the Brain Based Economy is to develop the habit of working when there is demand and taking time out when there is not. The trick is to actually do this rather than working through, which can lead to a life of slavery. After nearly 25 years of working for (and against) myself in this respect, I recommend these time-management strategies:

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What matters most?

One of the most important things I ever learned was the so-called urgent and important grid. I think it has been forgotten in an age of digital over-stimulation. The grid helps you allocate time to the most important things that matter to you over the long term. It also identifies those items that require sustained effort (eating elephants) over the long term and those tasks that you need to learn to delegate or turn into a short routine.

Good prioritisation is especially important in a world where your day can easily be interrupted by so many distractions from social media, fitbits and so on. Some people I meet are driven by urgency and not importance in the overall scheme of things. While this is natural, as our brains crave the novelty and excitement created by urgency, it is not healthy as we then allocate too much time to these things, at the expense of those things that are on our main pathway to success.

I have a daily routine to clear the urgent but not important items by dealing with them in one succinct move. This is difficult in a globally connected world if you are to be responsive, but it is even more necessary if your time is not to be frittered away around other people’s disorganisation. The mantra used to be ‘only ever touch a piece of paper once’ and it is transferable to the Internet age. Do it once, do it quickly, don’t do it again. We will meet our future family Johnny, Julie, Esmerelda, Thomas and James again in the epilogue, but here is a small snippet from their life in 2030, which outlines how we might be able to reach a more effective use of our time with the assistance of AI and machines.

Julie’s personal digital assistant Rover made the breakfast and collected, collated and prioritised her overnight e-mails. Rover even took two video calls during the night to gather rainfall and other data and convert this into information needed for an agricultural project Julie is working on. Mindfulness and physical exercise precede brainwork and the data from her morning routine is automatically fed into Julie’s PSP. All of Julie’s home appliances are enabled for her to speak to Rover anywhere in her house while he gets on with the housework. She talks to Rover via the fridge this morning, which gives her exercise class and meditation session.

Rover then conducts a business briefing and runs through the day’s meetings and calls that Julie must make. This leaves Julie to do what she does best. This level of structure and organisation allows Julie to be more agile and responsive to the various disruptions of business life in 2030.

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Don’t climb every mountain

Leadership is as much about what you say no to, as well as yes. Staying focused but also remaining open to opportunities is not just a clever play on words. Manic focus prevents you from developing your business and it might block off new ideas. Be firm but kind when saying no to others to maintain relationships. Sir Richard Branson is excellent in this regard, receiving many proposals but always being clear to say firmly but politely if he is not interested. It is easy to say yes to something but much harder to say no without offence. This is a skill of great leaders.

Get the balance right

Consider this seemingly frivolous example. Spending time playing with your children is important but it is not urgent in pure time-management terms, is it? Surely you could play with them later? But you have 190 e-mails in your inbox . . . Take this strategy to extremes and your family might forget who you are! This might sound ridiculous but I do know some parents that manage to get these two priorities in the wrong order and our story in the epilogue is testimony to the advantages that can accrue when we get this right. Protect family time above all else. The strategy of ‘eating elephants’ is a good one to learn, whereby you nibble away at your biggest tasks systematically. Use this strategy for important but not urgent items. I only managed to write this book because I am ruthless about using the ‘elephant eating’ principle, marking out reasonably sized chunks of the day and writing overnight when I can get several hours of uninterrupted time accompanied by music and an occasional glass of wine. Frank Zappa adds some existentialist pearls of wisdom on time management for dramatic contrast: “A composer’s job involves the decoration of fragments of time. Without music, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.”

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Free your mind

It is estimated that the average person receives more information per day in 1999 than they received in a lifetime in 1900 and this is a huge processing burden. Eminent neuroscientist and musician Dr Daniel Levitin suggests that to be more creative and effective we should allow 10 to 15 minutes to daydream every few hours. Levitin also suggests that a 15-minute nap is an effective strategy for wellness. Any longer than this tricks your body into thinking it is about to go to sleep, which has less positive effects on wellbeing.

Work hard, play hard

It is important to find a mode of exercise that you actually enjoy rather than trying to impose a fitness regime on yourself that you hate. I personally prefer swimming and cycling, but it is really about finding your sweet spot. Movement matters especially if your work cycle is sedentary. A brisk 15-minute walk toward the end of the day can make your final two hours of work much more productive. Although it might seem to break the laws of thermodynamics, if you expend energy you gain energy.

Enjoy what you do

All work and no play really does make us dull. In my case I love to play music and have cheekily integrated this into my work, as part of the ultimate time-management strategy where work = play. If you do not have the option of turning your hobby into work, make sure you make time for leisure pursuits. Some examples of these strategies in action are shown in our epilogue.

Go with the flow

Great musicians often reach what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the state of ‘flow’, where they are completely absorbed with the task at hand, where nothing else seems to matter and effort is effortless. They are often also acutely aware of what is going on around them. In other words, they have both internal and external mastery. In contrast, bad musicians live only inside their own heads. The music artist Prince was a good example of what Csikszentmihalyi meant by ‘flow’, able to focus on his own performance effortlessly while remaining in touch with the band, the lighting technicians and, most importantly, his audiences. I interviewed virtuoso jazz and classical guitarist John Etheridge as part of some research into the strategies of masters. Etheridge performed with Stéphane Grappelli, Nigel Kennedy and John Williams among many others. Etheridge recognised the state of flow through his own playing and through his work with other masters and this relates to our discussion on SQ. We pick the theme of flow up in Dialogue III.

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Commit to learning

As well as all the above, to maintain wellness in your business, devote time toward continuous learning in an age where the ‘half-life’ of knowledge is in freefall. Learning can take many forms and work itself is often more valuable than a training course. Wellness really does boil down to a happy balance between work, learning and play. Get the balance right and prosper.

Life in the fast lane

The whole question of life in the fast lane fell into sharp relief for me recently when I had a breast cancer scare. Fortunately this proved to be a false alarm, but it gave me the perfect opportunity to consider what mattered most and what could wait. We need a two-pronged approach to a connected world to give us perspective as well as responsiveness. I went in search of examples of fast information and slower wisdom.

BBEs help us to access more information at times of our choosing, allowing us to live in more spontaneous ‘last-minute’ ways. Just think of the last time you booked cinema tickets, air travel, a brief encounter and so on. However, it is not enough to just have more information. We need better information to inform better decisions.

Yet there are occasions when making last-minute decisions restricts the options available to us or forces us into making sub-optimal choices. While the information and technology revolution enables us to be more spontaneous, some good things in life arise from careful planning.

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Slow down to go faster

Neuroscientists estimate that our experiences of ‘being fully present’ are fleeting moments that last just three to four seconds on average. There is increasing evidence to suggest that we are increasingly suffering from ‘DADD’ (Data Attention Deficit Disorder), for example it is estimated that office workers in the USA check their e-mails up to 30 times an hour. What then can we do to improve our ability to contemplate for longer periods of time when it matters, in terms of decision-making, business strategy and practice? Some things in life benefit from incubation and the use of what Professor Guy Claxton calls our ‘tortoise minds’, rather than our ‘hare brains’. The idea of mindfulness is not new, but the term has helped to articulate the need for reflective practice in a busy business world, assisted by books such as Time to Think by Nancy Kline which points out that thinking for ourselves is still a radical act.

I went to meet entrepreneur Mark Sillitoe at the Anniversary Olympic Games in the Queen Elizabeth Park, where Usain Bolt won the 100 metres at his usual break neck speed. Mark invested in our Olympic legacy by starting a business to maintain the fleet of widebeam barges built specially for the Olympic Games using clean technologies in a sustainable ecosystem. A cruise on the river gave me a rare moment for mindful contemplation in the heart of the city. Of course, one does not need to take a river cruise to achieve a state of mindfulness and there are many time-honoured ways to give space to life in order to think carefully about things that matter. In my own case I have written large chunks of this book on trains, having taken the three-hour trip to London instead of the 42-minute high-speed option. This has given me some seven hours of uninterrupted time per day without access to the Internet to give focus and depth to my thinking and doing. If we are to live in a constantly connected world, all of us need the occasional pit stop for reflection and growth. Finding your own sacred time and space for mindfulness is an important part of any leader’s PSP.

Broadcaster and futurist Ben Hammersley bears witness to the need for mindfulness in our approaches to personal leadership. He also shines the light on some of the more trendy ideas about technology and fads of virtual working. We will remain human even if assisted by machines and our need to commune in geographical spaces is a ‘fad’ that has lasted since we began living in caves.

The death of the open-plan office is a myth, for various reasons. Firstly, we learn more and more every day about the psychological optimisation of different types of work. The need for quiet, for rest, for correct stimulation, for a sense of meaning and for other specifically human qualities – by which we are consciously or not influenced. I believe, for example, that the open-plan office is a finance-director’s dream retrofitted with bullshit justifications around it being good for creativity. It’s patently, and scientifically provably not so, the realisation of such will take another 20 years to shake through the business world. The same for company-wide chat systems, or hot-desking, or even a good deal of social media: an enormous amount of today’s cutting edge business social practices will become laughable over the next 20 years.

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Not only the tortoise but also the hare

In an “I want it all, I want it now” society, we must make wise decisions to balance our long- and short-term goals. This means that on occasions we must behave like the tortoise, at other times like the hare. I am reminded of this important maxim from Hyman Schachtel, which applies to an accelerated culture: “Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.”

Sleeping appears to enhance the connection between nerve cells in the brain. A scientific study from the Harvard Business School and the University of Rochester revealed that the brain consolidates learned memories while sleeping at night. It becomes increasingly clear that there is a positive correlation between good nutrition and brain development. For example, it is thought that fatty acids present in seafood and fish can improve memory function by about 15%. Exercise also has a profound impact on our ability to learn.

You cannot lead others unless you are personally balanced across head, heart and soul. Great leadership of others starts with a little self-care so that you can be of service to others. However you go about it, commit to your PSP today to be your best:

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2 Communications and influence

We live in an increasingly fragmented and busy world, with many competing activities and stimuli for our attention, time and money. Compared with 50 years ago, we have multiplied the number of ways we can communicate and this provides certain freedoms to live spontaneously. Yet, more communication devices and faster communications do not always make for better communications. In some cases, more and faster communications actually impede clarity. I observed this in stark relief when I organised a campaign to stop the UK’s Brexit using intelligent pop music to combat populism on steroids. The EU referendum was won by naked populism, extremely clever but ambiguous communications and a large cash injection on the part of the Leave campaign. It was also affected seriously by what took place on Facebook, Twitter et al. In comparison, the Remain campaign was well-intended but fragmented and unprofessional, perhaps resembling the BBC comedy programme Dad’s Army. In trying to maximise the impact of volunteers within various Remain campaign groups I encountered huge amounts of goodwill but some ineffective communications strategies. These took immense efforts to rectify, partly because of the degree of passion embedded in members of the movement. In particular, last-minute communications often meant that opportunities could not be seized due to the relevant people not all being in the same place at the same time and so on. This provided object lessons in managing communications within immature teams trying to use social media as a business communication tool, when it is not.

Success in communications can be reduced to four easy to say things, although they are often are hard to put into practice:

The message

Successful communicators use very clear, potent messages to engage and coalesce people around a goal or a project. For example, business people often set SMART goals for their projects, Specific, Measurable, Action orientated, Realistic, Time dependent. Fuzzy messages drive fuzzy actions and fuzzy outcomes. In short, fail to plan, plan to fail.

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Applying this to our EU referendum example, it becomes clear why people believed the message that we could spend £350 million per week on our NHS instead of the EU by “taking back control”. Although the message proved to be false and was retracted the day after the vote had been cast, this did not matter to people who wanted to believe the message. Irrespective of your views on the matter, it was undeniably a clear and potent message in terms of our model. It was carefully calculated to create ‘order control certainty’ in the minds of voters, in other words ‘not VUCA’. The notion of ‘taking back control’ has since proved to be a nominalisation in linguistic terms, i.e. the process of turning a word from a verb into a noun, as it became clear that people realised that they do not exactly know what they were taking back control of, when, where, and so on.

In business situations where things are unclear the successful leader creates clarity for those they lead, even if that clarity is the first step on a longer journey. This is because we are mostly conditioned to enjoy certainty over uncertainty. That said, audacious business strategies are sometimes fuzzy at the first formulation and the job of leaders is to make fuzziness compellingly clear for those that they lead. If that is not feasible, the next best alternative is to get them to ‘live with looseness’, without leading them up a garden path with lies. Research on communications has wide implications for leaders:

Two-sided messages tend to be more effective when the receivers initially disagree with the argument, where they are well educated, or when they are likely to hear counter-arguments. Arguing on both sides of the issue tends to be more persuasive in our communications with intelligent people. The ramifications of this innocent sounding sound bite are massive in terms of thinking about your choice of persuasive communications, as many of us do not like to appear to argue away from our preference, yet it can be very effective.

The messenger

Successful communicators use a messenger or messengers that will be heard. I have tried many experiments where I have taken the visuals and audio away from the person delivering them and found considerable differences in the receptivity of messages, especially when the messenger is controversial.

For example, I tested a speech given by ex Prime Minister Tony Blair, talking about the need to end our Brexit process. When I simply showed the text of his speech to a group of people who did not know who had said it, their agreement with the messages was generally good. However, when I tested Blair’s words matched with video and audio of him speaking on the same people, the receptivity of his message was severely impaired or fundamentally disagreed with, with people offering visceral reactions such as “warmonger”, “liar” and so on.

I did a similar test with Sir Bob Geldof’s famous standoff in a fishing boat on the River Thames with our UKIP leader Nigel Farage over his support of fishermen. I was surprised to note that even people who totally agreed with Geldof’s message rejected it once they knew who had said it, based on reactions such as “elitist”, “rich idiot” and various other visceral expletives. The successful influencer chooses the right person or persons to deliver the message. This is not always themselves.

If you are an inventor or a leader whose job it is to bring novel ideas to your enterprise it is particularly important to balance your innate passion for your idea with the need to persuade others of its value. Selling an idea often requires us to be less passionate than we are as the ‘owners’ of that idea. Remember the point about two-sided arguments being more persuasive than one-sided ones in many circumstances where the messenger has something to gain from the outcome. If you find it impossible to be dispassionate and balanced about your obsession, find someone who can represent your interests in an appropriate way to your customers or stakeholders.

In general, a messenger is perceived to be more influential when the receiver perceives them to be high rather than low in credibility. This explains why leaders need to operate from a strong platform of expertise to be successful. We explore the issue of power, expertise and authority further in Dialogue II.

Honesty and trustworthiness are also vitally important to be an effective communicator. Therefore, the messenger’s influence is weakened when the audience perceives they have something to gain from the communication. Bad salespeople have turned this into the phrase “I’m not trying to sell you something . . .”, which often means exactly the opposite!

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People are more easily persuaded by individuals they perceive to be similar to themselves. Yet the paradox for leaders is that often they are trying to change people, and this implies that they are engines of difference or even polar opposites of the people they try to influence. Sure, it is possible to gain more favour by using insights from NLP on gaining rapport, but the authentic road forward is to find ways to legitimise and deal with cognitive dissonance. We explore this topic further in Dialogue III.

All of this information on communications and influence can be used with congruence and flair as well as as an instrument of manipulation. Successful leaders know the difference and influence with integrity.

The channel

Successful communicators choose the best channel(s) or media for the job at hand, not just the most convenient one(s). When we communicate we often have a range of goals in mind, from informing, to persuading, confronting, facilitating etc. Impersonal channels can be counter-productive when giving ‘hard to hear’ messages and this explains why people often fall out on social media channels when trying to deliver complex and emotional messages if they are any more difficult than “I love you”. The relative poverty of social media as a channel for communicating nuanced messages is counter-balanced by people’s shortage of time to do anything more effective and we are now in the age where deaths are announced on Facebook rather than in person, sometimes for reasons of efficiency but also with some downsides in terms of humanity.

The multiplicity of communication channels has also increased enormously in the last 20 years from text to instant messaging across multiple platforms, video conferencing and so on, yet our fundamental skills of communicating have not changed. Sometimes the most efficient channels are not the most effective. Personal channels such as 1 : 1 dialogue are expensive in terms of time but they may be very effective. Impersonal channels are much more efficient but can be quite ineffective. The successful communicator reaches for the best tool for the job rather than the one most readily available.

Two other insights from the field of NLP are worthy of note here:

First, people are fond of deleting context-sensitive information when sending brief instant messages or texts. Simple messages do not tend to suffer from this strategy; for example, “I’ll meet you at the Kings Cross St Pancras Café Nero at 6.30 pm” is specific and clear. However, some people try to use the same channel to discuss matters of strategy, complexity and so on with some amusing and disastrous consequences. For example, this is a real-life request for assistance received by a LinkedIn message from someone I did not really know.

Of course, the obvious response if you believe it is a serious request is to state that you can help and ask for some background to the need . . . whether it is the person or the company that needs/wants culture change, what the culture is and why it needs changing and so on. But when no real answers come back, it becomes obvious that you have started too far ahead in the communications cycle.

Deletion of information is also quite common in my experience, when people take for granted information that you do not have access to, without which the message makes no sense at all, for example, “He’s a failure”. A failure at what? And so on. Here is another professional request for help from a colleague. People do say that I am quite intuitive, but I am not a mind reader . . . 

I remain mystified as to who or what Wingman is or was, although I did look the term up on Wikipedia but it still made no sense!

Distortion of information occurs when there is an inferred cause and effect relationship, for example: “He never brings me flowers so he doesn’t love me”. There are, of course, lots of reasons why flowers may not appear.

Generalisation is an interesting area. This is the tendency of people to assume that what happens to them is true of all people. Words such as ‘all’, ‘everyone’, ‘never’, ‘always’ contain the hallmarks of a generalisation. In the context of mass communications, generalised messages are attractive as their potential ‘market’ is much bigger than specific messages. However, they can be too general to engage people in productive action and they can lead to fuzzy outcomes, no outcome at all or the wrong outcome.

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The receiver

Successful communicators ensure that those they are communicating with, i.e. the receiver(s), are awake, alert and receptive. Sometimes this is the most important work you can do, to prepare people to hear what you have to say. Timing can be a crucial determinant of success. Hard to hear ideas might need some ‘warm-up’ to get the receiver in the mood to receive. Sometimes a skilled communicator will use several staged attempts to build up interest and desire to hear what is to be said.

Timing and location are also crucial if you are to reach your intended receiver and have the desired outcome. It is what I call the ‘Martini’ effect after the retro advertisement – not any time, any place, anywhere. More like the right time, the right place, etc. Ideas always have their day and the successful communicator chooses the right time and the right place to launch their ideas and strategies. It is arguable that Clive Sinclair’s C5 environmental scooter might have been more successful if it had been launched at a time when environmental consciousness was at a greater level. People often seize on the only opportunity they believe they have to communicate, for a host of reasons, e.g. limited access, convenience and so on. Sometimes it is better to mark out a time when the receivers are ready and willing to listen. This is a fine judgement and marks out the sheep from the goats in terms of communications excellence.

During my work with the UK Remain movement over 12 months I noticed a number of masters of their art in terms of communications’ excellence, but also rather more classic communication errors. These mainly arose not out of a lack of ability but more out of people’s busy-ness and in some cases a lack of a business-like approach to busy-ness. However, these offer great insights into how not to do things as a set of reversed out lessons on how to succeed:

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The multiplicity of messages, messengers and channels contrived to make it produce a very low signal : noise ratio. That said, the movement did the best it could, given its fragmentation and lack of strategy. It is very probable that it could have achieved so much more with some strategy, leadership and great collaboration methods.

In simplifying the communications model it is wise to realise that there are several types of receivers in any communication interaction. It is useful to distinguish between:

People waste a great deal of time asking the wrong questions of the wrong stakeholders. It is no use asking a gatekeeper to sign a cheque, nor is it always useful to ask a decision-maker for their opinion of the technical merits of an innovative new product idea. It could even backfire on your strategy by putting them in a place of discomfort. I have observed this happening even with some of the most senior people in enterprises who frankly should know better, so it is well worth thinking through.

If you are wishing to communicate to influence and know your receivers, it is also worth considering some general personality traits that can help or hinder your cause.

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Of course, generalisations can be generally unhelpful. It is always wise to work with the specific realities of each situation, perhaps holding this knowledge as a set of heuristics or rules of thumb rather than absolute truths.

When thinking about the people on the receiving end of our communications, it is also worth adapting some ideas from the field of marketing if you are communicating to influence or persuade. Everett Rogers’ diffusion curve identifies five discrete groups of people as receivers, who exhibit different responses to new things. Although this model was focused mostly on new product diffusion into the marketplace, it is just as relevant when considering questions of communication more generally. The five categories are:

At least 68% of the population are what I would call the ‘indifferent majority’. People waste millions trying to get these people to adopt a new product or concept before they have brought on board the people who they respect and listen to. It is really worth giving this some thought when considering an important communication, as you sometimes only have one chance to get it right, or wrong.

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Conventional wisdom on adoption of new products and concepts suggests that you target the innovators first, i.e. those who are already positively predisposed to the message and build momentum from the easy targets. Unconventional wisdom also points out that the people at the other end of the curve have negative energy toward your message, but at least they are not indifferent. Inside a company, they might well be influential cynics. To ignore them is perilous. What this group have are often real concerns, for example safety, cost, etc. If these concerns are properly addressed, the laggards can become your best advocates. Furthermore the late majority are influenced by the laggards to some degree. Thus it becomes possible to ‘squeeze’ the ‘indifferent majority’ from both sides.

The key to all successful communications is careful preparation. This allows you to take advantage of life’s occasional surprises. For this you need creativity and creative thinking, which we address next.

3 Creativity and creative thinking

Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true – but its father is creativity, and knowledge is the midwife.

Jonathan Schattke (M.S. Nuclear Engineering & Mathematics, Missouri University of Science & Technology)

To master creativity and what I call good creative thinking we must master the two thinking styles: divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking is what we traditionally think of as creativity. It opens up options, is characterised by a lack of constraint, the notion that many ideas are healthy and that judgement is suspended in the interest of generating novelty, which, when combined and developed produces ideas with innovation potential. Divergent thinking is typified by popular creativity techniques such as Classical Brainstorming, Six Thinking Hats, TRIZ, Superheroes, Synectics and Mind Mapping. However, brainstorming is frequently done badly and this gives creativity a bad name. I watched in sadness as a group of young people attempted to organise a ‘hackathon’. As soon as an idea was generated a tech person would repeat that the idea was already covered in his lengthy report on the subject. I sensed that he was possibly frustrated that the leader had not taken the trouble to read it, but the impact of this unmoderated contribution was ultimately destructive to the purpose. Eventually contributions dwindled to a full stop. Everyone looked puzzled as they had obviously never seen a creative thinking session organised and facilitated properly and had no basis of comparison, nor any idea what to do about it.

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Convergent thinking closes down options to a point, e.g. the systematic evaluation of a range of options down to a final decision. It is given much less attention than divergent thinking but is far more important if we are to gain access to innovations that confer SCA. It is estimated that only 4% of new product ideas reach the marketplace. Imagine the impact on your enterprise if you were able to double that ratio? And multiply it by five? So much time is devoted to creativity in enterprises when rather more time should be devoted to idea development and the conversion of raw ideas into market-ready innovations to improve the success rate of new product and service development. The trouble is that divergent thinking is generally the fun part of business and convergence seen as the boring/analytical/hard work part. It should not be seen this way. Without convergence there can be no ROI (Return on Innovation). Successful companies ensure that converging is done carefully to ensure that requisite novelty is not lost but ideas are developed such that they are ‘oven-proof’ for the harsh world of the open market. Instead of filtering novel ideas through the normal business criteria, it is important that they are evaluated more carefully, using criteria such as relative novelty, appropriateness for the future and feasibility using existing resources or ones that can be appropriated. If an idea is to be rejected or recycled, successful convergence kills the idea but not the originator of the idea and this is a hallmark of Brain Based Leadership.

On the subject of divergence, there are plenty of good books on tools and methodologies that support creativity. Our recurring theme of ‘Mathematical Creativity’ in this book is one such routine that is easy to use as an augmentation of Classical Brainstorming. There is value and purpose in having some shared rules of the road when participating with others in team-based creativity sessions. I am not going to spend a great deal of time on what I call ‘better brainstorming’ techniques here. Instead I am more interested in the psychological and physical habits that produce creative ideas naturally, as these tend to be more portable for individuals and encourage what I call ‘natural born creativity’. These were exemplified in the ‘altered states’ that were the basis of Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies’, Roger Van Ouch’s ‘Creative Whack Pack’ and various other psychedelic experiments in the 1970s. It is, however, neither essential nor helpful to add artificial stimulants in order to think differently. In most cases it needs to happen naturally in business, so here I offer you eight R’s of highly creative people which you can try on as simple natural extensions of your own skills in this area.

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R1 Randomise

There are many examples of great ideas being inspired by ‘random stimuli’ such as the discovery of Velcro which was inspired by taking a walk in a field. Creativity tools such as SCAMPER, Excursions, Catalogue, The Blindfold technique, etc. build on our unique ability to generate great ideas from random stimuli. Essentially we are talking about being ‘outside’ the space where your thinking currently lies and using a random provocation to simulate this state of mind. The randomise strategy works on the principle of what Arthur Koestler termed ‘bisociation’, which distorts a problem or opportunity from its original frame of reference.

Try this exercise. Take an issue of interest or concern in your life and spend some time defining it carefully. For example:

“I’d like to be able to balance a busy life with sacred time for friends, family and leisure”.

Go outside for a walk and collect ten items from nature. If, for example, you collected a leaf, ask what the leaf has to do with the issue in question. Doubtless you will generate a wealth of ideas from this stimulus, perhaps the idea of seasonality, or how the leaf stores energy for what matters most for its health and so on. In any case, the important move is to apply these provocations to the issue at hand. The approach works just as well when randomly browsing a magazine or catalogue. It was a selection of lifestyle magazines rather than an intense search through hundreds of medical papers that produced the breakthrough idea to extend product patent life for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer during a 24-hour summit meeting we held some years back.

R2 Reframe

Comedians often use the creative tool of exaggeration in order to make the familiar seem strange and/or funny. Reframing also changes the point of view or perspective to change our perception of a situation. By the same token, many great business ideas are the results of creative extensions, frame shifting or distortions of current reality. The idea of cats’ eyes came from the creative extension of imagining how much easier it would be to see at night if cats lit the way on dark streets with their reflective eyes. Rather than then requiring thousands of cats to lie in wait on motorways at night, which would involve cats sitting in specially created wells in the road and being more obedient than is feasible or even desirable for the feline form, the inventor set about embodying the reflective quality from cats’ eyes into a robust design that could be embedded into tarmac. This is much easier on the cats, who prefer to pursue their own interests, and much lower maintenance for the humans in terms of herding them.

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R3 Retreat

The discipline known as NLP has received a variable press, based on the misuse of NLP for what could best be described as ‘power selling’ and the evangelical approach of some NLP practitioners. This of course is not the fault of NLP but due to some of its overly cheery cheerleaders and pushy proselytisers. That said, some very practical, durable and ethical principles exist inside the genre when used with head, heart and soul. One such principle is that of the idea of being dissociated, what NLP calls second and third position and what I am calling retreat to fit in with our 8 R’s! The following is an attempt to debunk the NLP jargon.

Many of us spend a lot of our daily lives living inside our own bodies so to speak, in other words viewing the world from our own perspective. This is what NLP calls 1st position, being fully associated or fully present. It is often helpful to adopt 2nd position (viewing the world from another person’s skin) and 3rd position (completely dissociated, rather like seeing the world from an alien viewpoint). To sum up:

Creativity techniques that rely on the retreat or dissociation strategy include Superheroes, Disney Creativity Strategy, Six Thinking Hats, X-Factor Creativity and some approaches based on meditation and imagery manipulation, etc. Retreating might sound as if you are not facing your problems, yet putting distance between problems can put you in the perfect thought space to see issues for what they are rather than what they seem to be. This is very different to avoidance.

You can also use these ‘perceptual positions’ in sequence as an individual. In teams, it is possible to assign sub-groups with the different positions and facilitate a ‘synthesis’ of the ideas from the three perspectives in order to come up with ideas that are both novel, appropriate and feasible. In my work as a strategy consultant I have used perceptual positions in ‘series’ or in ‘parallel’, depending on the client need, the depth of enquiry and the time available.

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R4 Restrict

Constraints are a great spur to creativity and there are many examples of innovations that have been prompted through the navigation of a constraint or restriction, such as Sir James Dyson’s invention of the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner, inspired by his Hoover that would not suck due to the dustbag being full. Rather than complaining, he set about rethinking the constraint of the bag, starting from the viewpoint of getting rid of the constraint. The theory of constraints has applications across a wide range of industries and pursuits, for example the arts. I spoke with a theatre director who pointed out that great actors, faced with an unintended obstacle on a stage, use the obstacle, rather than seeing it as a constraint. Using restriction through navigating constraints is part of the skill set of the master improviser. Try imposing restrictions on your thinking, even artificial ones as thought experiments, in order to release your creativity.

R5 Reverse

The act of reversal is tremendously powerful in helping us focus on what we do want/need in a situation. Reversal is not about focusing on what we do not want, rather we must come up with a complete reframe of the problem or opportunity. By generating a perverse and extreme reversal we usually alter our state, which puts us in a position to see the issue with new eyes. Reversal reveals areas of the issue that have often been left unexplored. For example, imagine your enterprise were seeking to improve customer perception of their product or service, a perverse reversal would be:

“How can we make our products so dangerous/undesirable/faulty and so on, such that we put ourselves out of business for good?”

Generating options on such a provocation and then inspecting the options for their embedded goodness often generates ideas that are hard to think of using traditional brainstorming approaches. Reverse yourself into great ideas.

R6 Relax

Tension is important for creativity, but too much tension puts us into a state of paralysis in terms of generative thinking. As we have discussed, stress and anxiety flip us over into unresourceful states for learning and creativity. Putting someone into a crisis situation and then asking them to do anything other than come up with the default fight or flight response is unlikely to deliver results for all but the most resilient and well-trained individuals. The state of ‘relaxed attention’ or ‘flow’ is a much more helpful state for releasing creativity. Some business people are prone to thinking that such states are the realm of soothsayers and healers, yet it is possible to be balanced, centred and resourceful in a suit and without the need to lie down on a yoga mat. We discuss what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called ‘flow’ in Dialogue III, taking our examples of effortless mastery from the class A musicians.

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R7 Release

When trying to think creatively one easy state changer is that of using catharsis to unburden yourself in some way. Catharsis is quite simply the act of getting something off your chest and there are a variety of ways of doing this ranging from quiet reflection through to primal screaming! Humour is a great doorway into catharsis. British Airways once had a corporate jester within senior management to help break some of the seriousness that pervades an engineering culture and the ‘boredroom’. The jester was not Sir Richard Branson, although I gather he performed this role for free when he broke BA’s monopoly, much to my friend Dr Andrew Sentance’s upset when Richard took BA’s board on over their state monopoly over landing slots for their planes. Almost any change in emotions may be just as good to alter your state of mind. We explore catharsis as a facilitation style in Dialogue II.

R8 Romance

Much business life is analytical and unromantic in nature. For much of life this makes perfect sense as business decisions should follow a certain kind of logic to sustain the enterprise and its wider stakeholders. However, force of habit often forces us to express business problems in an unemotional way when it is unhelpful to do so. Try re-expressing a problem in a romantic way to create a shift in thinking. For example, instead of saying “How can we double sales performance?” say “How can we encourage our customers to become life long lovers?” The extensions that this generates often outperform options generated by random search techniques on their own. As with all strategies for creativity, these tend to improve the efficiency (speed) and effectiveness (degree of useful departure from current reality), rather than just thinking aloud.

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A culture of creativity

What then can we say that is sensible about the generation of a climate and culture that supports creativity and how techniques can enhance this? The groundbreaking MBA programme ‘Creativity, Innovation and Change’ was instructive in changing my entire fortunes as a business leader. Unlike most MBA programmes, it was taught experientially rather than being an assembly of business models. This meant that the learning was retained permanently and deeply and not as a bundle of knowledge stored in a recess of my mind. It is worth repeating some of the lessons I learned here, lest they suffer from suffocation in the Internet age. Leaders can inculcate cultures that support creativity by paying attention and living the behaviours behind these principles:

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In terms of creating a climate and culture that fosters creativity, leaders would do well to live these four values on an everyday basis. This is quite easy to do in good times. It is much harder but even more important to do in hard times when exploration and ingenuity are often sacrificed for expediency and short-termism. While this is not a book about tools and techniques for creativity and creative thinking, a few words on the topic are worthwhile, since they occupy a lot of time in any enterprise’s life as the ‘shared recipes that bind people together’. Techniques are simply the written down or codified knowledge of ‘what works’ in the field. Alongside techniques and tools for creativity, we do need a systematic process to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your creative thinking and we look at this first.

Systematic creativity

There are many different proprietary processes for systematic divergent and convergent thinking and I favour the most simple three-stage iterative structure. This focuses on defining the problem/opportunity first before looking at creative options and skilfully evaluating and choosing best-fit resolutions and, finally, identifying a pathway to implement the chosen resolution. This is, in effect, a series of staged sequences of divergent and convergent thinking.

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Starting with the question of problem/opportunity identification, skilled business consultants often say that there are several versions of a problem amenable to creative thinking. The problem/opportunity as presented and, after some dialogue, the problem/opportunity that comes to be understood and shared by those responsible for resolving it. It is vital that you work on the real problem or opportunity if there is to be long-term value in your work as a leader. This normally requires some initial diagnostic work except in the simplest of situations. The signs that tell you there is need for problem/opportunity identification are when people say things like “We haven’t got a clue what to do”, “We’ve no idea where we are going”, “We’ve no idea how to get there”, and so on. Techniques and tools to clarify a complex problem tend to help us to:

It is easy to be too unfocused and nebulous. Tightening the topic area to the point where the ‘aha’ moment happens is time well spent as it saves lots of time later on in the process. The sorts of techniques that help include asking the question “Why?” repetitively. ‘Bug Listing’ offers a cathartic way to get the problem off your chest by legitimising dissent and can help us to understand the background and the needs the solution must address. More intuitive ways to help understand the underlying issues can be developed using tools such as ‘extended metaphor’ and also help to examine the problem from many different viewpoints using Janusian thinking. On occasion it helps to use structured, goal-focused tools such as the POSERS checklist from NLP and on other occasions mapping techniques such as rich pictures and multiple cause-effect diagrams are essential to map the underlying complexity and help see the wood and the trees.

Once people have converged on an agreed problem definition, it is usual to move on to option finding. A well-constructed idea-generation session improves the efficiency of ideas, i.e. how many novel ideas are generated in the time available. It also improves the effectiveness of idea generation, i.e. the degree of useful departure from current thinking. Not all brainstorming sessions require radical ideas, so there is no implied suggestion that wackiness is a feature of effectiveness in idea generation. Effectiveness can better be measured by the degree to which the ideas are novel, appropriate and feasible, otherwise known as the NAF criteria. You know when you need to use a bit of mental escapology when people say things like: “Current approaches don’t get us far enough”, or “We need to renew our strategy and tactics”. Techniques for option finding enable you to:

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Of course, the most familiar technique for creative thinking is Classical Brainstorming. The technique is widely used and abused and tends to advantage extroverts who gain energy from the externalisation of their ideas. Brainwriting is a useful variant that helps to unlock the ideas from introverts who perhaps prefer the inner world of expression. Other useful techniques for divergent thinking include ‘Wishing’ and ‘Reversal’, which can help you reach unthinkable ideas very quickly. Sometimes the need is to bring the ideas back to the practical reality we are faced with, and techniques such as force fitting help with that. Other techniques build on some people’s natural abilities and preferences for putting themselves in an NLP 2nd or 3rd position such as the ‘Disney Creativity Strategy’, ‘Superheroes’ and ‘Six Thinking Hats’. These particularly suit people who are good at adopting roles outside of themselves and this brings a new meaning to NLP: “Now Let’s Pretend”.

It is said that we are only capable of holding 7 +/– 2 items in our conscious mind at a given time. What happens when we have 150 ideas from a brainstorming session then? The dumb move is to discount the 150 and go back to the idea you first thought of. The smart money is to use a thought organiser that allows you to see the wood and the trees, plus connections between ideas, from which you can formulate a strategy and so on. You know when it is time to organise and group ideas when people ask questions like “We have idea overload – I’m going to lunch”, “I can’t see the wood from the trees”, “There’s so much c . . . p here that I think we should adopt the idea I thought of in the first place”, and so on. Thought organisers enable you to:

If people are having difficulty seeing if ideas ‘fit’ with the problem as defined, Ishikawa (Fishbone) analysis helps the team to see the links. If the bulk of the ideas for solutions have a series of themes to them, Mind Mapping can group them efficiently. Rich Pictures force us into helping the ideas to coalesce. To render complexity easier to understand, multiple cause and effect diagrams pull together allied ideas. Having 150 ideas can cause an overload problem in itself.

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It is one thing doing a superb brainstorming and thought organising session, quite another to converge with care. Careless decision-making can invalidate even the best innovative thinking through the use of ‘business as usual’ criteria to evaluate novel ideas, which by their very nature are untried and untested. That is not to say that innovative ideas should not be pressure tested – indeed, they must if your company’s risk profile is to be met. They must, however, be treated differently from existing business propositions, otherwise most if not all will be screened out by the process, with the result that people judge brainstorming to be a waste of time as ‘you end up with the same answer as when you started’.

You know when it is time to take a careful approach to making wise decisions when people say things like “I think my idea is the best”, “Why bother brainstorming, I think we all know the answer?”, “We haven’t a clue what to do”, and so on. Techniques for this stage help to:

A range of techniques can be employed here from simple voting approaches to grids and matrices to carefully preserve the novelty of the ideas while realistically assessing their potential to be capable of realisation using resources you already have or can acquire. We focus in greater depth on decision-making shortly.

Once you have carefully selected an option the next step is to identify an implementation pathway for your decision so that it becomes part of business as usual. The devil is in the detail and execution requires meticulous planning and navigation of the obstacles to implementation. You know when it is time to implement your idea when people say things like “The idea is simple, but nobody accepts it”, “The idea is complex and will not be understood”, “The idea upsets the status quo and the egos of certain individuals and groups in the company”, “The idea is risky and we are not in the risk business”, and so on. Techniques for this stage help to:

A number of tools are available to help, ranging from simple checklists such as the 4W’s and H through to Force Field analysis, which can help you understand and manage the power dynamics behind implementation. There is also a suite of project management type techniques such as Critical Path Analysis and decision trees.

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In summary, BBEs have a culture and climate that supports creativity and the conversion of bright ideas into sustainable and profitable innovations. They generally install the underlying thinking skills and beliefs into the DNA of the business via careful selection of naturally creative people supported by the ‘habits’ we have discussed. If there is need to ‘make creativity go faster’ or to have some shared rules of the road, then having some shared processes and techniques and tools will generally make the conversion of creativity into innovation more efficient and effective. Yet the installation of tools, techniques and processes into a poor climate and culture will generally be less effective.

4 Precision decisions

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.

Tom Watson – IBM

I often cycle when working and travelling in London. It is the perfect place to observe the random and complex adaptive behaviour of human beings. I note with some amusement and occasional trepidation that these days I often nearly run over pedestrians walking across roads while addicted to mobile devices, as they seem only to respond to the audio stimuli from cars. Some say that our brains are like computers, yet current computer systems are far less complex than our brains and the analogy is at best a partial one and more likely a very poor approximation. This will change rapidly in the Man-Machine age.

Yet our random behaviour as humans in public spaces will be a major impediment to the implementation of driverless cars and other automations if they are to travel at a reasonable speed. That said, we can also expect that our decision-making will improve in a Brain Based world where rationality takes precedent over ego and human emotion. Embedded in my previous casual remark, though, is a whole hornet’s nest of organisational vipers in the VUCA world of business. We regularly make poor decisions as human beings, in spite of compelling evidence that we should choose otherwise. People continue to smoke cigarettes in spite of the body of evidence that suggests this can kill. A high percentage of people continue to eat and drink in an unhealthy way after a heart attack, in spite of clear advice from their doctor that this is a warning of the need for a lifestyle change. Consider these examples of irrational decision-making, which range from the sublime and amusing to the ridiculous and vaguely insane.

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A local council banned conker trees for fear that a conker may insert itself into a child’s head while playing in the park. (Editor’s note for our international cousins – a ‘conker’ is the name for the prickly seeds from Horse Chestnut trees). Clearly ‘conker attack’ has a low probability of occurrence and constitutes a low impact in terms of serious harm! Yet our well-meaning public service managers saw fit to issue an outright ban to the prickly monsters.

An overenthusiastic member of staff (stationmaster Dave) at my local train station told me that chaining my bicycle outside the station on some railings in the street was “a health and safety risk”. Upon further enquiry as to the risk he was unable to identify one, although I was expecting him to come up with terrorism as a catch all excuse, which would have been hard to push back as the opium of the people. When pressed for his reason he said that he had identified a risk that it might “ladder ladies tights or stockings”. This was once again highly improbable, considering that the bicycle was parked in an area of zero impact, save for the laddered lady’s lost vanity in an area of low tights’ or stockings’ density. Despite writing to the CEO of SouthEastern I could not get any adequate answer for the perceived ‘threats to fishnets’.

When working in corporate life I have noticed that some IT departments consider that Skype is insecure and block its use in companies. Although it is true that voice over IP (VoIP) communications are insecure, apparently Skype is the networking medium of choice for terrorist cells. Somewhat perversely I am minded to say that this would appear to be a pretty good endorsement of its security!! (Far more of the risk is executives losing their phones and laptops on trains, or even more so, moving between companies and taking their entire ‘hard drive’, i.e. their brains, with them.) Skype might have some security concerns but the whole thing seems out of proportion with the actual risk and the alternative leaky strategies to contain knowledge and commercial intelligence.

Yet, nobody seems to think that it was risky for Michigan Republican Senator Christina Bond to carry a gun in her underwear. Senator Bond, or 007 as she came to be known, apparently shot herself in a bizarre tragedy, yet why were we surprised that she shot herself? Moreover why was it reported as an accident in the US media rather than an accident waiting to happen? When we look at risk rationally, we can see that it is possible to confuse the risk of ‘conker attack’ with falling over on a raised paving stone, flying Aeroflot in the 1980s or accidentally shooting yourself from your underwear.

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It is more dangerous to cross the road than ‘conker attack’, flying and most of the things we assume are risky. Smart thinkers consider the probability of a risk occurring and its impact rather than assuming that all of life is a risk. We appear to have become obsessed with risk rather than risk management. This is one area where machines might help us make better decisions, almost like having Mr Spock from Star Trek on the team to balance out our reactions from our ‘crocodile brain’, which regulates our fight or flight response, is prone to recency bias and so on.

You might well want to say to me, “Peter, the risks of conker attack and bra holsters are frivolous examples”, yet, the failure of Pfizer’s inhalable insulin product Exubera is a much more serious affair. Exubera was a breakthrough medicine, offering patients a needle-free life for their insulin. The inhalation device that was devised for the product was almost the size of a small fire extinguisher and became the product’s ‘Achilles heel’. Why, therefore, was this obvious product defect not spotted, especially given the scrutiny that every microscopic aspect of a new pharmaceutical product receives? The CEO at the time knew that Pfizer did not have much in the way of an R&D pipeline and declared that Exubera would be launched whatever happened and invited anyone who said to the contrary to apply for a new job. Quite unsurprisingly, nobody did. It is a supreme example of a decision that was handled poorly by humans to the enterprise’s ultimate cost of $2.8 billion due to a defect that was obvious to all but the CEO. It is arguable that this decision would have been better handed over to a machine who would have told the CEO dispassionately that he was about to make a major mistake. Then the only obstacle would have been the CEO’s ability to listen, take note of the information and do something about it.

Human beings suffer from a number of biases that cause them to make irrational decisions and we can look forward to some improvements in our decision-making processes in the Man-Machine age if only we have the courage and wisdom to listen to what the advances in data management will offer us. The benefits of a balanced approach to decision-making that makes the best uses of what logic can offer us plus the human touch are many, including:

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The blood/brain barrier

The science fiction TV series Star Trek envisioned a world in which the logical functions of decision-making (Mr Spock) were separated from the emotional side (Captain Kirk) and which often used a mediator (Dr McCoy) who attempted to bring head and heart into balance. However, Kirk often won the battle for hearts over minds. This mirrors what happens in business and society when our heads are over-ruled by our hearts. It is almost always a mistake when head, heart and soul are separated in decision-making, be it a personal decision such as buying a house or a car, or a vital business decision such as whether to enter a new market.

It is estimated that adults make around 35 000 decisions every day and many of our decisions are unconscious and, in a sense, artificially intelligent, such as getting up, protecting ourselves from danger on the roads and so on. But what happens when we know what to do but then act in ways that are directly in opposition to our decision? Neuroscience is helping us to understand the balance between our collective synapses and our corporate corpuscles, yet understanding why decisions do not always get executed is merely part of our ability to change those decisions. Can we reach a point where our decisions are much more balanced between head, heart and soul?

Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow outlined two different modes of decision-making. He called automatic, unconscious thinking ‘system 1’ and a more deliberate and measured approach ‘system 2’. System 1 drives quick reactions, such as avoiding an accident, whereas system 2 helps us solve complex problems. There is nothing inherently new in this. The Jewish Kabala separates hokma (wisdom) and binah (intelligence). Hokma is seen as being linked to ‘right brain’ thinking with binah more connected with ‘left brain’ analytical thinking. Professor Guy Claxton discusses something similar in his book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. It would clearly be inappropriate to organise a focus group to decide whether to dodge a speeding bullet. Equally, it is probably a bad idea to organise a snap opinion poll to decide on the UK’s social, economic and political future. Yet our hare brains can also be used (inappropriately) to process complex problems where instant decisions might be sub-optimal. Politicians sometimes use such devices to persuade us to accept simple answers to complex problems using attractive slogans that perhaps have no real substance on deeper inspection, but which appear to offer a solution. Examples in recent times include “Lock Her Up” (Hilary Clinton), “Build a Wall” (Mexico), “MAGA” and “Take Back Control”. The ideal length for such slogans seems to be three words and ideally something that has rhythm and resonant simplicity.

Machines offer us dispassionate insights into decisions we can make as leaders, but only if we care to listen and act upon the knowledge. We have the possibility of severely limiting the failure rate of innovative products and services but the onus falls upon us to act in accordance with that logic. Humans have not had a great track record at listening to advice that does not accord with our own paradigm up till now. We might well be ready to make a great leap forward if we are prepared to listen to the insights that machines can provide to facilitate wise decisions, yet human processes such as denial and the Dunning-Kruger effect must be addressed if we are to get better in this area. To achieve this we need better information and better receptivity to information.

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Informing good decisions

We are bedevilled by biases as human beings while they also make us charming, funny, silly and occasionally vulnerable. People believe things to be true in spite of compelling evidence to suggest otherwise. Examples abound, such as when an EE Sales representative told me with great authority that there are terrorist incidents every day on the streets of Britain. After some exploration of his assumptions it turned out that his friend had been at the Arianna Grande concert in Manchester when there was a tragic terrorist attack. Although his friend had not been injured, the incident had been generalised as an everyday occurrence in his mind. He had, in effect, been himself a victim of what psychologists call availability, recency and confirmation bias. The plain fact of the matter is that there were many more deaths from terrorist attacks in the 1970s and the 1980s, and in terms of their impact, we should really be more concerned that there are five road deaths every day on Britain’s roads, some five times more than the very worst years of terrorist attacks in 1972 and 1988. Air pollution is now a significant killer, contributing to 40 000 premature deaths per year in the UK. Yet, we appear to rate events that appear in the media more highly than the everyday facts of life and death.

I hypothesise that people’s experience becomes their data in a world in which they are rained on by data from the Internet, that the newspapers contain a distorted kind of truth and that they are overwhelmed by ‘facts’. Our ‘bounded rationality’ is indeed bounded as we are unable to source all the data to make informed decisions, nor is it rational, due to our ability to prioritise more recent and more dramatic events over ones with greater impact. The currency of truth is devalued in such a world and we are all poorer for it.

Embedded in the need for making better decisions is, therefore, the need for much better approaches to our management of information. Frank Zappa takes a characteristically existentialist view on information management: “Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth, truth is not beauty, beauty is not love, love is not music. Music is the best.”

Our relentless hunger for data makes the need for better information management even more pressing and we must reform the data–wisdom paradox as this story illustrates.

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I called James at the customer relations’ department of Student Finance England who manages student loans for young people in the UK. They were pestering my son and myself to provide ‘proof’ that he was not currently working. He was not. I called to explain that there was no need for me, nor him, to fill in the time-consuming forms they provide, as they already have a foolproof system in place to take his loan back as taxation at source from his wages. Thus they would know when he started work and their request for data was not needed. James replied “We have to have the data”. When I asked why, he simply repeated “For storage”. When I pointed out that data has no purpose if it is merely to be stored and not used, James insisted that “Everyone else does it”. He was unable to refer me to someone who could not repeat this broken record. I called again and heard similar answers, including one young woman, who had been a student herself but was only able to tell me, “Your son will be charged interest if he did not comply”. This story illustrates an inflexible system, people who are unable to listen and respond and, moreover, a complete misunderstanding of the relationship between data and wisdom. This was clearly frustrating for all concerned and to no ultimate value to either party. We need to reform the system for a new age and there is clearly much to do and a big hill to climb in some enterprises.

We traditionally think of the hierarchy from data to wisdom where:

In the information age, three important tectonic plates are acting on this hierarchy.

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We have also seen rapid shifts in what is defined as wisdom with the advent of post-truth politics where taken-for-granted truths are dispelled one day and then transformed the next, with no explanation or apology when previous ‘truths’ are reflected back to the perpetrators. This is clearly a perverted use of knowledge and devalues the currency of trust, which is vital for all business to continue. Nonetheless, the availability of distributed knowledge is overall a massive advantage to individuals and society, but it requires us to adjust our strategies for scrutinising and using knowledge in a frenetic world. Here are five principles for dealing with data overload and information poverty:

5 Innovation excellence

If creativity is the input to the inventive process, then innovation is the output. Business leaders are mostly interested in innovation over creativity, yet there is not universal understanding or acceptance that you cannot have one without the other. There is also considerable confusion in the world of business as to the interchangeability of these two terms. This leads to the belief that a brainstorming session or a hackathon is all that is needed for innovation. Yet this is often only the beginning of the process. These things often generate the raw ideas that must then be developed into viable and sustainable innovations. Given the statistics we mentioned earlier about the extremely poor conversion rate of ideas : innovations, there is a massive opportunity to be grasped by BBEs. With just a small incremental improvement in the conversion rate the success of an enterprise can be transformed.

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Innovation operates at three levels. It can be strategic. This includes brand building and development, building the enterprise’s unique position, restructuring the company to maintain an edge. Examples include Tesla Inc. and IBM, which grew from selling computers to enterprise solutions. The UK Automobile Association repositioned itself as the ‘4th emergency service’. This added 2.5 million customers (nearly 20%) to their business and the idea for this came from a ground floor staff member. This demonstrates that strategy can be distributed to the customer interface in service-led enterprises if leaders have good listening posts for great ideas. In IKEA’s case, their brand is built on customer experience and they have used intelligence to help their customers make better choices of furniture for their homes through their Catalogue app. This helps customers envision furniture items placed in their own homes. Virgin are masters of innovation within branding and have conducted some notable businesses out of branding alone, including Virgin Atlantic and a considerable number of glorious failures including Virgin Brides.

I think because there aren’t many virgin brides, it never took off.

Sir Richard Branson

Innovation is most often understood as a product or service. This requires the exploitation of novel ideas to deliver something of value to the marketplace, or the reconfiguration of an existing product or service so that it is more in tune with market demand. Examples of product and service innovation include fire (400 000 BC), the wheel (3400 BC), the printing press (1440), the steam engine (1712), semiconductors (1896), the transistor (1947), the Fender Stratocaster (1954) (OK, that one is a personal choice and perhaps not groundbreaking!), the World Wide Web (1990). Much R&D attempts to improve the ROI (Return on Iteration) ratio toward the development of successful new products and services. Whereas there has been an emphasis on pushing new products and services into existence in the 20th century, the statistics of new product introduction are often poor. These days, the Internet allows for strategies that encourage customer engagement and pull strategies on the basis that participation can breed commitment.

However, much innovation is about internal process improvement, in other words finding new ways to do old things. Examples include shortening the distance or number of steps between the enterprise and its customers. In a busy world, shorter and smarter processes have the potential to give your enterprise SCA. Amazon are a good example with their ‘one click and you’re done’ promise. There is much process innovation work to be done in public services, who have tended to transplant bureaucratic manual systems into computer-based ones, which often makes the service delivery more cumbersome for the end user but with less recourse to be able to get service delivery due to the lack of an ability to speak to a flexible and responsive human being. Top of my hit list for improved process re-engineering is Her Majesty’s Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) who have managed to finesse the ultimate in mind-numbing Kafkaesque customer service and some parts of our NHS, which, despite the undoubted skill and commitment of professional staff, is sometimes frustrated by antiquated and unnecessarily complex administration and management.

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Improving innovation probability

The relationship between creativity and innovation is probabilistic. The best we can have is the idea that we can make it more probable to convert ideas into sustainable innovations. What then must enterprises pay attention to in order to increase the likelihood of successful innovations?

Idea development  Great companies are great at rapid idea development, pushing the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) through successive iterations as rapidly as possible to make the idea ready for the market. It is rare for an idea to be fully formed at first inception, yet continuous iteration may make it unwieldy and the successful innovator ensures that idea development refines the idea such that it improves its fitness for purpose without losing its edge. In short we must iterate to innovate and the faster we can get that process working the greater the likelihood that we will find something of interest to our customers and markets. The essential condition is a fusion of style and substance that produces desire and functionality. This is the embodiment of the oft-quoted phrase, “I try to fail as fast as I can”.

Yet failure without learning is of no practical use. Entrepreneurs and innovators must understand that failure contains all the seeds of success built into the experience if only they are prepared to stop, listen and learn. All too often, a failed project is buried in the organisation’s deep memory, sometimes so deep that organisational amnesia breaks out. All the golden secrets to success are entombed along with the project. Few people ever look back in a fast paced enterprise to their ultimate peril. Some of my success as a creativity consultant over nearly 25 years has come down to leading executives into dark corners to examine ideas that have been forgotten or ignored for a host of reasons. At a personal level there are powerful forces within us that contrive to stop us admitting that we made errors. This requires exceptional emotional intelligence to confess to ourselves that we made a bad decision, let alone to others we work with and whose confidence we share.

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Idea elegance  Quite simply, if your idea has not got a great name or a beautifully simple concept attached to it, you will find it harder to diffuse the innovation into the market. With this in mind, great innovators are unafraid to study art, music and other ‘non-business’ disciplines to understand concepts such as beauty, resonance, simplicity and so on. The wheel is an example of an idea that is elegant in that it has been adapted many times while still preserving the essence of form and function. The wheel quite literally makes the world go round. Giving your product or business a great name matters a great deal in a world of declining attention spans . . . I will just say that again . . . Giving your product or business a great name matters a great deal in a world of declining attention spans. Say it short, say it powerfully and say it in ways that your customer will understand.

Market readiness  Innovators are fascinated with what I call market intimacy. This is not the same as being led by market research. Business mythology says that enterprises like Apple and Fender refused to be led by market research, yet perhaps the truth is closer to the idea that they refused to be led blindly by market research. It is simply not intelligent to ignore the wealth of data that exists on just about every little thing we do. Yet data cannot tell us much about things that have never been done before. As with most things the smart leader blends data with wisdom in their search for novelty that someone wants or needs in sufficient quantity that it offers a sustainable profit or purpose.

The Fender Stratocaster guitar is one such example of a product that has managed to retain a premium price in a market of fierce competition purely through a combination of great design linked to a brand name that continues to defeat ‘me-too’ competitors. Leo Fender designed the Fender Stratocaster without reference or deference to market research strategies or techniques. He challenged the prevailing paradigm by designing a guitar that was made from two separate pieces of wood (the neck and body), when they were previously made from one piece of wood by luthiers. He attached the neck to the guitar using four wood screws, challenging the almost sacred viewpoint at that time, that guitar making was a craft. Fender’s guitar was essentially the Model T Ford of the guitar world, transforming guitar making into an industrial process rather than a cottage industry. Fender also introduced a number of innovations. He crucially understood that great design combines form and function, that market research cannot always tell you about new product innovation and that product design is insufficient to ensure your innovation diffuses into the market. Fender was also great at marketing his products and especially understood the power of endorsements in gaining diffusion for his products. This is a point we shall return to when we examine MyMVision, an innovative app development to connect musicians to their global value chain.

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I still note that the mistake is made to push, push, push when the statistics on the diffusion of what I call ‘better mousetraps’ is fairly unpromising. I believe that the problem here is that inventors and entrepreneurs quite literally fall in love with their ideas. They then assume that everyone else is just as romantically attracted. We need to put distance between ourselves and our ideas in order to see them as others do. Once we are in this place we have the possibility of discovering ways of generating market pull rather than product push. We now have the ability to engage customers at the design stage and this is one way to increase the probability of product adoption.

Evolution vs. revolution  There is safety in evolutionary innovation as the next product or service usually builds on the safe foundations of an existing market need and an established customer base, but there may be no sustainable advantage or differentiation long term. Revolutionary innovation is, of course, high stakes and potentially high cost, yet it might be one of the few things that gives you a sustainable edge in a business world where business development is a bit like copying and pasting into a word processor. Guy Watson, CEO of Riverford Farms takes up the vexed question of evolution versus revolution in our next insight from an innovative enterprise coming up shortly.

Streetwise innovation tactics  Small companies want to behave in ways that make them seem bigger. Large companies want to behave in ways that make them seem smaller. The winning move is to find ways to accrue genuine advantages that come from size while minimising the liabilities. There is much emphasis on the big ‘S’ of structure, i.e. large-scale organisational structures that fundamentally reorganise the way work is done. However, there is much value that can be created by using small ‘s’ structural changes to gain from everyday changes that create a small company ethos in a large enterprise. A few examples will help you think through some of your own that will work in your company.

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What is your team’s ROI?

Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.

Albert Einstein

Most business leaders are familiar with the concept of ROI or Return on Investment. In a world where rapid prototyping and incremental development is more important than one-time product development, what matters more is the extent to which you can make radical improvements on each product iteration. This leads to the updated notion of ROI or Return on Iteration. This leads us into the wicked problem of measurement and control of innovation. Measurement plays an important part in getting people to recognise success in most walks of life. Yet too many measures can be crippling in many walks of life. They are especially so at the front end of innovation due to the fragility of embryonic ideas. However, some measures for innovation may be of value:

A ‘hardy perennial’ approach that helps us stay focused in the field of performance measurement is the balanced scorecard, championed by Kaplan and Norton in 1992. This focuses attention on the need to balance hard and soft results with short and longer-term strategy. As such it is an advance on having thousands of disconnected and unmeaningful measures that typify average players in the field.

The strengths of the scorecard are in its simplicity and the fact that it brings together hard and soft measures. As such it is vital that such an approach does not develop into an unwieldy set of purely numerical measures, as this loses the point of its creation. Aliaxis, who produce innovative building products, adapted the format into three critical indicators that can be easily understood by everybody and were a step improvement as they reduce the complexity of the model by 25%. In a busy world, we need simple processes to help us understand complex things. Any form of reductionist thinking that does not ‘dumb down’ the complexity but somehow ‘dumbs it up’ by improving access to a business idea and reducing the number of things to occupy our RAM as human beings is an OK development by me. Aliaxis have dumbed up Kaplan and Norton’s model thus:

The BUS, CUS, US language is an easily tradable ‘shorthand’ that can be used to increase focus on where improvements are needed. BUS or business/financial measures include closeness to budgeted profit. CUS or external customer measures reflect achievement against required levels of order completeness and timeliness of delivery. These measures are, in turn, interpreted in terms relevant to local teams. This is a good example of a simple system in use to ‘tame’ a wicked problem.

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The anatomy of an innovator

Innovation is not just the realm of technology firms. It is as old as our wheel. This example shows just how it permeates every aspect of our lives as we visit Riverford Farms, an organic farm owned and managed by Guy Watson. Guy specialises in a sustainable and ethical approach to business and this permeates his whole life and ethos in a model approach that others would do well to live up to. He alludes to the need to match revolutionary innovation with the evolutionary kind, to know when to innovate and when to consolidate and to the restless mindset of the innovator.

We were double winners at the Soil Association Best of Organic Market awards this month; best and most innovative organic farmer. The urge to innovate stems from our restless dissatisfaction with the way things are, a determination to find a better way and constant pushing of the boundaries. It got man out of the cave, brought us the Industrial Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Internet but arguably also the Enclosures Act, climate change, deforestation, gun powder and industrialised farming. Clearly it can be a force for both good and bad; as yet we are incapable of distinguishing the useful from the destructive before lunging forward into the chaos that ensues when we let the marketplace decide. The innovations that are scaled up are invariably the profitable ones (usually to a small minority), not necessarily balanced, beneficial to all or thought through in their consequences for humankind and the planet.

I am an irrepressible innovator and sometimes loathe the restless dissatisfaction that comes with it. I know it makes life hard for my staff and those around me and have determined to take time to celebrate achievements before dashing on. On this occasion, celebration involved a lot of organic vodka, imbibed on a warm London night with some self-satisfaction.

To be a good, maybe even the best, organic farmer requires much more balance, and some wisdom. Innovation has its place but, unless preceded by a lot of observation, patience and a bit of humility we would be charging around creating clever solutions to the wrong problems. Last week we were clearing up the yard and I noticed a number of my early inventions disappearing into the skip (I couldn’t help retrieving the long-abandoned, barely used, lie-down weeder; a genius idea that my staff hated). Mercifully, over most of my 30 years of organic growing my impetuous nature has been balanced by our more considered farm team, particularly John, our cautious farms manager of 25 years. I appreciate his patience and consideration but will never emulate it; I will be an innovator to the grave. To succeed and persist another 30 years we need both approaches, and the wisdom to recognise when each is appropriate; when to risk my revolutionary leaps and when to progress in John’s cautious steps.

Guy Watson, Riverford Farms, www.riverford.co.uk

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6 Learning and plasticity

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.

Aristotle

Like most things connected with the future, the jury is out on just what humans will need to tilt the balance toward the intelligences that are needed for a machine-enabled world. I would, however, argue for a rebalancing of the importance of each type for a sustainable world in which we profit from machines and robots, etc. In the industrial age, it was important for us to carry our IQ around with us. Our education systems were guided toward this goal through ‘uploading and downloading’ information onto examination papers, through our attempts to impress each other with our retention of facts and the ability to organise and reformulate facts to suit particular needs. Retention of facts may no longer be needed apart from entertainment purposes at dinner parties and quiz shows. What matters more is our ability to apply information and knowledge.

As a child, it was important to carry many facts around in one’s brain. In hindsight, this was a sensible strategy as a two-year-old’s brain is approximately 80% of adult size, so we have plenty of capacity. In any case it is estimated that we only use approximately 3% of our entire brain capacity in our lives, unlike most computers. The development of what could loosely be called ‘Learning to Learn Technologies’ were crude, so I had to use a DIY approach, developing my own approaches to install the required knowledge to pass exams and so on. Some of my methods were not efficient in today’s terms even though they were naively quite effective. These included the repetition of French vocabulary in my head before going to bed and then recalling it on awakening, essentially a rote learning method, repeating the phrases in my head many times until I had linked them to their meanings. In other cases I manufactured surprisingly effective ways of assembling knowledge and wisdom onto small cards containing images, words and other triggers such as mnemonics, which I would ‘photograph’ in my mind’s eye. All this pre-dated the advent of “Key Facts” cards and then Mind Maps™ by Tony Buzan and a suite of visual memory methodologies such as rich picturing and cognitive mapping. I learned many other methods of acquiring, retaining and organising information later on, but, to be frank, the amount of information now available has outpaced my ability to learn so I must modify my strategy for learning. Given that there has been an exponential growth in the amount of data we are exposed to on a daily basis, we have two choices on how to handle it as individuals. We can either drown in data or swim with information. Some of us are clearly switching off as a strategy, since the average attention span has declined from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8.25 in 2015. That is nearly one second less than the attention span of a goldfish, although, in fairness, the goldfish’s environment has not altered that much in the same time. We must become much better at solving the question of how to improve the signal : noise ratio in terms of finding and using the information we need to succeed.

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We know that children learn best when teaching engages with their own natural exuberance, energy and curiosity. Yet much educational pedagogy still expects children to sit still, as passive recipients of knowledge, disengaged with learning. The ‘upload-download’ model, whereby teachers input knowledge in order for children to write it back down on an exam paper is also broken in an age where application of knowledge is more important than knowledge acquisition. Also, much of our work life requires collaboration so why do we rely on feeding the individual child in school? Education has a lot of learning to do about learning in the Man-Machine age. It is something I spent some time discussing with Professor Ken Robinson some years back when he had just written his groundbreaking book on education called All Our Futures. The essence of this book was that creativity in education was a core skill across all subjects and that it could and should not be confined to the art department. His findings were widely ignored by the government of the day who had commissioned the project. Perhaps they will listen now. I also spoke with Greg Smith of Arthur D. Little more recently on how education must change in order to prepare people for a world in which the intimacy between people and machines is increased? In a nutshell, he said that the measure of success must move from the things you know to the questions you can ask. Acquiring knowledge through facts must be replaced by acquiring knowledge through lines of enquiry. So a futurist school manifesto will balance lessons in IQ (head), EQ (heart) and SQ (soul). We are likely to be focused on meta-knowledge (how we use knowledge) rather than just concentrating on the acquisition and retention of knowledge per se. It might well include lessons on:

Although there is little hard evidence to support the existence of spiritual intelligence, Howard Gardner alluded to its existence when he augmented his theory of multiple intelligences in 1999 with what he called ‘existential intelligence’. Just because we cannot quantify something it does not mean that it does not exist. Society does seem to have become afraid to believe in anything these days unless there is quantitative research-based evidence behind the concept, perhaps because of the proliferation of information sources, often contradictory information and the advent of the term ‘fake news’ which has devalued the currency of the truth. Yet, many of us are prepared to buy health foods, read tarot cards and pray, none of which are supported by hard evidence. Are we simply too hard on things that are by their very nature empirical in nature amid a data-led world?

What then works in the field of multiplying your personal intelligence? Let us lift some more durable needles out from the haystack in this area from the last 50 years of activity for busy people. Never mind last week’s fads. We are looking at what works in this area, from classic methods that have stood the test of time to advances in this area that will last more than a week.

Never mind the neuroscience

Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

E.B. White

Perhaps the ultimate test of the convergence between man and machine will come when a computer can do a stand-up comedy routine without assistance. Rather than telling just a pre-prepared joke, can the computer ‘warm the audience up’, sense the context in which the joke would need to be adapted and so on? Once the computer had made the audience laugh, could it act upon emotional intelligence to build on the situation and vary the script until they could take no more?

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Neuroscience offers us massive opportunities to discover how we might be more intelligent individually and collectively. Unfortunately the word ‘neuro’ has also become some kind of catchphrase to be added on to virtually any product or service to revitalise it, rather like the word nanotechnology has been added to hairspray to befuddle us. Before we look at what advances in neuroscience can offer us, let us take a brief diversionary muse into some early failures in my quest to fuse man and machine in perfect harmony.

Having wrestled with machines for much of my life as a musician, I spent a lot of my early life trying to get machines to do things that humans do easily. My Man-Machine experiments came to a head in 1978 when we augmented our drummer Simon on stage at a concert in the town hall with a spin drier loaded with a brick to create an industrial backdrop to our music. We did not do this as an act of cruelty to Simon but one of kindness, as he was incredibly shy and did not want to be seen on stage. Instead he played ‘in synch’ with the spin drier behind the stage curtain, although that experiment did not work well due to the dominance of the spin drier and its arrhythmic qualities. Most of my experiments with drum machines and early computers were not as satisfying as the interactions I have had with live percussionists and drummers, due to their ability to learn, unlearn and relearn. The process of creating new neural pathways in our brains is called neuroplasticity. This is our brain’s way of becoming more effective and efficient. As we age some of our neural pathways grow stronger and others diminish. But we are still able to learn all through our lives if we are motivated to do so. In this respect humans differ from machines, most of which do not currently learn, unlearn or relearn. Our abilities to learn, unlearn and relearn are some of the most precious capabilities that differentiate us from machines at this time. We would do well to enhance these capabilities as we enter the age of machine intelligence. How then is the brain organised for thinking?

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Keiron Sparrowhawk leads My Cognition, a company devoted to cognitive fitness and our ability to enhance it. Major advances in neuroscience over the past 30 years have built on two centuries of psychological and cognitive research, to give us a better understanding of five domains that form the main part of our cognitive function. These are: executive function; working memory; episodic memory; attention; and processing speed.

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Our plasticity differentiates us from machines that are, of course, currently brilliant at logic. The point at which machines can match our ability to think creatively is a long way off and creativity will be a core skill that helps us work in harmony with machines. The following stories illustrate the different ways that people learn.

The chemistry of learning

It was a chilly day in February 1971 and I was 12 years old. I was tucked up in the house as usual in the living room with my chemistry set. My mum was doing her own chemistry experiments by burning my fish finger sandwiches in the kitchen in her usual way. In front of me, an array of test tubes and flasks, a methylated spirit burner, a tripod and a crucible. The air hung with acrid smoke as I attempted various chemistry experiments with my Lotts’ chemistry set, suitably augmented with various items I had bought in bulk from the chemist’s shop without parental supervision, question or challenge: ammonia, hydrochloric acid, flowers of sulphur, copper sulphate, potassium nitrate, hydrogen peroxide. Some of the experiments were quite dangerous! I was in effect a learning junkie and also read avidly around the subject of chemistry. As a result I became top of the class in the subject and suffered the usual Anglo-Saxon bullying that accompanied educational success in an English grammar school environment. I later on realised that I was more of an exception rather than the norm in my nerdishness and thirst for learning, yet I still feel I would be ready for a world in which the only source of personal competitive advantage is the ability to learn fast and to be inquisitive. As an aside, just imagine what would happen if a 10 year old went to the local chemist’s shop to procure such items at such tender years in the current age?

This story is a good example of what Kolb would call active experimentation in order to learn. In my experience, just trying stuff is insufficient to guarantee learning. We have all done experiments but failed to learn from them. To learn well, we need to also have ambition, goals, interest, capability, a means of learning and willpower. So often in my life as a university tutor, I have noticed that there is no shortage of capability among the people I have dealt with but often the desire to learn, which is connected with interest and willpower, is missing. The old adage “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink” springs to mind. Clearly we need to ignite the willpower of our children in learning if we are to succeed as faster learners. This includes allowing them to experiment and, occasionally, to fail.

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In other cases, learning can be a social process. Reading aloud or listening to stories is one of the most ‘cerebrally’ engaging experiences a child can have. Watching TV for 15 000 hours only generates about 30 minutes of brain activity. However, reading aloud fires up children’s brains because they have to use their imagination. This activity stimulates the electricity in the brain, promoting brain development by strengthening brain pathways. Do we read books anymore, however? Perhaps I am preaching to the converted as you are clearly reading this one!

7 Branding for a complex world

In a world where the signal : noise ratio is in sharp decline due to communications overload, an effective brand can help you and your enterprise stand out from the crowd. Supermarket brands are a kind of shorthand for your enterprise’s products and services. Your brand is a manifestation of the bundle of promises you intend to deliver. In a cluttered and complex world branding is a way of helping people find your enterprise, its products and services. How then does the gentle art and discipline of branding work in an age when many brands are virtual and transient? How are enterprises evolving their approach to branding to address the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution where intelligence, information and imagination are the hallmarks of success? To brand your enterprise you must engage all the senses to reach people’s heads, hearts and souls. To begin, here are six of the best rules every brand builder should remember and some examples of enterprises that are using these rules to help them stand out from the crowd:

Stand on the shoulders of giants

ColaLife is a not-for-profit enterprise inspired by the thought that Coca-Cola seems to get everywhere in developing countries, yet simple life-saving medicines do not. They asked the question why and started to work on a number of fronts to cheekily brand themselves with the ‘cola’ tag as a disruptor by delivering small changes that make big, self-sustaining improvements. Not everyone can become a brand and while ColaLife do not have the resources to become a brand themselves, like a Fortune 500 enterprise, they have cleverly stood on the shoulders of giants in ways that give them presence while complementing Coca-Cola’s drive toward improved ethical credentials, working with companies such as Glaxo SmithKline (GSK) and Johnson & Johnson to save lives in Africa.

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Their work is in the field of Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) and zinc for childhood diarrhoea. More than a decade since this treatment became the global standard, 99% of diarrhoea cases are still not treated with ORS with zinc and diarrhoea is still the world’s second biggest killer of young children. This told co-founders Simon and Jane Berry that current efforts to improve access are not sufficient and are working too slowly. Simon and Jane are living embodiments of a company that connects passion and purpose. Here Simon speaks of how they came to have the idea and the transformations that have happened to realise their dream of “making death from diarrhoea history”.

One of the things Coca-Cola taught us: you have to deliver on expectation – every time. Quality and trust are everything – even and especially for poor people with few resources to risk.

Jane Berry

ColaLife uses the power of horizontal online strategy, having more than 10 000 online supporters, and interest from many global stakeholders. These help to give a tiny enterprise the power to source expertise – and even information sharing – among unlikely partners such as UNICEF, J&J, GSK, Coca-Cola, SABMiller and health agencies across the world.

The power of connection

MyMVision connects musicians around the world with live music venues, music schools, recording studios, rehearsal rooms and the entire value chain via an IOS and Android app. MyM facilitates the professional careers of artists, helping them at every step of their journey, from the cradle to the stage and beyond. Launched in 2017 by Internet of Artists, a London-based company boasting a fully Italian creative team, MyM has masterminded social media and collaborations with giants, building their brand on solid foundations, with already more than 100 000 active profiles in over 15 countries. Founder Riccardo Torriani identified several of our branding rules as being pivotal to the development of their BBE:

Brand building through social media is only part of our story. We have developed several strategic collaborations with partners to give us scale and reach. Nobody wants to be the first person to try an innovation and our musicians can partner with world-class musicians across the planet. We have also benefitted from endorsements from professionals who have worked with Prince through to Ozzy Osbourne.

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Moments of truth matter

Your brand can be built or destroyed in seconds through social media. Some enterprises choose not to have social media presence because of this. It does not matter as people will talk about you anyway. As Jeff Bezos says: “Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.”

Brands matter, especially when a problem arises in your enterprise. Your response to circumstances when your enterprise is challenged is what marketers call a ‘moment of truth’ as it reveals your brand values in an unvarnished way. I was deeply impressed by the behaviour of Line 6 CEO Marcus Ryle in this respect. Line 6 are a high-tech electronics firm that make guitar processors among a range of other musical equipment. I had a mechanical problem with a guitar effects unit, the flagship Line 6 POD 500X, which is used by the likes of Bill Nelson, Elbow, Avril Lavigne and session musicians who work with Eric Clapton, Pink and Van Morrison. The problem occurred shortly after the unit was out of warranty but I considered the fault not to be down to fair wear and tear. I could make no progress with Yamaha’s call centre, who handle Line 6’s routine affairs on their behalf and decided to persist by inviting the CEO to connect with me on LinkedIn, having explained why I wanted to speak to him briefly. I could not be more impressed with the turnaround that Marcus performed after he made some detailed enquiries of me. Moreover, I was totally impressed because he handled the issue personally, when I am sure he had better things to do. If more enterprises were able to act in this way, their reputations would soar and their repeat business with it.

Brand on the run

Nub Records is an independent record company that collaborates with Warner Bros to achieve global reach and punch above their weight in the music business. The owner, Mark Christopher Lee, first set Nub up as an independent label for his own band:

We were getting played a lot on BBC Radio 1 and were offered a lot of what I thought were dodgy deals by record labels. So I decided to start a label myself. We were one of the first digital only labels back in 2005 and we now have a deal with Sony.

Mark started sending music to the legendary VP of Warner Music – Seymour Stein who famously signed Madonna as well as The Ramones – Seymour loved what Nub were doing and their DIY Punk ethos. Since that time Nub has entered the Guinness Book of Records with their series of 100 × 30 albums. The concept is 100 songs all 30 seconds long, as a protest against lack of royalties from music-streaming services such as Spotify – 100 × 30 unintentionally broke the world record for the maximum number of songs on a 74-minute digital CD. It also fits perfectly inside our emerging world of DADD where the average length of video watched online is 2.7 minutes. The award sees them featured alongside Justin Bieber in the Guinness Book of Records, which Mark found hilarious. Nub Records are living proof that David can conquer Goliath with a clever strategy. Nub Records are a good example of a brand that has used the power of networks, endorsements and PR to build a brand from a small base without huge budgets and access to branding agencies.

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The lessons from these branding stories may be summed up:

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Synthesis

We must face up to the Man-Machine paradox rather than avoid the inevitable. The winning move for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is for humans to operate in synergy with machines, information and intelligence.

If we choose to operate in the Man-Machine quadrant this offers us the choice of gaining self-actualisation through the genuine release of the drudgery of working life, although we will need to pay the price in terms of becoming lifelong learners. Replacing drudgery with self-actualisation is not a bad trade-off although we might have to make other trade-offs in the process.

We live in a VUCA world. To survive and thrive, we must master complexity thinking and learn to improvise as part of a deliberate strategy rather than slavishly following rigid plans. We continue to develop the theme of strategic improvisation in Dialogue III.

BBEs are ones in which we fully engage the heads, hearts and souls of the people we employ or collaborate with. Enterprises that operate with high IQ, EQ and SQ are positioned perfectly to perform better in a disruptive business world.

Brain Based Leaders are also exceptional at balancing head (IQ), heart (EQ) and soul (SQ). It is no longer true that the most conventionally intelligent leaders will make the best ones in a world where information is freely distributed. However, there will always be a role for smart practitioners who can convert the tsunami of data into valuable information knowledge and wisdom.

In a world of communications overload, the Brain Based Leader masters the art and discipline of persuasive and potent communications, providing they lead with resonant simplicity and truthful communications in a busy, complex and confusing world. Instead of ‘dumbing down’ communications, Brain Based Leaders ‘dumb up’ their communications by being brief, rich in content, potent and respectful to their recipients.

Brain Based leaders create cultures where creativity and creative thinking are part of business as unusual. At the same time, they encourage others to make wise decisions, based on a balance of head, heart and soul without undue bias from the human condition. In doing so they set their people up to maximise the conversion of good ideas into innovation excellence for maximum ROI.

A BBE is a living organism rather than a two-dimensional organogram. Learning and plasticity are embedded into the enterprise’s DNA. We will explore enterprise plasticity further in Dialogue III.