2

CHAPTER TWO

THE CREATIVITYWORKS
FRAMEWORK

Please pick up the nearest pen, any pen will do, and ask yourself, “How could I create a new pen that will meet my needs in the next five years?” Take a few moments. Draw what your new pen would look like. How far did you push the device beyond what a moment ago you considered just any pen?

On the second meeting of my class during the semester, I ask the same of my students. I walk in, set a pen on my desk, and say, “This pen no longer meets my needs. Get into groups of four people each and create a new pen for me, one that has multiple functionalities and will meet my needs in the next five years.” Initially, the students just stare at me, this being only our second class. Then I bark, “You are in a Creativity and Innovation course. Get into groups and use the CreativityWorks Framework to design me a new pen in the next forty minutes. Go.”

Now the pace of the students is frenetic before they settle into a quiet buzz as they work their way through the challenge using one of the brainstorming tools introduced in the first class (and that you, too, will learn about later). The pace picks up again forty minutes later when they present their drawings for an amazing new pen. Some of the features suggested include a USB drive, automatic note-taking transfer to my laptop, an emergency LED light, Bluetooth locator, text messaging display from a smartphone, and for women, a small lipstick applicator. And there are many more creative ideas. It’s only the second class of the semester but the students now understand; they own the creativity in this class. Before I walk you through the CreativityWorks Framework, let’s review what you need to own.

CREATIVITY STARTS WITH YOU

I am always amazed when I meet with company executives or founders of startups and they have no idea that “employee creativity” starts with each employee. I don’t care what type of company or industry you are in—a law firm, restaurant, accounting, banking, or a mobile applications company—you “own” the creativity that happens in the organization. Are you telling me that people at law firms and banks don’t need to be creative in either introducing new products or solving problems? Are you going to leave creativity and innovation in your company to chance? You get to choose creativity. Here are some simple ways to “jump-start” your own creativity mindset:

Open your eyes. Do you really see what is going on in your company, in the marketplace, and with worldwide trends (i.e., organic foods, renting via Uber and Airbnb, mobile banking and transactions, etc.) that affects you or your customers?

Make new mind connections. When was the last time you read a book not related to your business or attended a trade show or event that had nothing to do with your industry? Pick up new knowledge or, better yet, a new skill.

Talk to your customer. When was the last time you had a conversation with a real customer? How many customers do you talk to regularly to get their insights or to develop a little customer empathy?

Really observe something. Do you take note of colors, smells, and sounds that make up a brand or retail presence? When was the last time you took a different route to work or walked into a store you have never been in before?

Ask “why” more. As you meet with people and look to help them solve problems, do you form your own opinions quickly and ask eighty-word questions, likely to confirm those opinions, or do you simply ask “why” more often, then just listen? For example, pretend you run a ketchup company. Your VP of sales says, “Sales are down.” You ask, “Why?” “We ran out of inventory.” “Why?” “We had problems related to the new product.” “Why?” “There was a shortage of a key component.” “Why?” “We only have one supplier.” Aha! Now you know the real problem, and it’s not that sales of ketchup are down.

Reframe your challenge. Instead of looking at a challenge from one “closed” perspective, step back and reframe it. For example, your VP of sales is back to say again, “Sales are down.” “Why?” “We don’t know why, so let’s run a promotion to move more ketchup.” “What if we lower the price?” “That will hurt gross margins, net profits, and our brand.” And you’re stuck. What if you changed your old way of doing things, though—in this case by expanding your product line to include mustard, using your same manufacturing and distribution channels? What if you reconceived of your business as not a ketchup company but as a condiment company? In fact, in April 2015 this is precisely what Heinz did, entering the $400 million retail consumer mustard marketplace. That’s how you reframe a sales challenge.

Build your creative network. Who do you hang out with both at work and in your personal life? How many “creative” people are in your network? When was the last time you had a “creative” conversation with someone not in your profession?

CREATIVITY: FOCUS ON SOLVING PROBLEMS

You have an amazing idea, and it’s a big one. You’re super motivated. You’re blindly passionate. You’re pretty smart. So here is the question: Is a good idea really all it takes to build a great business? A great idea, that’s what it’s all about, right? Wrong. When I first meet with entrepreneurs or company leaders, I don’t want to hear their idea about the products being built or services provided. First and foremost, I want to hear about problems—those that exist and those that can be solved. Quite a few people, particularly first-time entrepreneurs or product developers, kind of want to scratch their own itch. They have a vision for a product and they want to see it in the marketplace. They are the worst kind of customer. They are their own customer.

As long as consumers have problems, they will forever be on the hunt for solutions. People will always look for better, faster, and smarter ways to accomplish everyday tasks. And fortunately for entrepreneurs and marketers, there’s still lots of room for improvement in existing products. That said, the biggest issue for most people is finding these painful problems and matching them with the best solutions possible.

So focus on building a must-have product, not a nice-to-have one. Consumers are overwhelmed with the paradox of choice on a daily basis. Attention spans are getting shorter in the age of multitasking and only a few products are getting noticed—with many being a solution for a want and not a need. The demand for quicker and faster results (i.e., lose weight now, play a mobile game now, listen to music now, get somewhere now, etc.) makes it very difficult to fully satisfy the needs of consumers. You need to be doing something different and better to make it in this world, as consumers expect and demand more than just another product. So, what do you do?

Solve really painful problems. Google made search better. Amazon simplified online buying and selling. Netflix solved on- demand streaming media. Uber is making on-demand car service better. Airbnb is making travel accommodations more flexible. What can you make smarter or better? What problem can you solve? What do customers need? What is the one painful problem your potential customers (and, hopefully, they comprise a big marketplace) have that you can solve without a struggle? If you come up with a product that is not a must-have, you could still find a way to repurpose it to solve a pressing need. If you have been able to identify a crucial problem that you can effectively execute and deliver to market, you will be able to create a real product or business that matters.

Now how does an entrepreneur or corporate manager go about figuring out which problems to tackle? Well, if you have industry expertise or experience you have an advantage in creating solutions to issues you’ve dealt with firsthand. But for hopeful founders or product developers who may not have experience in a given space, there are other ways to come up with the next great idea. You’ve just got to start talking to people. The more you do, the more you’ll start to see patterns. The more patterns you see, the more likely you can uncover a problem.

A person with a creative mindset looks at a problem and knows it’s an opportunity. That’s not a cliché. A problem is literally an opportunity to get paid if you can be the one to solve it. Successful people make their living identifying problems and then providing those solutions to the marketplace. Every good product solves some sort of problem. Even video or app-based games solve a problem—they provide a way for people to unwind after a stressful day and fulfill a fantasy.

If you want to be successful, your natural response to any given problem should always be to ask yourself how you can solve that problem. Not who is to blame, and not how that problem came to be—just how the problem can be solved. Problem solving should become a habit. As you become alert to problems with no solutions, you become alert to new ways to create, grow, develop, and innovate new products. If you can marry your new “alertness” to calculated action, you will develop the instincts that you need to potentially implement innovative solutions that solve problems so well, you will create an amazing new product or company.

Of course, it’s not easy to start an innovative new company. According to a report by the Kaufman Foundation, a research center that studies entrepreneurship, roughly 2 million new businesses are started each year. We also know about 90 percent of startups ultimately fail—many, I suspect, because they should never have been started. The company didn’t have the right idea; it didn’t know the right market or it wasn’t the right time for the idea, yet the founders plunged ahead anyway. I am not saying that entrepreneurs or company leaders cannot adjust or pivot their business model, but quite of few of them simply don’t know when or how to pivot the business idea they are in love with.

Creating the spark for new ideas that can lead to new companies is, however, much easier, especially if you follow the Creativity- Works Framework.

[THE CREATIVITYWORKS FRAMEWORK]

Let me pick up where I left off in Chapter 1 and expand some more on the framework’s four components in this chapter and then go into more depth on each in the subsequent chapters.

1. A Growth Mindset: The most critical component of the framework, a growth mindset, is also the one you control completely. Having this mindset is not just a question of having a positive attitude; it’s an outlook or internal belief that you are, can be, and will be creative. It is deeply personal, and it informs how you interact with your creativity from everyday work-related ideas to life-changing projects or goals. How you think and feel about creativity guides your life, and it empowers your professional success, your personal purpose, and your creative lifestyle.

2. Environment: Environment encapsulates the culture and leadership within an organization, whether it’s a Fortune 500 company or a startup. Culture is an organization’s shared values and beliefs. “Leadership,” as Peter Drucker says, “is not magnetic personality—that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’—that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” With good leadership, culture isn’t forced; it is fluid and constantly evolving in a positive way. Communication is open and frequent. Everyone understands the mission and goals of the organization, and everyone has input into how they can be attained. Employees feel that they are an important part of the company and that every job matters and everyone is respected within the company. Trust flows up and down the org chart, and everyone is focused on customers.

3. Habitat: You can’t really maximize the creativity in yourself unless you are in a physical space that promotes both the “creative feeling” and interactivity with other people. Creative spaces designed to promote these activities increase the likelihood of collisions—and the data repeatedly demonstrates that the more “employee” collisions you can create in a physical space, the more you create positive outcomes. We don’t measure the content of interactions, but that doesn’t matter. When collisions occur, regardless of their content, improvement typically follows. As the Harvard Business Review noted in an article on Pixar, Steve Jobs believed physical space mattered. He was adamant that restrooms, cafeterias, and meeting rooms be in central locations to increase the interaction “collisions” between designers, writers, animators, and production people. Of course, Pixar’s leaders embrace diverse and open teams, cross-collaboration, and openness to feedback; this company culture creates a sense of purpose that permeates the campus. Pixar’s habitat, though, is what enables leadership and culture to become manifested as wonderful movies.

4. Brainstorming Tools: Based on my twenty years of working with both large corporations and startup companies, my research, and the course I teach, I have come to the conclusion that most brainstorming is ineffective because it does not start with a clearly defined problem, an alignment of the solutions objectives (as related to the problem), and a structured format with clear time limits. Well-designed brainstorming, however, can be very effective. In later chapters, I will explain six powerful brainstorming tools in detail (SCAMPER, IdeaGen, Phoenix List, Blue Ocean Strategy, Tempero, and Observation Lab) to help you focus your creativity and generate potential ideas and avoid having your brainstorming session degenerate into a free-for-all of pointless ideas.

The CreativityWorks Framework can be a powerful mentality and process for you to use in your pursuit of creativity and innovation. But remember, the most important element in creativity and innovation is still the customer.

CUSTOMER TRUTH CAN DRIVE INNOVATION

In my book Fail Fast or Win Big, I dedicated an entire chapter to what I call customer truth. I used the adage that “customers are not always right but they are never wrong.” In other words, customers may not tell you that they need an easy to use MP3 music player or what it should look like, but when Apple introduced an “easy to use” MP3 player, the iPod, customers swarmed all over it. If it had been no better than what was in the marketplace at the time, they would have rejected it. When you look to solve a customer problem, you need to validate that it’s a real pain point with potential customers so that when you look to creative solutions, they actually need to solve the problem. The other thing you want to verify is your customer target segment. You can’t really drive brainstorming sessions to come up with creative ideas to solve a problem if you don’t clearly understand your customer target segment. Are they millennials, age 18 to 34, which will be the largest target segment in the USA by 2025 (81 million), or are they among the 71 million baby boomers, age 60 to 85, who today are still the largest customer segment in the USA? The key is knowing as much as you can about your customer before you start looking into discovering and solving their problems. Here are some simple tips that will help you learn more about your potential customers:

Observe them. Hang out where they are and watch what they do; learn how they interact and purchase products and services you are looking to improve.

Walk in the customer’s shoes. Behave like your customer. Buy your product or service or a competitor’s and see what the shopping experience is like. What did you learn from a customer perspective?

Talk to people closest to the customer. Can you talk to the people who service or sell to the customer? What problems do they see? What problems do they hear about from customers?

Be a mole. If you want to better understand or improve a product or service, then be your own “undercover boss” and learn what you don’t know. Do a “ride along” in the customer environment or, if you can, shadow or be an employee for a day in the customer environment.

Talk to customers. As simple as this advice seems, I cannot tell you how many corporate leaders and entrepreneurs I have met that just fall “out of touch” with their customers. Talk to your own or potential customers and listen for problems; then determine if you have a potential solution that meets their needs, not their wants.

The CreativityWorks Framework is a methodology for you to use in driving better creative ideas that could become innovative solutions. But you really can’t create an innovative solution and move it into the marketplace unless you have a creative and persevering growth mindset, one that truly believes you can be creative and solve problems even when the rest of the world does not believe you.