Innovation – Hidden in Plain Sight

Last week I spent a couple of days in half hourly conversations with all sorts of different businesses who are interested in what we are doing and in particular the ways in which they could innovate more effectively using the tools that we are currently making available.

This was exceedingly interesting, many contacts were made and offers proposed. However, in some of these conversations I found myself pointing out how innovation is really all around us, how people are almost oblivious to it and why it’s useful to begin recognising it.

Some examples? Around 2007 more people in the total world population started living in cities than in rural areas. That is a huge shift and the consequences are pretty difficult to overestimate.

To give you an example of just how profound these can be, if you look at the US there are a couple of staggering statistics; 90% of  US GDP and 86% of all US jobs are generated on just 3% of the landmass of the continental US. And that 3% is in cities.*

Now those cities often don’t get to keep the wealth they have generated and hence can have poor infrastructure.  But that doesn’t alter the fact that cities are hugely important innovation and wealth generators.  Indeed the very process of urbanisation is itself a demonstration of innovation. And we’re only just beginning: in the next 25 years it is estimated that 300 million Chinese will move from the countryside to cities like Shanghai. This represents the largest migration in human history.

This is why I sometimes say that innovation is hidden in plain sight and people go about their business without realising that it’s happening all around them.

Here are a couple more less dramatic but equally pervasive examples, this time from the world of fashion. How about high heels? The heel as we know it is something of a recent invention – and it started as something for men.

Louis XIV was a short man and he wanted to be taller so he wore heels. Thus the court and all the men began to wear heels. This, by the way, is why we talk about people being well-heeled: it means they have cultural standing and financial means. Eventually heels become the province of women and they are reinvented again and again.

And then there is the little black dress.  Historically this is a very recent creation and yet it is absolutely ubiquitous. Pretty much every woman has a little black dress. Thank you, Coco Chanel.

If you really want to know where the little black dress came from you need to know where she came from. She grew up in a Catholic orphanage in the 1890s surrounded by nuns in black habits.

Right up until the early 1920s the only people who wore black used to be servants, nuns or those in mourning. So the idea of a dress that is the complete opposite of the Victorian bustle with its voluminous crinolines, a dress that is simple and black is not just innovative, it’s revolutionary.

Fast forward to the 1920s and the little black dress is born. It really takes off when Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, wears one. The flappers are gone but the little black dress lives on. Now it’s a part of every woman’s wardrobe.

We are surrounded by innovation. Look around!

*‘A Country of Cities’, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Metropolis Books, 2013

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Celebrating What’s New!

I’m looking forward to this weekend: on Saturday it will be an opportunity to meet up with old and new friends because it will be our third 25^th Anniversary Celebration Day.

One of the things I’ve been spending time on these past couple of years is the very idea of innovation and how to be innovative. A lot of people want to innovate but don’t necessarily know how to. It is true that innovation is the life blood of commercial success, but it’s also the basis of personal well-being. (If you’re in any doubt about that just ask someone whose relationship has gone stale).

Being able to innovate then is very important - which is why I began to work with Professor John Bessant who’s background is innovation in organisations. We got together because John had got to the point where he was very clear that the next stage was not organisations but what happens inside people that makes it possible for them to be innovative. We met when he came to take the Practitioner with me. Many of the NLP techniques are potentially useable to foster that overall capacity to be innovative. This is not the same as being creative: you could be creative and not really do anything. To be innovative you need more than an idea: you have to follow through and do. Something has to actually happen.

John is going to be joining me this weekend and we will be sharing some of the tools that we have in our new programme that will be starting in the Autumn.         

I also want to spend some of the time looking at the long and winding road that is a person’s life. Having a way of making sense of where you are on the journey, knowing how to take charge and go in a direction that is meaningful to you is crucial. So often what I hear from people who have taken trainings with me is that what they found most valuable was how it helped them re-orientate in their own life. They have a new awareness of what they are about and where they want to be going.

I am very pleased that Lawrence Kershen QC,  who took his Practitioner with me in 1990, will be joining me on Saturday. Lawrence’s journey can tell us a lot about how to engage with our inner calling. It has immediate relevance for anyone wanting to be true to themselves. More of that on the day.

When you start thinking about the journey that is your life, being able to just keep going is also a crucial part of the art of succeeding. So the other thing that I really want to focus on are those secrets of perseverance.

Winston Churchill’s adage of “never, never, never give up” is really to the point here. After having guided ITS through 25 years of ups and downs I think there are some things I can usefully say about how to ensure that you do not just survive but you actually thrive.

It is going to be a jam-packed day and, hey, here comes summer!

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On Leadership & Overwhelm

One of the most important things I do is working with people who are in leadership roles in very different organisations all over the world. As part of that I find I am frequently asked to engage in coaching the next generation of leaders in how to be effective as leaders.

A hallmark of leadership is you have responsibility but you also frequently feel there are many things you need to attend to. So, it is often the case that leadership and the experience potentially of overwhelm go together.

How do you address overwhelm as a leader? This becomes a question which any effective leader has to have an answer to. One of the things that’s fascinating to me about being overwhelmed (or fearing that you’re going to be overwhelmed) is that no one is ever really overwhelmed by what they are doing. In fact they are overwhelmed by the number of things they are not doing and that they feel they should be doing. You therefore have this very curious thing that overwhelm is not about what you’re doing but it is about what you feel should be doing. 

The secret of dealing with overwhelm is getting very clear about what matters most. If you don’t know how to prioritise it is going to be really difficult to avoid feeling overwhelmed. If on the other hand you cultivate the art of prioritising then overwhelm is not something you are going to be on the receiving end of because you will always be addressing the questions like... what is most important here? Where do I need to focus my attention first? What is requiring my attention now?

You are therefore constructing timelines for yourself as well as asking, ‘what is my top 10, my top 5, my top 3 things to do? Being able to do this is a learnable skill but without practice it’s something which is very difficult to do in the moment. Until you actually have some means of stepping back you are unlikely to do that because you are way too busy being busy.

One of the things I notice about people is that the longer they are in the world of work, the busier they get. The busier you are the greater the danger of you not being strategic because you are just doing your best to keep up.

How to ensure that you don’t get lost in your own busyness or you don’t get overwhelmed by the drama of the day? Well, you know what it is like when you come back from holiday - you frequently see things differently. Why? Because you’ve taken a break and stepped back. You’ve created a breathing space.

I think very often that is what good coaching does and it is absolutely why the CEOs I work with value having a coaching space. It is because every so often, on a regular basis, they step back from the drama of the day and they do something really important. They take a breath, they take stock, they look at the big picture and then determine what really matters here. Again they are prioritising, but they are doing so based on their own values and there is an understanding of what is important going forward. They also look at what is in keeping with their own primary values and the goals they seek to realise. If you don’t do this on a regular basis you will forget what your primary values are and what you are going for because you will just be trying to keep up.

Good coaching creates the space to be strategic not just in your leadership but in your leadership style. This prevents overwhelm and that means you get to be a whole different kind of leader  – one who can inspire others to learn how to do this too.

That has got to be a skill worth learning.

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15 Videos!

I have just had a very video based day. It has been extraordinary really and a contrast between the old and the new too.

Many years ago I was approached by The Open University to see if I’d be willing to contribute to their MBA programme as they had a course which was on “Creativity, Innovation and Change”.  Indeed I think they still do.

That saw me going with a group of ITS alumni to the BBC studios in Marylebone High Street and recording a piece which has been used for many years now.  As it happens, somebody who took that MBA Open University programme was particularly taken with what we were doing regarding how to be more creative and how to generate innovative strategies. This person contacted me a little while ago to say that he would very much like to come and video me talking about creativity, innovation and also leadership.

Times have moved on and instead of me going to a studio he just came to the house. He is actually Italian and this will be going out through an Italian portal for leaders who are English speaking.  It was interesting how we did it remarkably easily, with no fancy studio equipment. It was just fascinating to do. Also to hear his take on how taking the Open University course had made a real impression on him. That was one piece; the old way and the new way all in one.

On the same day I also got a series of links - 15 altogether  - each being a short link to a video I had recorded at the request of some students. These videos feature different topics looking at innovation, entrepreneurship, branding, work-life balance, the role of collaboration, keys to successful living and how to survive in a recession.  And they are ready to roll. I have just been having a look at them. I could wish for better lighting and so forth.  Nevertheless it seems to me they are very much of the video age. None are more than two or three minutes. 

A video is a useful way of saying something to the point very briefly and hopefully to give people a steer on different ways of coming at being more resourceful and of course more resilient. Of course I had something to say on the role of Applied Neuroscience - you would be surprised I think if I hadn’t! - but also on the nature of entrepreneurialism and why it isn’t just to do with business.

Learning to have an entrepreneurial mind set would be an incredibly useful skill to develop as part of every child’s learning experience. In essence being an entrepreneur is about having a dream and being able to follow that through, being a self-starter, creating something, making changes based on whether or not you are succeeding and daring to dream.

One of the videos is called, Do You Need a Plan?  Yes, you may but you won’t just need a plan, you will need some passion  too. You will also need to go with your gut when the plan says one thing and your feelings say something quite different – I know which I’d trust.

These kinds of thoughts and being able to offer them in videos is very satisfying and very simple. My hope is that we’ll be able to put these out fairly soon. I’ll keep you posted.

So, the world of video...Good Lord!

Until the next time. 

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How Neuroscience Can Help Trigger Innovation

Well this past week has been one of those wonderful times when some of the themes that I’m particularly passionate about have been coming together in ways that I thought would probably happen but I didn’t quite know when.

So earlier in the week I was talking with Professor John Bessant with whom I’m preparing some material on innovation and how to be innovative. He is somebody who has spent many many years at the forefront of exploring innovation in organisations and we first met because John was just interested in what he considered to be the missing piece - namely how to be innovative at an individual level; what can you do and what can you give people that can enable them to be more so. That has been the focus of our attention. We’re in fact going to be doing some work later in the year showing people exactly how to do this and as team leaders how they can enable others to be more effective too.

A few days ago I was also talking with Professor Patricia Riddell about neuroplasticity and the ability of the brain to essentially reinvent itself and the extraordinary potential possibilities that this throws open. Of course this started with a re-understanding of the field of neuroscience of just what was possible. Initially it was assumed that the brain was the brain and there you go: you got what you got. However, what has been so clear in the last ten years is that essentially the brain can re-invent itself, not just to any degree at all but beyond our wildest previous imaginings and we really don’t know the limits.

Now, when you put these two things together; innovation and what is called neuroplasticity do you think they might just have anything to do with each other? Well of course, because what we’re taking about with neuroplasticity is not just people having a new idea once in a while, it is about the brain literally changing itself at the bio-electrical and chemical level. When you have, for instance, new insights, you are changing the organic structure of your brain. It is not just a nice idea, there is something going on internally laying down new neural pathways.

This has got amazing implications. People recovering from traumatic injuries? Well clearly this will be good news because much more may be possible than we thought. In addition, just in ordinary everyday life, pretty much anybody can learn to become more able to do things that they previously thought they couldn’t. If that is true for an individual then it is also going to be true for a group of individuals who might just be known as a team. Or for many teams who might just be known as an organisation.

Now think about this, what would it be like if we started looking at teams and organisations as able – or not - to encourage more people to be more innovative, that is to say, to be become more capable of demonstrating their own brain’s neuroplasticity. Or are we working in organisations where there’s an extraordinary kind of rigidity? As in, it must be this way because it has always been this way. It is not that we don’t want procedures, it is not that we don’t find protocols useful as they have an enormous role to play in making sure we don’t wake up every morning and re-invent the wheel. But if you want to stay stuck make sure you don’t believe that change is possible, that you don’t believe that your own brain can deliver an extraordinary rate of change that you can barely imagine - and make sure that you don’t think other people can do it either. Well who on earth would want to do that?

And of course that is why bringing these different worlds together is so potentially rewarding and for me incredibly exciting.

We are actually going to be having a Celebration Day on 1st June and John’s going to be joining us on that day. He and I will be exploring some of the dimensions of innovation and how to be innovative as an individual. But before then Trish and I will be exploring the promise of neuroscience as it relates specifically to this new quality of being able to achieve greater plasticity - and thus greater flexibility and greater creativity.

Our whole world opens up if we just understand what is possible for our brain. That’s why I’m looking forward to this coming weekend on neuroplasticity. So, until the next time.

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Low cost Innovation

In the era of Apple it is very easy for people to get hooked on the artefact and fail to appreciate the kind of thinking that gave rise to it.

To achieve effective innovation what is frequently needed is the ability to ask some basic questions and think afresh about what we are doing. (Which of course is exactly what Jobs and co. did consistently).

What does this really mean in practice?  Here are two case histories I often use when considering what would innovative thinking look like if there’s no extra budget but things need to change?

In the first few years of the Second World War Hitler’s U-boats were taking a terrible toll sinking a huge tonnage of Atlantic shipping. Ensuring Atlantic convoys would continue to get supplies through to the UK was the single most important determinant of ensuring continued resistance to Hitler. If the Atlantic convoys were all sunk then so was the possibility of resistance to Hitler. However the British kill rate for destroying U boats was abysmal – about 1% of those sighted were sunk.

Enter Patrick Blackett, physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Blackett developed what we now call organisational research. With a very small team he started to ask some questions. The Navy knew that the U-boats could only move at a certain rate. Something like 45 seconds elapsed between sighting and dropping depth charges. They knew that the U-boat would probably dive to about 150ft so you set the charge to go off at 150ft. Well that’s fine, the depth charge explodes but it’s is in the wrong place because what they hadn’t taken into account was that the U-boat might change in direction not just depth.

So what did Blackett suggest? That the parameters be changed. You would only go for attacking U-boats if they had been out of sight for no more than 25 seconds and that you would set the depth charge to 25ft because they could not have gone any deeper than that in 25 seconds.

The net result of this was that it improved the kill rate from 1% to 10%. That is the equivalent of having a new secret weapon which is ten times more powerful than its predecessor. But actually there was no new secret weapon - just a different way of thinking.

Much of the time U-boats travelled on the surface so they should’ve been pretty visible. Given an estimated number and the distances they travelled it was possible to calculate how often they should have been sighted,

In fact only thirty percent of the sightings that should have been achieved were being achieved. Why was this? All sorts of fancy ideas were suggested. Again some basic questioning yielded vital information. The planes used were converted night bombers. Because they were used at night they had been painted black. However they were now being used as spotter planes in broad daylight and black is the most visible colour against a daytime sky! Repainting the underside of the wings white led to a doubling in the number of sightings. That is like suddenly doubling the number of planes you have available.

When I share these cases with business leaders they immediately grasp that the innovation lies in rethinking the challenge and asking new questions. 

So  you might want to consider what is the equivalent for you in what you are trying to do? How might you do more effectively what you already do now?

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Neuroplasticity – New Tricks for Old Dogs

The other day I was in the pub and I heard one guy saying to the other ‘well you know me, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ as if this was an explanation for why he was going to stay the same.  Of course, actually it is no explanation at all because the fact of the matter is we now know you can teach an old dog new tricks, not only that but every person can learn new things regardless of their age. Why? Because the brain isn’t just some sort of static soft round mass of tissue it is actually a living system and your brain is always changing. That change shows up in lots of different ways. It exists at every level, at the level of the cells, at the level of your behaviour and indeed there is an expression in the neurosciences which I think is a very apt one which covers a lot of the what fires together, as in neurons wires together. If it starts happening  on a regular basis it becomes part of the structure of how you do what you do and maybe even how you think of who you are.

What might this mean for us? Well it means that actually old dogs can learn new tricks whenever they wish but they do have to want to do it and they need to know how to do it. This is not just dogs but everybody. For me this is particularly exciting because of the work I’m doing with Professor Patricia Riddell and bringing the world of Applied Neuroscience into our everyday learning and understanding using the tools of NLP to make it possible to apply this new understanding. All of that becomes so much easier with the work that’s being done now which makes it very clear that the best way to understand your brain is to think of it as a system. For me that made life much easier because I spent a lot of time focusing on systems and systems thinking. Indeed I wrote a book about it and one of the things that happens when  you start thinking systemically is you understand the power of feedback; arguably no feedback, no system. Feedback is what tells us whether we are on track or off track, are we doing too much of something, do we need to do more of something, are we doing enough? It is there in every aspect of our lives it is just that often people do not recognise it as such. 

If I’m driving my car, the engine only works because of all sorts of very clever feedback that has been sort of built into it. I can take all the parts of that engine apart, I can pile them up in a heap beside the chassis and I still have all the bits of the engine but I do not have a functioning engine any longer and that’s because the bits are only part of the story. The engine is more than the sum of its parts, the engine is the feedback loops that make things happen to a greater or lesser degree so that the car can move forward and be under my control in the same way our brains have feedback loops and we can begin to engage with those and that changes the way we can be, it changes what’s possible for us and that makes it possible for us to have a new understanding, not just of what we can do but who we might become. 

It creates all sorts of extraordinary opportunities which up until very very recently were not thought to be possible by science itself so there is a real revolution taking place over the past few years within the field so that neuroplasticity has come to be seen as the norm. It used to be the case that we had these myths of location where almost like what Trish calls advanced phonology, you know like there are bits of the brain that do particular things and the classic example of that is the left right brain split that many people still assume is the case, whereas actually what is going on in the neuroscience makes that very old hat and not even true any longer. What therefore becomes possible is that we can start to work with our brains and we can literally create new pathways, have new abilities and we know what is really needed to make that really stick and guess what, so much of what NLP has been doing is giving us the tools to turn this understanding into a practical reality. 

That’s why Applied Neuroscience is so valuable right now. That’s why we’re going to be having a high old time doing a half day Sunday morning exploration of neuroplasticity for you and for me.

I can’t wait. Until the next time.

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