Effective Meetings

Effective meetings are conducive to innovation. Meetings can waste a lot of time or they can provide an effective way to harvest ideas and ensure buy in, thus empowering the group to achieve greater levels of productivity. Meetings can be an empowering experience if handled well. The effectiveness of a meeting can be enhanced by
Having a clear goal for the meeting
Circulating the agenda in advance to ensure preparation
Having a system to make sure everyone is heard
Recording and implementing decisions and using good ideas
Being open to feedback and fresh ideas.

Meetings where people feel free to express themselves openly without threat are successful in liberating the most creative ideas. Listening skills are crucial. Thinking tools can ensure that everyone is able to think differently and intensively on the subject. The rules for idea generation and the creation of a positive climate include: suspend judgment, postpone reaction and external effort.

Reward for Creativity

The climate in many Indian companies is one of maintaining status quo. Even in fast track companies, Indian managements are more likely to opt for minor charges rather than dramatic breakthroughs. Respect for authority is a key factor in Indian companies. Tradition and precedent are the sacred cows. An individual rarely crosses the invisible borderline of what is widely accepted practice. To break this self imposed barrier, it is essential for companies to publicly reward individual creativity. Innovation Role models should be placed before the groups. They should see that innovation is a key characteristic of senior officials as well as fast track younger executives. Even when an innovation actually fails, the innovation should be rewarded for taking the risk. It is a common perception, that in India, individuals who are creative often do not enhance groups creativity. Competitiveness, one-upmanship and turf protection are toxic to team creativity. Teaching tools to enhance team creativity through building on each other’s ideas, are key. As the old saying goes, “None of us is as smart are all of us”

Spectators and Participants

Innovation circles require the regular and total participation of people at all levels.

Without them 80% of the people are spectators with a ‘chaltha hai’ attitude. Only someone who loves their work can become a participant. A participant who dives deep into the subject and develops intimacy with his work innovates to make things better. As Khaleel Gibran writes “What is it to work with love? To work with love, is to weave the cloth with the strings of your heart as though your beloved were to wear it”.

It is the love of work, which awakes the need for innovation. Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam writes of how India developed a re-entry structure for the guided missile Agni. The material used was a new, very light material called carbon. “One day an Orthopedic surgeon from the Nizam Institute of Medical Science visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so light. He took me to his hospital and showed me his patients. There were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic caliper weighing over three kilograms each, dragging their feet around. He said to me, ‘Please remove the pain of my patients.’ In three weeks, we made 300gm calipers and took them to the orthopeadic centre.

The children didn’t believe their eyes. From dragging around a three-kg load on their legs they could now move around! Their parents had tears in the eyes. Compassion and a creative idea changed the lives of these polio afflicted kids.

Organizational response towards risk taking

Organizations that institutionalize successful risk taking by teams and individuals by public rewards and affirmations are more likely to reinforce innovation through new and riskier paths.

A risk, infact anything new, involves the possibility of failure. The path to successful innovation may pass through a period when nothing seems to work. The organizational response to an unsuccessful innovation, holds the key to whether the company will develop into an innovative company or not.
The way a company treats its top performers provides role models for all others. If such fast track performers are innovative, then others will see creativity and innovation as the path to success. If most star performers are cautions and rule bound the clear message would be “Be careful and just follow rules if you want to more up. Creativity does not pay”.

Talking Directly with Customers

Management by walking around (MBWA) is the most appropriate way to ensure that the customer’s voice is built into products and processes. Advisory committees of opinion leaders can be an effective method of keeping one’s finger on the pulse of public opinion. Focus group interviews enable customers to explore ideas with skilled facilitators, trained to go below the surface of suggestions and complaints. Tapping Customer Creativity, is a tool to help negotiate new products with customers. It is the kind of process that reinvents the future. For instance, customers were not even aware of the possibility of a Walkman. Only an intense negotiation between top management, manufacturing and customers could have created it. Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) regularly involves shop floor workers, marketing executives and customers in an annual process of negotiating the future.

Internally, productivity depends on performance feedback, as does innovation. There is no incentive to think outside the box when no one listens or cares. Positive affirmation is the key to ensuring that people stretch to think creatively: 360 degree feedback provides young innovators opportunity to give their bosses feedback on a less than conducive environment. A system to clearly map individual competencies and provide consistent timely feedback can result in providing appropriate training when required.

Making sure people are heard

If there one thing the quality movement has taught us, it is that it makes sense to listen to everyone, particularly the working man who does the work. People who feel that they are heard, are likely to solve problems online. Participation is the reward we give to those who respect us. The Industrial Revolution made a thinking, feeling, human being a cog in the wheel. Competition has forced us to bring back humanness into the workplace because it could increase profits. Instituting co-operation and commitment are key to better performance and perhaps innovation.

Creative Problem Solving

Creative problem solving in an art and a science and can be learnt like swimming or singing. Genius is a fact, but everyone can learn to be much more creative than they are by learning problem solving methods. Another area that is rich in possibilities is the possibility of overcoming, self restricting obstacles that are cultural in nature. Women, for instance, are taught to strictly follow rules. Those at the bottom of corporate hierarchies, are told to just follow instructions. Stereotypes have destroyed many budding innovators. The environment itself can be so hostile that only the most obvious and time tested ideas are verbalized. The culturally enforced need to be sensible and practical can prevent many conformists from presenting anything truly creative. These self imposed barriers to creativity can be removed by awareness and organizational interventions.