10 Divergent Strategies - Break through the Box!

All creativity imagines an alternative universe ~ August Turak

Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box

Why is it that creative people tend to break rules? Innovators imagine something that will work better. They don't like being boxed in, but somehow have a glint in their eyes for the adventure of a challenge. Is that where you see yourself?

Intriguingly, creativity may have come into the world by a lie... An early inhabitant on our planet imagined a fake water hole and made it seem realistic to a competing tribe so that competitors picked up stakes and moved to settle in that locale. "All creativity imagines an alternative universe," Turak finds. "A universe that does not yet exist, and in this sense every creative act is 'untruthful.'"

Consider the mad artist...is there a link between highly creative people and mental illness? After all, Vincent Van Gogh and Sylvia Plath, represent a popular perception that creativity and madness go hand in hand. Some scientists recently found that "divergent thinking, or the ability to think outside the box, involves the brain's dopamine communication system." A Swedish research team, who investigated the dopamine connection further, discovered that "people who had lower levels of dopamine receptor activity in the thalamus also had higher scores on tests of divergent thinking--for instance, finding many solutions to a problem."  They think outside a less intact box, since previous works shows that people with schizophrenia also have lower dopamine receptor activity in the thalamus.  

So what exactly does this have to do with work?  Everything.  Here're examples of divergent thinking that break norms...

1. Great guerrilla marketing "means developing a sixth sense for knowing when and how to creatively cut corners," August Turak notes. "It requires a sort of impish instinct for breaking rules. But it also means successfully walking that invisible line between creativity and unethical chicanery."

"Every great guerrilla marketer is a bit of a scamp; a person who is constantly evaluating the rules that make up conventional thinking looking for the ones just screaming to be broken. If the bowling ball is the implacable enemy of the egg, guerrilla marketing is the implacable enemy of all the assumptions that pass for business as usual."

2. From Mentor to Mindguide "Both experts and upstarts claim to see unlimited potential in shared wisdom, Dr. Ellen Weber points out. "Yet seasoned mentors advise clever cronies to operate much like themselves, in spite of rapidly changing horizons."

"Few would disagree – it’s time to shift tutoring approaches to reflect more balanced and reciprocal coaching. Guidance based on mutual brainpower potential, and experience from differences, rather than on entitlement, age or seniority."

3. Conversation as a "non-zero sum" game  The world is fast changing from the 500-year tradition of individualism since it is not working in today's world.  Individualism leads to a zero-sum game which polarizes positions.  Collaborative conversations take people in a more productive direction that benefits humankind.  "One player's  gain does not translate into the other's loss, Melinda Blau concludes.  Such conversation helps us to think differently and see new creative possibilities.

4. Experimentation - a part of every employee's work In order to develop a culture of experimentation, H. James Wilson and Kevin Desouza suggest that "organizations should provide employees with a multitude of opportunities to question, observe, and engage in new experiences." Some key strategies are:

a. Increase managerial attention. Managers can encourage employees to experiment with their ideas, but even go so far as requiring experimentation when ideas are being developed and proposed.

b. Develop employees' skills on basics of conducting experiments.

c. Use experimentation in spite of the fact it'ss a messy and untidy process. Experiments usually don't lead to fruitful results.

d. Start presentation series for researchers and practitioners. Sharing extends insights.  Both  researchers and practitioners seek quality outcomes to present to wider community.

5. Fail Harder  Though failure goes against the grain, Jorge Barba reminds us that massive failure advances the creative process. "Success is a lousy teacher compared with failure," Mohawn Sawnney of the Kellogg School of Business finds. "We learn a lot from failure, because failure makes us more receptive to new ideas and failure is easier to diagnose than success." Sawhney suggests that companies should document, celebrate and reward failure by focusing on Famous Mistakes.

Ad house Wieden+Kennedy created a mural to display such a divergent approach.



6. Best leaders are great followers Nearly everyone sees him or herself as a leader. But where are the followers? Michael Hyatt asks. On the flip side, history’s worst leaders never learned to follow. As a result, they became tyrants, making the lives of their own followers miserable, Hyatt contends. He sees unassuming qualities in great followers: clarity of role; obedience with the ability to follow orders; servants willing to do the job joyfully; humility that shines light on other leaders; and, loyalty in public with private influence.

7. Weird rules boost creativity Strangely enough, weird rules can boost a company's innovative output. 10 years ago Stanford professor, Robert Sutton introduced his methods in Weird Ideas that Work.

Some of the guidelines include:

• Reward success and failure; punish inaction,
• Find some happy people and get them to fight,
• Ignore people who have solved the exact problem you face,
• Hire "slow learners" (of organizational code),
• Seek out ways to avoid, distract, and bore customers.

"Rules which fight against the normal corporate norms," Lifehacker's Dave Drager concludes, "have been proven to foster creativity within organizations."

8. Power of Play In a quest to "escape the tyranny of technique," Kate Arms-Roberts discovered InterPlay, an integrated system encompassing all the parts of your life--"a sanctuary for those who seek to be spontaneous, affectionate, open to truth, playful and real," according to leader and guest blogger, Kate Arms-Roberts.  InterPlay's foundations build on "improvisational practices using song, story, silence, dance and community and a set of principles that can be applied to any moment in life.to help break the rules." Consider Ann's experience...

Storytelling forms of InterPlay loosen me up. When I struggle to make the words tell my story, Babbling in a Made-up Language releases me from the pressure of precision. When I am running over with ideas, I Could Talk About is a form that gets the ideas out without requiring me to do anything with them; I just have to list them. If my body is stiff or my words are stilted, I can shake things up by telling Big Body Stories that involve movement or dance as well as words.

How might improvisational play launch new creativity in your work?

9. Gaming changes disliked routines  If you take the Tube to work in London, travel can be fun rather than bearable with Chromaroma. Here's how it works:

Chromaroma will import the user's Tube, bus and bike journey history, awarding points for each trip. For each user, Chromaroma tracks statistics on the number of swipes, achievements, “missions,” “collections,” places, identities, modes of transport, seasonal highlights and passengers encountered as the user travels around the city, along with the number of stations “captured,” records set and overall rank. By watching their own travel details, users can investigate new ways to travel and new destinations; "multipliers" and bonus points are available by working with a team, building up connections with fellow passengers, and discovering “mysteries” attached to a particular location. Beyond competition and conquest, Chromaroma's gameplay “opens up the beauty in the city's transport flows and reveals to its most persistent players some of the mysteries of travel, and even the strange characters travelling through the tunnels in the centre of the system, who may hold the secrets to your city.”

Gaming is used successfully for call center motivation as employees create teams and vie to win trips by most successful calls. Who would guess gaming can be motivating rather than distracting!

10. Solutions do not necessarily address problems Luke Williams tells the story of how Jonah Straw and friends discussion turned to "disruptive business ideas." One of Jonah's friends asked, "how crazy would it be if some company started selling socks that didn't match? Jonah's friends thought it was a terrible idea. It was soon forgotten by everyone, but Jonah, who couldn't let go of it. It led Jonah to launch Little Miss Matched.

"Most people in business are trained to focus only on problems: things that don’t work and need fixing," Williams finds. He says, "It’s more effective to start by identifying something in your business or industry that’s not necessarily a problem, and then go about methodically breaking it down." To do so try the following steps:

~ What do you want to disrupt? Define the situation you want to challenge. Define it in a sentence.

~ What are the business cliches? Identify assumptions that influence the way insiders or outsiders thing about your situation such as "hackneyed beliefs that govern the way people think about and do business in a particular space...We don’t consciously think about these things because 'that’s the way they’ve always been.'"

~ What are your disruptive hypotheses? Poke the status quo by generating several disruptive hypotheses to fill in the answer to, "I wonder what would happen if we ________." Think about opposites as you do this.

~ What can you invert? Red Bull was developed by Coca-Cola as an expensive soda, whereas their others were inexpensive. It may cost double the price of other colas, but it sure will give you a shot of energy when you need it.

~ What can you deny? In the case of Zipcar the company did not need to see the customer or complete paperwork. And, it started renting by the hour. consumers liked the process since they no longer needed to wait in line, fill out papers, listen to pressure to upgrade or add all kinds of insurance. Customers simply apply for membership and they can reserve vehicles online.

Try focusing on something that you take for granted at your business and use Luke Williams' steps to see what hatches.

Let's face it, people who live disruptive thinking, may not be not so crazy after all, considering all the innovations that emerge.