Leadership is not rocket science

Transforming health care by growing collaborative care

Over the past 2 years I've had the honour of working with a project championed by the College of Registered Nurses of Nova Scotia seeking to move collaborative care (health care professionals working as integrated teams) from happening occasionally to widespread practice.  Here is a video that captures the journey to date:

Working Together: Moving Interdisciplinary Practice from Theory to Action from Ravi Tangri on Vimeo.

Now here's innovation despite this challenging economy

I just heard about two restaurant owner who got tired of everyone being down because of the economy (and probably their business being down as well) and decided to bring some joy back to their clientele - so they took away the prices.  This is a story about restaurants, but the learning is relevant to us all.

It all started with the Little Bay Restaurants owned by Peter Ilic.  Because of the credit crisis hitting his customers, he wanted to ensure that they felt that they were getting value for their meal, so for the month of February he's allowing his customers to pay what they want for their meals - and there's no fine print.

In a Reuter's news release, Peter says, "It just seemed the right thing to do with everyone under the cash and feeling pretty miserable."

In Montreal, the Taverne Crescent had been forced to close for lunch on Mondays and Tuesdays since the start of 2009.  Then the owners heard about what Peter Ilic had done and felt it might bring back some of the joie de vivre that has faded in the current economic climate. 

As happened with the Little Bay Restaurants, most customers have been paying a fair price.  Even if they don't that's OK.  Nicky Odorisio, co-owner of the restaurant says "If someone pays a quarter and they've never been here before, and they like the product and they like the place, maybe they'll come back for dinner on a Saturday night when it's our regular menu."

He's looking at the long-run, not focused on the short term ka-ka.

I applaud both these entrepreneurs.  Instead of just cutting back and shutting down, they're focused on how to create unique value and a unique experience for their clients.  It reminds me of a few years ago when Hurricane Juan hit Halifax and shut the city down.  power was out for days, so not only did most homes lose all their food, so did all the restaurants.  Most did nothing.  The Ardmore Tea Room on Quinpool Road, however, realized the food was going to waste and they knew that many people didn't have supplies, so they set up  a barbecue and gave away 2,000 meals. 

The kicker - as of the writing of this story, the Ardmore Tea Room still hadn't received an insurance settlement for Juan.  This was an act of pure service to the community.

During Hurricane Juan, every restaurant faced the same crisis.  Only one looked at what they could do and how they could make a difference and serve the community.  In this current economic crisis, many restaurants (and other businesses) are facing challenges and downturns.  How many are taking action like Little Bay and Taverne Crescent? 

Most restaurant owners would say that these people are crazy and that they're going to lose their shirts - and use that as a justification for doing nothing.  First of all, that isn't happening.  Yes, there are people getting a free lunch, but there are others who are paying more than the meal is worth - and they'll be back for other meals at full fare for a long time.  Second - whether this works or not, at least they're doing something and looking for ways to create value for and loyalty from their customers.

All of us are afraid and may feel helpless at times.  Staying in fear and helplessness indefinitely, however, is a choice.  And these entrepreneurs are choosing to take action despite their fear and despite the economy.

I applaud them for taking action, and if I were in their cities, I certainly would reward them with my patronage, now and in the future.

That's my 2 cents.  What do you think?

The bar goes up the second time around...

When you create a new innovation, your can really rock the world, and your industry.  The next time though, people are expecting more from you - something that's on par with your first innovation usually won't cut it.

Let's step away from business and look at another form of innovation.  years ago, Judson Laipply took over YouTube and became a hit at may conventions with the Evolution of Dance - over 109 million views at last count.  He's just come up with Evolution of Dance 2, but is it as good?  Even if it is as good, does it have the same impact?  You be the judge.

Evolution of Dance 1

Evolution of Dance 2

This is not meant to diss Judson Laipply - he was probably pretty blown away by his first success - and kudos to him for what he did.  This is just to illustrate that once you change the rules of the game, people often expect you to be a rule-changer every time, and that's a tough reputation to live up to.  How often can you do that?

What do you think?

How to turn crazy ideas into workable innovation

Your ‘blue-sky’/dreaming/brainstorming/divergent thinking sessions should generate a number of way out there ideas.  Remember that the sign for success of that type of thinking is the number and the craziness of the ideas, not their practicality.

 

Once you have a list of ideas, you need to pick the ones to develop into action plan. Approaching a problem with traditional, linear, left-brain thinking would start by looking at what was practical right away.  The key to creative thinking is combining this logical, left-brain thinking, with your intuitive, emotional, right-brain thinking to develop a truly creative solution.

 

Since all your ideas from the first stage should all be impractical, crazy ideas, you can’t really decide on the basis of practicality – that would defeat the whole cause of creative thinking.  What you need to use to select those ideas you want to develop is energy.  Do they annoy you?  Do they make you laugh with their silliness?  Do they push or pull you in some emotional way?  What you’re looking for is those ideas that you react to emotionally, whether that emotion is laughter about the stupidity, or being annoyed and irritated at how impractical the idea is.

 

The emotion that you feel is your intuitive, emotional right-brain and your unconscious mind communicating with you.  These two aspects of you see patterns and connections that a logical, linear approach would not see.  It’s like the Sony engineer who saw kids on roller skates and skateboards and saw kids listening to music, and thought ‘music on wheels’ to come up with the Walkman.  It seems obvious now, but back then, it was a revolutionary breakthrough.

 

We’re very good in our society at thinking logically and rationally with our left-brain.  Many of us have to learn to communicate with our right brains, and this emotional reaction is a first step.  What it’s telling you is that, at some level, you’ve seen a pattern or the essence of a solution that your logical, rational brain simply can’t see.  Those are the ideas you need to grab on to and work with to create the truly breakthrough ideas to take you a quantum leap beyond where you are now.

 

What you have to do to move from the crazy idea to the solution is find out what the essence of the idea is and find a way to make that workable.  You’re not going to literally make the dreams happen, but how could it be ‘as if’ you did?  How could you make the essence of the dream workable?  That is the breakthrough that creative thinking allows you develop – it takes you to a place you could never otherwise have reached because you allowed yourself to dream first.

Forced relationships drive innovation

Forced relationships take you where you might not otherwise have gone before, to look at your problem in new ways and from new perspectives.  This process basically involves linking the problem you’re working through with anything that’s not directly related to it.

 

If you’ve reached a block in coming up with ideas, think of how your favourite cartoon character would deal with the situation.  Or how could you use a tree to solve an unhealthy relationship between two departments?  What sort of feat would a ‘Lord of the Rings’ character have to perform to convince your customers of the effectiveness of your product?

 

There’s no logical connection between these pairings, and that’s the point.  By stepping out of logic, you get out of the way of your anal-ytical left brain and allow your intuitive right brain and your creative unconscious mind to bring you ideas you might otherwise have censored without knowing you were doing that.

Using checklists to innovate

In his book, Applied Imagination, Alex Osborn, the father of modern creativity, proposes the idea of using a checklist of verbs to change the way you look at a situation.  These verbs can include ‘magnify’, ‘reduce’, and ‘backwards’.  If, for example, you’re looking for a new way to produce a certain type of report, start with ‘magnify’ and think of what you’d do if you had to write every report in the organization.  How would you make that work?  Or, if you were to apply ‘reduce’, think of how you could give the essence of the report in one sentence, or even one word, or one number.  Applying ‘backwards’, how would the process work if you had the people for whom you’re preparing the report do the actual writing, so that they submitted it to you?

 

By ‘stretching’ the problem in these improbably ways, you’re forced to look at it in new ways, and in so doing, you can come up with ideas you may not otherwise have generated.  That’s the key to creativity – seeing things in new ways.

How to really make brainstorming work

One way to take brainstorming a step further is to come up with the absolute ideal solution to your problem if you had all the time, money and other resources in the world and absolutely no restrictions.  What do you wish you could do?  Don’t worry about constraints or limits.  Just create the absolute, ideal solution that you could dream of.

 

Once you’ve got that, then look at the ideas you’ve generated and see how you could make the essence of them work.  For example, you might not be able to take your staff to a different country every month to treat them to a different cuisine each time they beat a target, but you could take them to different ethnic restaurants in the city to reward them for hitting key milestones.

 

Like brainstorming, this is a free form process, and you need to let all the ideas you can think of out before you start looking at how you can make it workable.  If you reserve your judgement and wait until after all the ideas are out, and then look at how you could make the core of the idea workable, then you’ll generally find that you’ll get a lot further compared to being ‘practical’ up-front.

How to think up

Ever since Alex Osborn launched the modern wave of creative thinking in business with his 1942 book, How to Think Up, we've known that effective creative problem-solving techniques need divergent, impractical thinking before developing a practical solution.  The problem with accepting ideas that make sense right away is that the reason they make sense up front is that they are based on what you are already familiar with and what you already know from the past.  At best, you’ll improve your productivity or effectiveness a few percent with the ‘innovation’, and that’s just not good enough for the rate of change that we’re living in today.  To create the tens or hundreds of percent improvement in results we need in today’s world, we need those ideas that seem absolutely ridiculous or unachievable at first.  That is where the breakthroughs come from.

 

Critical to this process is deferring judgement and allowing ideas to come forth freely, no matter how ludicrous or impractical they may seem.  Often we are embarrassed to come out and state these outrageous ideas simply because they are outrageous, and yet that’s where real innovation comes from.  Take a look at the history of innovation and invention and you’ll see that it’s true.  Being practical first has never generated any real breakthroughs.

blackout

isnt it cool I can make this entry in a blackout?

Drinking liquid nitrogen

 

So what are your limits?