How
to introduce CPS to business
Why
creativity scares business
History
of Alex Osborn and Sid Parnes
Osborn
on the Eisenhower campaign
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TAPE # and
time code |
Audio |
B4
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Raymond
A. Binis |
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04:01:37:19
04:02:30:14 |
[Ray Binis - tell us
about yourself] Well, telling you about myself would be like talking
about somebody you liked, so, I’m going to tell you about myself. I’ve
been with the Creative Education Foundation for more years than I care to
count, but by the gray hair you can tell that it’s a long time. Got involved back there with Sid Parnes and Alex Osborn and
a number of other people that were the basis of the foundation. That
changed my life, because I was an engineer prior to my interest in CPSI.
And I got so involved in CPSI I went back and got involved in
engineering and marketing and turned our marketing department into an
engineering department and vice versa. Which led me to find that there’s
another side of life and I left engineering to go into management
consulting and management work, where creativity became a way of life,
instead of something you use as a hobby. |
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04:02:32:26
04:02:52:03 |
[How
would you define creativity?] Defining
it? It’s an explosion of your mind. And as that explodes it brings up
all new kinds of possibilities. Possibilities lead to new adventures.
New adventures lead to new probabilities.
Probabilities end up in something you can really latch on to and do
and it creates a whole new adventure in life. |
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04:02:55:21 04:03:37:16 |
[Tell
us about your recent study in education] One of the things that we’re doing in our recent
study is taking a look at a number of school districts. We’re doing two studies.
One in the central part of the state and one in the northern part
of the state. Both of the
studies involve changing education concepts.
One is to look at all the management services and see how we can
provide better services at reduced costs by combining school districts,
not merging, not making them into one, but using existing and reducing the
costs by sharing of the services. And that’s from bus drivers to buses
to maintenance to janitorial staff to cafeterias, everything.
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04:03:37:16 04:04:19:26 |
The other one is looking at the educational services
and looking at small schools anyplace from 400 to 800 to 1,000 students.
And saying, how can we improve the education by combining the efforts of
all the schools and producing quality education at less cost.
This does not mean moving teachers, firing teachers, it doesn’t
mean changing curriculum, it means improving what we have.
For example, making better use of distance learning.
Getting people involved with universities, with manufacturing
plants where they can tape into the company and come back via electronic
equipment and students in the classroom can now have first hand experience
of what’s happening. |
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04:04:25:22 04:04:52:17 |
[What kind of
results have you seen?] Very
good. There’s a lot of interest. Schools are willing to look at it.
Schools are taking a chance with some of the new innovative
approaches. The state legislators are extremely interested.
They’re taking a new look at education and they’re looking at
being able to do more with less- that means more education with less
money, instead of more money with less education - and that’s a real
change in a lot of places today. |
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04:04:57:17 04:05:17:17 |
[How
do you introduce CPS in the business environment?] Introducing creative problem solving is more like
introducing yourself and saying, ‘We can make some changes, but we got
to know what you’re like.” I never tell them we’re going to do CPS -
because that’s scary. Executives look at that and say ‘whoa, wait a
while.’ Our company’s running well, we just need to make some changes. |
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04:05:21:22 04:05:25:27 |
[Why
does the word creativity scare the average executive?] Because it means change.
And change as you know is difficult |
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04:05:35:23 04:06:28:17 |
[Which
people most influenced your thinking on creativity and CPS?] The influence was gained primarily from Alex, because
I had a first session with him many, many years ago. Next was Sid Parnes
and Sid came with some real interesting kind of innovations and Sid was
alive. He caused a fire under
you when you got started. And probably Burt Decker, who was involved at
that time in the military. As
I said I was an engineer. He talked about taking engineering into a
customer and not saying we’re selling you a product, but how can we
redesign your product to work better for you at less cost?
And that got me to thinking. And
a number of other people at the early stages of creative problem solving
institute that got me to thinking about hey- there is a better way to do
this and it’s easier. |
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04:07:01:21 04:07:49:26 |
[Ray tell us a
little about yourself] Talking about myself is easy, when you’re talking
about somebody you like, so it’ll be easy to tell you the rest.
I got started in business as an engineer, working in engineering.
Engineering you know is a pretty linear sort of thing. I sort of
got involved with CEF. At that point, I met Alex Osborn, Sid Parnes. And I
made a change because Alex- my first session with him- showed me a new way
of thinking, and Sid, of course, being a very exuberant person- full of
fire and building fires under you - made you take a whole new look at
yourself. When I went back to the company, I discovered I could take
engineering and make it part of marketing and vice-versa. And that meant
taking engineers out in the field as salespeople and going to a customer
and saying we’re not selling you a product, we’re selling you an idea.
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04:07:49:27 04:08:11:23 |
Taking that idea, then and putting it into your
company at less cost means a better product for less money, and better
business all the way around. That’s basically the style I had with my
company, which led me into the consulting world, which is ECM
Incorporated, which is Experiential Consultants in Management - ECM’s
easier. |
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04:08:48:20 04:10:02:19 |
[Give
us a little history on Alex Osborn and Sid Parnes] Alec Osborn is the creator of this whole movement. He
is the one who wrote a book on creativity back in the early ‘50’s with
B.B.D. and O. Alex took the
money from the book and put it into a foundation, which is CEF. Alex’s
money out of the royalties of the book started CPSI. Sid Parnes - Dr. Sid
Parnes was working with Alex at that time, and Sid was the one who wrote
the first creative problem solving workbook for the institute. I came in
about the 3rd institute, so I wasn’t at the beginning, and
that’s where I met both of them. Alex, at that point, was really on fire
with creativity and he was spreading creativity mainly in the marketing
and P.R. areas. Sid was with the University and he was moving it into
education. The two made a good combination because one was bringing in
business ideas and the other was tying in education and it created this
CPSI. It brought in a lot of
people with - developed new thinking among people. |
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04:10:10:28 04:11:41:11 |
[Give us some of
your war stories…Success Stories] Works well - especially when people don’t know
they’re doing it until they’re into it. Got called into a small
manufacturing firm – this firm produced cylinders for wallpaper.
They were having a tough time. Business was down wallpaper was not
in demand. There were getting
a lot of competition from overseas. The
owner of company really needed to turn this around - talk about deferred
thinking. We came in and we
started talking about how to turn the company around but he kept saying,
‘it’s my company, I’m responsible for it, I’ve got to make it
work. And we introduced to
him the concept - ‘don’t think about what we’re going to do - think
about what you want. And just
sit back and relax. As he
did, we were able to work with some of his people in the company.
There was only a handful of people, it was a small company.
We got them to work together as a team, instead of individual
department heads. The art
department, production were separate.
All of a sudden they were talking to each other.
Production was saying, “I can do this” or “I can’t do
this” The artist was saying, “well, you gotta do this.” Well, pretty
soon they realized they could do both if they talked.
The whole organization started to talk - we built a team.
We started to look at problems go through the process.
And they worked through the process without knowing the process as
such. Once it started to show
some success, then they started introducing CPS - and the company made a
tremendous turn around - today it’s a growing company. |
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04:11:41:13 04:11:59:05 |
Sideline: his daughter got so involved with him in
this that she came back here to take the master’s course in CPS in the
University. So, it sort of
followed: he got involved, she got involved, the whole family‘s now
involved. Interesting! |
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04:12:06:00 04:12:39:03 |
Defining deferred thinking, is like saying to
yourself, “Boy, I can’t do much with that, so I’m not going to think
about it anymore. I’m going
to put it aside and say the heck with it” and go about doing your normal
work. Some place during the
course of the day or night all of a sudden something will come through. It’s that ‘aha’ in the brain that says ‘you
didn’t think about this, stupid. Think
about it a little bit.’ And
all of a sudden something new something new comes out of it and you’re
able to use it and it’s able to work.
It was there, but you didn’t recognize it. |
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04:12:46:04
04:15:01:26 |
[Tell
us about your experiences with deferred judgment in the business
community] Had an executive of a major hospital in Indiana who
was brought in to close the hospital basically.
They were in trouble. They
were across from a major city - six or seven hospitals around them - all
big - they were small .. They were having a tough time making ends meet-
everybody went to the big hospitals.
He brought me in - brought the company in, I should say, and I came
in with them - to take a look at the hospital to see best way to downsize;
reduce. In talking with the
people at the hospital, we began to realize that there was a lot of
potential. The opportunities were there, but nobody allowed them to work
on the opportunities. He was new. The last administrator was gone.
So we sat down and said you know ‘give us 6 months to see what we
can do. Your people think
this can turn around. They
had a lot of confidence, morale is low, but there’s confidence. Can we
work with that?’ And he
said, ‘I don’t know’. He
said, ‘I have a charge. Let me think about it.’
And he did, he just dropped it. We didn’t hear from him for a
month or two. Suddenly, we
got a phone call and he said, ‘let’s talk further. It’s now come
back to me that maybe we could do something - I’m not sure what.’
We came back and we talked about it a little further. He talked to the board and got an extension.
We started working with his staff.
We made some changes, moved some departments around, some people
around. But we got them
involved in solving their own problems.
Today that hospital is as big as any across one of them across the
river. And in fact they have
management arrangements with the big hospital to do services the hospitals
can’t do in their own. So, they’ve made a total change. But, he had to think about it, he had to really put this
aside and really think about it. He
told me, he was an accountant, basically and all he looked at was the
bottom line. And he could not
focus on the bottom line because there was no money, so he dropped it. He
says “I gave you no thought. I didn’t even think about what you talked
about. I concentrated on the bottom line.
Where were we going to close the hospital?
He says and then somebody came to me: ‘maybe we could do
something different.’ And that’s how it happened. |
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04:15:36:18 04:16:07:08 |
[Sound bit version of hospital story] Well, we got called to a hospital that was really
going under.(pause) The
problem was lack of money and the problem was the lack of real confidence.
We brought in the process, trained the management staff primarily
in CPS, then moved down into the staff itself.
Took a little while, but today, it’s a highly profitable
hospital. It has turned
around. The top executive -
the administrator is now president, and they’re really moving in a whole
new direction. |
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04:16:08:01 04:16:18:29 |
[Why?] Because they allowed people to get involved and new
ideas to come forth and they’re able to do new things differently and it
created a whole new atmosphere in the hospital. |
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04:16:25:26 04:17:04:20 |
Some of the examples were - key one was food.
Food delivered to departments was always cold.
They had rooms all over the place wheeling carts.
They came up with a new process where now they knew where the
patient was going to be. If
it was in X-ray the food wasn’t delivered.
If they were with a doctor the food wasn’t delivered.
It was kept in the kitchen. They
bought carts with heating units in them. When they brought the food to the
floor it was fresh from the cafeteria.
And they moved it fast into place. This came about with people
thinking about, ‘how would I like my food?’ |
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04:17:04:20 04:17:31:26 |
Another example was wheelchairs. They were perpetually buying wheelchairs because they had
no wheelchairs. When we got
all the employees together and we did a search of wheelchairs to find out
what the problem was. We
discovered wheelchairs in the closets, because they were ‘mine’ and I
wasn’t going to share them with anybody. When they found out they could
share them and get them back, when maintenance discovered they could
repair them cheaper than buying new ones, when everybody got into the
problem, they all added their two cents and suddenly we had more
wheelchairs than we needed. |
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04:17:32:08 04:17:59:04 |
Had the same thing with people coming into the
emergency room. The old
standard process of we take your name, we take your information, we get
you set up. The employees
said, ‘why do we need this? We
can get this from a relative. Let’s get them into the room to be treated
first.’ And they made a
change - simple change. You
got something wrong? What’s wrong? There’s a doctor - you go in there.
You, sit down here. We’ll get the information from you.
And it worked - reduced. |
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04:18:07:20 04:18:40:10 |
[What
are the baby steps businesses can take to introduce CPS into their
environments?] It’s got to start at the top. The top management has to be willing to make change.
The top management has to recognize that their major role is the
planning the future of the company, and that everybody underneath that
group is the running of that company and they know how to run it. They
have to build some confidence in the fact that these employees are capable
of making some of these decisions and if you get the executives to
recognize that change can be made and that they can pass that change down
to others, it’ll work. |
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04:18:53:05 04:19:32:03 |
[Take #2] Ways of introducing CPS into the business is getting
executives involved - that’s a start. Executives have a tendency not to
want to make too many changes, or control the changes. Once executives
begin to realize that change can be made and that their major role is
guiding that company for the future and that productivity comes from the
people below them. And if
they can see that those people can become involved, make decisions and
come up with new ideas and give them the - allow them the right to
implement some of these things, they won’t cost a lot of money, but they
will make some changes and those changes will change the organization. |
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04:19:38:25
04:20:18:20 |
[Talk
about the use of deferred judgment] Probably the most difficult part of that is for
executives and even employees on the line.
You’ve got to remember most management people are paid to make
decisions and they’re supposed to make decisions immediately.
The next thing is most employees aren’t supposed to make
decisions. They’re supposed to do a job.
You push this widget and that’ll happen.
So, when you start to say to them you know when there is a problem
you can’t jump with the first answer they’ll look at you and say
that’s my job. And you have
to start introducing the fact that if you can put this aside 24 hours is
not going to make that big of a difference.
But, within those 24 hours something new will happen, and we work
on that. |
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04:20:31:26 04:21:10:18 |
[Take #2] Business managers should use the concept of deferred
judgment primarily to be able to get things done properly. There’s a
tendency to make decisions and not think about what you’re going to do.
Part of that effort is to get employees to begin to recognize that they
too, are involved. And once they’re allowed to make some decisions, once
they are allowed to sit down and think about it, it will work. So, the key issue here is executives have to take some time
to think about what they need to do and be able to think about what others
can do and sort of defer things, so better ideas can come out. |
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04:22:16:07 04:22:44:13 |
[Talk
about the resistance to creativity in business] The resistance to creativity in business is it’s
prevalent. Mainly because business people are business people, and
creativity seems to be touchy-feely out there in the blue sky someplace
and they want results. What
they don’t understand is that creative problem solving is results
directed. That you’re solving a problem, and you’re going to implement
a specific approach to solving that and it does work. |
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04:23:04:10
04:23:30:25 |
[Did this
process begin in the advertising business?] Yes, the process started in the advertising industry
through Alec Osborne, who introduced creativity in BBD&O.
And used that whole creative approach with a number of the
companies that he was working with which increased sales and increased
their profitability. So, it
really began with Alex and moved into the foundation through Alex’s book
that he sold and the royalties off the book. |
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04:23:49:15 04:24:12:28 |
[Take #2] Creative problem solving did begin in the business
world. It began when Alex began to realize creativity was around, and
could be used and through his company, BBD&O, he introduced creativity
in advertising and marketing which resulted in real successes for some of
his customers because it was specific in solving problems that they had,
in a creative manner.
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04:24:21:03 04:25:02:22 |
[Talk about your
experience with the wallpaper manufacturer] The wallpaper manufacturer was run by an individual,
who was highly skilled in his business, but there was a real demand for
turn-around - the company was not making money. We began to realize that
once we walked in there, and we got their management team to work together
on solving problems and talking to each other and got that spread down
into to the operations where production people could talk about problems
and recommend ideas for solutions, that whole creative process took hold,
and once each of them bought into the fact that their ideas are valuable
and could result in some good solutions the whole company turned around
into a profitable operation. |
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04:25:10:15 04:26:04:24 |
[Take #3 on hospital story] The hospital needed to make a change or close. And
the turn around at this rural hospital meant that something had to be done
differently. And the executive in charge - was fairly new - the
administrator. He looked at how to close the hospital - brought us in -
and we made the change - Instead of closing the hospital, how we could
operate it - because we found out that people were really involved. They
were interested in making it work. So we introduced the CPS process with
the executive group first. Got
them to look at their problems, got them to realize that there are other
solutions. Closing was not a
solution, that was a fact you could do.
Once they made some decisions, then we passed CPS process down into
the organization and it was amazing when people let loose, to be able to
come up with ideas and make changes, it all happened.
Great change in the hospital. |
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04:27:17:27 04:27:47:08 |
[How
was the CPS process used by Osborn in creating the campaign spots for
Eisenhower?] The campaign spots that were developed for President
Eisenhower, by Alec Osborn,
is basically his creative approach- to draw people out- to be able to get
people to ask the right kind of questions so you can come up with the
right kind of ideas and that
fit into the process. The process means exploring. You don’t know what
the problem is until you ask enough questions to find out what the real
problem is. |
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04:27:50:25 04:28:01:16 |
[How do you
get to the problem?] Asking a lot of - Getting to the problem is easy, if
people are willing to talk and most people are. If you ask enough
questions, people are going to give you enough information. |
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04:28:48:24 04:29:30:01 |
[Can
you explain going from ideation to solution finding?] The toughest part for management to look at is they
say everybody can sit here and come up with ideas, but then what do we do
with them? The best part of that process is showing the executive that you
can take all these ideas, set up a criteria for measuring those ideas,
select the best possible ideas out of the group of ideas and to build an
implementation plan to make it work.
And that means looking at all the roadblocks, all the barriers that
are going to come up and overcoming those barriers again with the process,
so that when you’re ready to implement you know where your barriers are
and you know how to overcome and you’ve got results.
And that’s what the executive looks for - results. |
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04:29:32:06 04:30:01:26 |