Roger Firestien

I’m Roger Firestien, and I’m the president of a company called Innovative Systems Group. I’m an Associate Professor at the Center for Studies in Creativity. I’ve been involved in the creativity business for about 20 years. I do a lot of consulting and speaking with most major national and international companies.

12:02:10:05 12:03:10:08

[Define creativity]

Creativity is novelty that’s useful and let’s talk about that a little bit. We all agree that for something to be called creative it has to be new or unique or novel. But, it also has to work, it also has to solve a problem, it also has to produce a result. You know creativity for creativity’s sake is great, but we need to create some results. And most of us need to create results in a much shorter period of time than any of us have been asked of in the past. When we talk about creativity in organizations and people, I really like what the psychologist Abraham Maslow said about creativity. He said that ‘A first rate soup is better than a fourth rate painting.’ And what he’s talking about there is that it really doesn’t matter what you create in, it is if you are expressing your creativity in some way that’s useful to you or useful to other people. So when we talk about creativity there are a lot of myths that are out there. Often times people think only artists or composers or musicians can be creative, that’s just not true. We’re all creative and we can all express our creativity in different and valuable ways.

12:03:12:21

12:04:30:27

[How does the business world use creativity?]

How does the business world use this creativity? Well, creativity is a competitive business weapon. The organizations that are going to survive and thrive are not the ones with the deepest pockets but those organizations that can unleash the creativity of the people in their work force. An example of this is most of the organizations that we work with are in competitive situations they have similar products, they have similar delivery systems, they have similar services. The thing that makes the distinctive difference between those organizations today, that are going to be profitable, that are going to do well, is how they put a new twist on what they’re doing, how they deliver their services a new way, how they meet the customer’s needs in a new, more innovative way and that’s where creativity comes in. Also we’re finding in some of the results we’re creating, creativity can help reduce costs, it can people to create new products and services. But, the thing about looking at creativity and innovation is that it is not something imposed from the outside. It’s something that people in the organization can do. So much of the time today organizations or sorting through the acquisition phase; we’re not going to grow through acquisition anymore, but we’re going to grow through internal innovation. So what we find is that we’re very busy helping the organization to grow the organization through internal innovation. So their people have to come up with new ideas and new concepts to make the organization more effective.

12:04:41:10

12:06:21:01

[How do you bring creativity into a company…]

I was on the phone this morning with the vice president of a major consumer products group. This person was saying we’re very innovative, we’re an innovative company and we’ve done very innovative things over the last 10 years, but we need to get more innovative. And, you know what, we need to find the blocks to innovation in our company. People have this conception that there are these like big walls or that there’s like blocks in the hall. But, the blocks to innovation are not the way the company physically is designed, but the behaviors people use. So, specifically there are some things that we can do in organizations to help the people in those organizations to be more creative. And, there’s about four of them.

First, when people are generating ideas or coming up with ideas to defer judgment, to not judge those ideas until we have a number of ideas to choose from.

Second thing, often times the way we speak about a problem determines how we’re going to approach that problem. So, if you say something like, ‘well, we don’t have any money to develop this project’ or ‘management’s never going to buy that,’ the idea stops, the progress around that idea stops. But, if you phrase that and speak about a problem in a way that says ‘how might we raise the money?’ or how might we get management’s support?’ All of a sudden your brain starts to think about ways to solve the problem.

Another thing we have to do is to help people evaluation problems positively. It doesn’t make a lot of sense after you’ve been generating lots and lots of ideas in a creativity session to then pick out several ideas and talk about why they won’t work. It makes a lot more sense to look at the strengths of the idea first and then work to over come the concerns.

Also, helping people to take personal responsibility for their creativity. The role of a leader in an organization is crucial when it comes to creativity. And also the role of each person in the organization is crucial as well.

12:06:28:15

12:07:23:18

[Would you define deferral of judgment?]

Deferring of judgment…right. For example, say you’re in an idea generating session or in a session where you want to come up with some new ideas…the most common response in business today is that when someone comes up with an idea, someone else sitting across the table is going to tell them why that idea isn’t going to work. And we’ve been taught that way, we’ve been taught from a very early age to judge: yes/no, right/wrong, safe or unsafe. But, one of the things that we need to make sure that people understand in business is that ideas at the initial stage are not actions. We confuse ideas with actions. Ideas are potential actions we might take later on. At the initial stage of idea generation all we’re looking to do is to store up a number of possibilities to select from and then we can use those to come up with new ideas and new concepts. The idea behind that is the more ideas you have to choose from the better are your chances are of getting a good idea and deferring judgment at least to that.

12:07:23:18

12:08:06:21

[Roger continues about phrasing a problem]

When we talk about phrasing problems like a problem, creativity or the approach we’re using to creativity is a language based process and so, when we speak about a problem in a way that says...that describes it as an obstacle, it tells your brain to leave it there, to leave it alone. But when we speak about a problem in a way that opens the problem situation up, that says ‘how might we come up with the ideas?’, ‘how might we come up with the money for this?’, ‘how might we convince management of it’s value?’, ‘ how might we get other people in the organization on board with this?.’ That immediately tells your mind to generate ideas to solve it. So that’s the second thing is to phrase problems in a way that they can be solved.

12:08:06:22 12:08:45:04

[Roger continues on evaluating ideas]

Then, when we talk about evaluating an idea, we use a technique called plusses, potentials, and concerns. And so when you’re coming up with an idea and you’ve got an idea there that you’re working on and there’s some feasibility around the idea it makes no sense at all to talk about why the idea is lousy. Let’s provide a structured approach to evaluating the ideas. What’s good about the idea…what potential might there be in the idea...and then what concerns do you have about the idea because no idea is perfect. And so when we take a look at the concerns, phrase the concerns once again like a problem statement with a ‘how to’ or a ‘how might’ so we can overcome the concern, refine the idea and build it for action.

12:08:45:04

12:10:19:23

[Roger continues on Personal Responsibility]

Finally, personal responsibility for your creativity...Some studies that have been done on organizational creativity and leadership by a researcher named Bjorn Eckval, in Sweden has found that 67% of the statistical variance accounted for, regarding the creativity in an organization is accounted for in the behavior of the leader. What that means is if you’re the leader, if you’re the boss and people are involved in your organization, they’re invested in what’s going on, they think the company’s a great place to work, they’re really moving initiatives forward there is a 67% chance that you’re doing some things right. If however, it’s the opposite case, people are not involved in the organization, they loathe their job, they think the company is a retched place to work, there’s a 67% chance that it’s your fault.

Now the role of a leader in an organization is crucial in helping the people in that organization to come up with some new ideas, to model that behavior. So, when we speak to leaders about creativity, leaders in organizations, the first thing that we need to do is to work with those leaders to be able to tolerate the new ideas, to allow some mistakes to happen sometimes, to teach them how to treat ideas in a different way. Instead of critically analyzing them and looking at what’s bad about the idea, looking at the strengths of the idea first. It’s got to start with the leader. And then back to the personal responsibility issue…if a leader is going to help the organization to become more creative, it’s not creating beautiful office parks or not creating great murals, it’s giving people some training and changing their behaviors to tolerate new ideas and to build on those new ideas.

12:10:55:00 12:14:01:07

[Could you relate the Tootsie Pop story, example]

Often times, people think they can’t be creative because their environment is so regulated. We work with people in a variety of industries from radio pharmaceuticals to hospitals and you have to be regulated there because safety really is a major factor there. An organization that is really regulated is a hospital. For example we have a woman who is director of medical records at a hospital in Georgia. She had a problem with getting doctors to complete their medical records on time. As you know medical records are very important. Anytime anything is done to you in a medical situation there needs to be a record of it. Medical records are also how the hospital gets paid. But completing medical records is not the most exciting thing for doctors to do, it’s not billable time, it just has to be done, it’s oftentimes very tedious and routine and pretty boring. And so, Janet, the Medical Records Director, developed a real fascinating, sophisticated system, I call it, for getting doctors to complete their medical records on time. And it’s Tootsie Roll Pops. The way it works is, every time a doctor completes a medical record on time they get a Tootsie Roll Pop and their name goes into a drawing for a magnum of Champagne. Now when you think about it most of these doctors can afford to by a Tootsie Roll Pop factory, they have cases of the finest Champagne back home in their wine cellars, but, on the of the drawing for the magnum of Champagne there were 20 doctors in their scrubs and in their lab coats outside of medical records betting of who would win the magnum of Champagne. And medical record productivity went from something like 42% completion to over 80% completion. The story continues, about six months later, I called Janet and I said ‘Janet, how are things going over their?’ She said ‘the doctors are acting like children.’ I said ‘OK.’ So, she said, ‘I’ve decided to treat them like children.’ I said ‘What are you doing?’ She goes ‘We’ve gone through 20 lbs of animal crackers in the last two weeks.’ I said ‘Wait a minute, the last time we talked it was Tootsie Roll Pops and now it’s animal crackers, what’s going on?’ She said, ‘We were backlogged about 300 medical records and now whenever a doctor completes a medical record on that backlog, they get to have a handful of animal crackers. Two weeks later, 20 pounds of animal crackers later, they had completed 288 medical records and Janet had collected over 4.5 million dollars in attestation signatures. That’s a signature attesting to the fact that work had been done, the record was properly coded and that the hospital had been paid. Now the lesson from this is, that even in highly regulated systems and highly regulated environments, like hospitals, there’s room for creativity. The other lesson in this is, even with people like doctors, people that are in leadership positions like this, people that are powerful people that can’t be necessarily motivated by time or money, a little bit of recognition makes a big difference. Also, adding some fun to the workplace makes a big difference as well, because it was a game for these folks. It was a game for them to get their medical records done. And in that situation it worked. Now that’s not going to be the same in every situation. What I tell people in organizations is that they need to find the currency that’s important for the people there that they can be rewarded by. And it’s not necessarily money.

12:14:01:07 12:14:27:20

(rewards)

As a matter of fact, we did a study several years ago and we asked people in a major utility, ‘how would you like to be rewarded for your creativity?’ They came up with all these ideas and then they decided on those ideas. We found that less than 10% of those ideas had anything to do with money. They were flexible time or time off or, in this organization, a ride in the company’s hot air balloon. Oftentimes we think the solution to the problem is to throw more money at it and that isn’t the case at all.

12:14:43:00

12:17:15:20

[Can you complete and expand that story?](thinking outside the box)

Janet finally got the doctors trained to complete their medical records on time but, she found that there was another problem. And the problem was that the medical records were stacking up in the medical records office. The doctors were completing them but they weren’t coming over to the medical records to sign off on them. So, Janet is the kind of leader that really trusts her people to work out their problems in the organization. They had been trained in creative problem solving and she gave them the problem of how might we get the doctors to come over to medical records and sign off on their records. Well, they began to generate some ideas and one of the ideas they came up with was pretty outside of the box. And the idea was this: ‘Well, look, if the doctors aren’t coming to medical records, let’s move medical records to the doctors. Well, at first glance that’s a pretty ridiculous idea. I mean medical records is an entire department of a hospital. You can’t be following doctors round with a department of a hospital. But there was some intrigue in that idea and it was a new way to look at the challenge. And Janet had established that environment for creativity in her organization where people were willing to try out some ideas and try new approaches. So they experimented with the idea a little bit and did some research. They found that medical records was in one part of the hospital and they also found that the doctor’s lounge was in another part of the hospital. Lots of doctors in the doctor’s lounge. The solution was instead of having doctors come to medical records, they took a desk from the medical records office and put it out in front of the doctor’s lounge. They staffed it with a medical records employee, put a couple of computers and a telephone on there. And now, when a medical record is completed it doesn’t stay up in the medical records office, it moves over to the desk in front of the doctor’s lounge. Then when a doctor comes down the hall to have a cup of coffee or a consult with a colleague, the medical records staff employee recognizes the doctor, opens the file and says doctor can you sign off on this please, the doctor signs off on it and, to add a little spice to it, they get to have a dinosaur graham cracker cookie in the process. Once again, a kind of wild crazy idea. But, what happened as a result of that was that little move cost the hospital nothing except they had to put a phone jack in the hall. It cost the hospital a phone jack in the hall but that little move is consistently reducing the hospital’s receivables by 3.5 million dollars a month. And so, oftentimes when we think about creativity, we think it’s the big idea, the big idea totally outside of the box. OK. A whole other way to do something. But in this case the breakthrough came in looking at refining the system and doing things just a little bit differently.

12:17:30:15

12:18:29:26

[Leaders influence 67% of creativity- what influences the other 33%?]

Well, the other 33%, this takes a look at the behavior that’s going on and what we can do is attribute about two-thirds of all the behaviors that go on in an organization to the behavior of the leader, particularly in regarding creativity. Now the other third that influences the organization, is not only the leaders’, the leaders’ behavior is the strongest, but the other third that influences creativity in an organization is the way the organization is designed, the reward system, payment structure, those sorts of things. But what is really intriguing about that research is that when you talk about organizational blocks to creativity , it’s not the rewards system, it’s not the suggestion system, it’s not how the office is designed, it’s the behavior of the leader and it’s the behavior of the people that work together in the organization. Organizations can be really creative and they don’t have to have beautiful office parks. It’s the way the people work with each other and treat each other around new ideas. Those are the blocks to creativity in organizations.

12:18:36:06 12:20:49:02

[Can we train leaders to be accepting?]

Well, I think leaders today and in the organizations that I’m working with don’t have much of a choice. The era of growing companies through acquisitions is over. What companies are looking to do now is they’re looking to grow their organizations through innovation. And some of the companies that we work with, what they’ve done is, some of the companies we work with have made major initiatives around innovation. And what’ve done is appointed innovation champions throughout the organization. And so the CEO has said you’re the innovation champion, you’re the innovation champion, you’re the innovation champion, and you’re the innovation champion. These people are terrified because they don’t know how to innovate. So the way you innovate is you teach people some basic behaviors: deferring judgment when you’re generating ideas, phrase problems in a way so that they can be solved, positively evaluate ideas – look for strength in ideas. Leaders are, are the crucial point in that because we find in organizations where innovation sticks and the organization grows the leader has as much or more training in creativity than the people who work in the organization. Now whether that leader will ever run a creativity session or not, that is not the point. What the leader is there to do is to be able to coach the process of innovation, to support the people in the organization and to become what we call not process illiterate. What I mean by that is oftentimes in organizations – this is the bad case – you come into an organization, the leader of the organization introduces me, says we’re very excited to have Dr. Firestien here today he’s going to teach us to be more creative. He introduces me, says how important it is, I show the first slide, the leader leaves the room. What has just happened there is that the leader has wasted a lot of money because he has just sent a very strong message to his people. The message that he has sent is that ‘you need to get fixed, I don’t,’ ‘Innovation is important but it’s not really important enough for me to be here.’ And the other thing is when these people get excited about coming up with their ideas and begin to propose them to that leader and what’s going to begin to happen is it’s going to be the same old behaviors again. So that leader is now ‘process illiterate.’

12:21:09:08

12:22:41:27

[What are some small steps to initiate creativity?]

Look for lots of little ideas first. Oftentimes what leaders want is they want the big idea. The breakthrough idea. What I call that is the ‘Fairy Tale Idea.’ Because in many cases in organizations that are now beginning to decide that innovation is important and they haven’t innovated for years, they expect this ‘Fairy Tale Idea,’ this big idea they expect it to come and well up and save the organization. Even if that big idea hit them they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Because they have history of not tolerating the little ideas. So first is to accept the little ideas and it can be something as simple rearranging the office for more efficiency. I mean if you take a look at the magnitude of ideas, if we talk about moving a desk from one department to another, that’s a little idea. But he result was extraordinary. So support and build on the little ideas, lots of little ideas. What happens then is as a result of all those little ideas coming you have a lot of improvement beginning to happen and people begin to trust the process. And they begin to trust that the leader is not going to put their ideas down. What that does is that it paves the ground then for people to feel comfortable enough and excited enough to trust the organization enough to propose those big ideas. Those big ideas that don’t necessarily match the way the organization is currently doing business. So, you get started, focus on the little ideas first - really support and praise those.

12:22:44:01

12:24:07:02

[How do you praise?]

You praise specifically. We talked a little bit last night about research in education has found that it takes about a four-to-one praise-to-criticism ratio just to keep students on track. To change their behavior it takes a significantly higher praise to criticism ratio, about eight-to-one. Lots of organizations that we work in are run by people that have been taught that as soon as an idea comes out, it should be critically analyzed or scrutinized. Well that doesn’t work when we’re talking about creativity. First, is to increase the praise ratio that is going on. And praise specifically, it’s got to be legitimate praise, it can’t be bogus praise, people are going to see right through that. Look at what’s going on that’s right in the organization and then move people in that way. We also talk about organizations that are not highly creative we find oftentimes find pockets in the organization, we call them pockets of light. Where people are being creative, they’re getting the job done and that leader or that manager is making it a great place to work. And when we analyze those areas we find that there is a lot more praise going on, a lot more laughter and a lot more fun going on. So how to praise, first praise specifically, look at what’s going well. But in addition to praise, throw some humor in there and have some fun with the work as well, because that will really build on it also.

12:24:20:13

12:24:42:04

[Importance of praise]

The importance of praise in an organization…most of us are starved for praise. And we’re all children inside. So if we can just begin to increase the amount that we praise by one or two times, what we’ll find is that the atmosphere for creativity lightens and more people are willing to contribute ideas.

12:25:10:22

12:25:55:24

[Why are organizations afraid of creativity?]

The reason organizations are afraid of the word creativity is because they think when you get creative you’re going to have people running around painting the walls, painting themselves. They think of the creativity as this sort of mad artist. But that’s not the case at all, they are much more comfortable with the process of innovation. But, creativity, in many cases we have some myths about them. Many people in business think that only artists or composers or musicians or children in some cases are creative, where we’re all creative. It doesn’t really matter what we create in, what really matters is that we’re expressing ourselves and that we’re making a difference, a positive difference, hopefully, a positive difference.

12:26:22:18

12:27:23:17

[Take #2]

Organizations are afraid of creativity because they are afraid that they can’t control it. They think that creativity is something really wild that only crazy artists who are throwing paint on canvas are creative. Whereas in organizations that are growing everybody is creative but they can creative in ways that support the goals of the organization. It doesn’t work in an organization when the president says let’s all get creative because then people are coming up with ideas that really don’t focus on the mission. What we find helpful in organizations is if the president or the managers or the people in charge say here, we need you to be creative and by the way, here are the problems we need you to solve. Can you go to work on those? So, one of the ways to get rid of the fear of creativity in organizations is to focus on the challenges that the organization really needs to solve and then train people to be more creative and focus their creative efforts towards that. That way you’ll get innovation in the area you want it to happen.

B13

(Roger Continued)

13:01:00:14

13:03:19:15

[Is creativity important to the bottom line?]

Is creativity important to the bottom line? Say you’re in a company that makes widgets. And your job is to move one widget from here over there and get it out as cheaply and as inexpensively as possible. There’s really no room for creativity in a situation like that you might think. Well, I’ll tell you a story about that. Several years ago we were working with a forge plant in Upstate New York. Now this plant makes ring gears for cars. A ring gear is not a very glamorous product. It’s about this big around and it goes in your transmission or your transaxle. It changes the direction of power from one direction to another. Now, it looks like a big donut with notches on it. The way you make a ring gear is you take a hot piece of metal, you put in a die. The die is then compressed under about 20 tons of pressure and a hot piece of metal on the outside comes out on the other side in the shape of a ring gear. At this plant they were having problems with getting ring gears getting stuck in the die. What happened was, one of the operators would go out with a long crow bar-like piece of metal and break the ring gear out of the die. Now, what was happening was the way they were getting the ring gear out of the die was they were breaking it out of the die. So that there was a quality problem. So that had to be all reworked. The other thing was that they were beginning to break dies. Dies were costing anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 a piece and they were starting to break four or five of these a week. So we’re talking about a $40,000 problem a week. The group held a creative problem solving session to work on the problem of how to prevent the ring gears from sticking in the die. They started to generate some ideas. And as often happen in idea generating sessions after you get the first eight to ten ideas out, you tend to stretch and get a little bit crazier, a little bit goofier, a little funnier. One of the men in the group came up with the idea of, well, we’ve got a sticking problem here, so let’s do what my wife does with sticking, let’s spray the pan with Pam, the vegetable product, Pam. Well, they laughed about it. One of the other people in the group says, you know Pam probably wouldn’t work, but you might have something there. What they did was went over to the lab and mixed up a solution of water, a special soap and a little bit of oil. They went down to the street to the local store. They came back with a two dollar spray bottle and about $.50 of solution.

13:03:49:14

13:04:18:07

They take a dollar-fifty spray bottle, $.50 worth of solution and spray it on the die. You know they haven’t had any broken dies since and they haven’t had any sticking ring gears since. So, a $2 or a $2.50 product is regularly solving a $40,000 problem. So, if you’re talking about organizations that are only focused on the bottom line, and this organization is definitely doing that, creativity really made a difference on the bottom line.

13:04:24:25

13:05:00:09

[What do group members think when an idea is REALLY outside the box?]

Well, it was kind of interesting because they were trained in CPS. But, even an idea like that is pretty outside, so they laughed. The guy came up with the idea of let’s spray it with Pam and everybody in the group started laughing. Until somebody in the group said, you know there is an essence of an idea there. That’s often how ideas get started. It sort of comes out over here and you know you’ll laugh about it a little bit, but someone else in the group will say, you know there’s something to that. I’ll bet if we mixed up some Penfield 101 solution, a little bit of soap and some oil and water and sprayed it on the die, it would prevent the problem. Bang, there it was.

13:05:08:11

13:06:46:12

[PPC]

The technique is called PPC: Pluses, potentials and concerns. The way you use that technique is after you’ve generated a lot of ideas, instead of looking at why the idea won’t work, what we recommend is following sort of a format or procedure. First, look at the pluses of the idea first. What’s good about the idea right now? Then look at the potential in the idea. What might be the result if the idea were implemented? And we use words like ‘it might.’ And finally focus on the concerns. But in dealing with the concerns, instead of saying things like it’s going to cost too much, or nobody’s going to buy that. Phrase the concern like a problem statement. How to reduce the cost or how to get management to buy that or how to get buyers for that. Then generate ideas to overcome each one of those concerns. And then what begins to happen is the idea gets better. Now PPC is sort of a little language device. It gives you something to hang on to when some one comes to you with a new idea. And so when we train people in organizations to be more creative one of the things that they really hang on to is the PPC technique. Now, when somebody comes to them with a idea, they don’t say ‘oh hey, I’m going to do a PPC on your idea now. No, no, no. They get the essence behind the idea or the spirit of the idea. First, instead of taking a look at what’s wrong about the idea and talking about that, they’ll take a look at the strengths of the idea and then sort of ‘blue sky it,’ look at the potential and then deal with the concerns. That little tool can help to get rid of some of the major blocks to creativity in organizations.

13:06:56:05 13:07:37:28

[Difference between Creativity and Innovation]

Well, some people like to make a difference between creativity and innovation. Some people say that creativity is getting the idea and innovation is doing something about it. Where innovation fits in to the CPS process is in that action-planning phase. And that’s oftentimes why people are uncomfortable, particularly in business, with the word creativity. Because they see creativity as sort of wild musings and they don’t see results around that. You need to create results, OK. You need to diverge, come up with lots of ideas and then converge, focus on those best ideas and then put those ideas into action. That’s where the innovation comes from, getting those new ideas into action.