TAPE # and time code

Audio

B15

Ted Colson

15:00:56:05 15:01:37:04

[Ted, tell us a little bit about yourself.]

I live in Tampa, St. Petersburg area of Florida. I have a company called Applied Creativity along with a partner, Alison Strickland. Primarily we do business with corporations in the Fortune 500 category although we do work in school systems and organizations like Goodwill Industries.  We cut across a wide spectrum of organizations, but primarily it is corporate focused.

15:01:42:13 15:03:06:23

[What would you say is the reason that corporations are coming to you for assistance?]

Well, the world of work is changing. I mean the way work has been done and the way it is going to be done is very, very different and it began with companies like GE who started downsizing, outsourcing folks with never the expectation that they would be hiring them back. When you start to do that and you start to decrease your head count, you are asking people to do more with less.  And when that happens you’re really going to have to start to apply a set of creative principles to look at that, because work is really changing drastically.  By the year, perhaps, 2010, the majority of people in the United States will be working in a project based way, 12, 14, 24 months and then they will be gone. One of the things that people are beginning to realize is that they have to identify what their core competencies are: who am I? and what am I here to do?  And what can I offer a corporation and be able to find the corporation that needs that.

15:03:06:24

15:03:47:20

And a perfect example is like Microsoft with Windows 95 of bringing together a team for a specific period of time, and bringing all this talent together with a deadline here and working until that is done and when that is completed the majority of people left, went on to other things. That’s going to be the nature of work and that’s what corporations are beginning to see that they really do need people who can get things done much faster with a whole lot of imagination, creativity and ingenuity and those are the skills of the 21^st century.

15:04:28:05

15:05:48:07

… [Ted, why do you think corporate business leaders are sometimes a little fearful of implementing "creativity” programs?]

Well, the organizations like to be organized. They like people in systems and structures and creativity doesn’t lend itself to that and there is no guarantee that out the other end of a creative effort, something really outstanding is going to happen and the process is messy.  We have yet to work with any organization or talked with others who have gone through a real creative effort to bring a product or service to market, to the marketplace, that don’t after it’s over ever step back and say, there’s got to be a more organized way of doing this and there isn’t.  I don’t believe you can organize your way all the way through, because if you are doing everything that is predictable, you’re not out there on the cutting edge, you’re not in new territory and that’s what you’re looking for.  And new territory is cumbersome, it’s awkward, in many cases you don’t even have the words to describe or explain where you are, because it’s new and we don’t have a language yet to understand it.  And management looks at this and people can’t even explain to them where they are yet and that’s frustrating.

15:05:59:29

15:07:31:26

[…How do you encourage business leaders to have a greater tolerance for ambiguity?]

That’s a, that’s a toughie.  Some organizations like 3M and others are giving employees opportunities to kind of experiment and explore around interest areas of theirs, in some cases not even directly connected to their business and with the notion that just the process of doing that will help people in the work that they are doing within that organization and they might bring something in from outside so they sort of built in a little bit of tolerance for ambiguity. Creativity is, in our perspective, developmental.  It takes time and it’s not something that people learn and ‘oh, I’ve got it now’ and they’re on to something else.  It’s a life process and the more you do it the better you get at it.  And so that’s another issue that where you were here and where you are tomorrow and where you’re going to be the next day in terms of your own creative growth is going to be real different.   You know, frequently it’s hard to differentiate between creativity and learning. They might be one in the same and one of the issues that many corporations are getting into is looking at the concept of the learning organization and part of that is dealing with this whole area of ambiguity.

15:07:34:03

15:08:25:09

[How do you define creativity?]

Well, amongst other things, it’s the ability to see in new ways, make connections, seize opportunities, challenge assumptions and I think taking intelligent risks.  OK.  And if you look at one of the key fundamental principles is the ability to challenge assumptions, identify them first, because we’re all live within a set of assumptions that we’re making about everything we do.  One is to identify those assumptions and then to challenge those assumptions to see if they hold up under that challenge.

15:08:25:09

15:10:06:25

I worked with the small business administration a number of years ago and they had programs around the country for inventors and entrepreneurs to come in and we did a number of workshops for them.  Once there was a speaker there that had 45 or 50 patents and his talk to us was somewhat convoluted and somebody said to him all right how do you do it? What is the key here?  He said, ‘well the first thing is interest.  I have to get interested in something and once I’m interested I try to find the seminal thinkers in that area and I begin to read their books and their articles and I try to identify all of the universal truths, his term, assumptions, my term, that they are making in that field and then I go about systematically violating everyone of them and it’s in that violation that I come up with my breakthroughs, my insights, my newness and that’s my simple process I use over and over and over again. And for me I can do that because I’m not steeped in their tradition.  I’m not schooled in their assumptions, they don’t make any – I don’t care about them. I do define them. [Greg: You didn’t have no emotional investment in them] Right.  They hadn’t been schooled into him.  And that’s what happens, they were schooled - in terms of our assumptions.  And that’s a challenge.

15:10:23:26

15:13:09:11

[You know business leaders have a bottom line focus, one of the things we’re trying to do…is to give them some examples of where the creative problem solving process and creative principles have really worked well…can you relate any examples to us?] 

We work out of a framework and we look at newness in primarily four areas, technical, organizational or procedural, interpersonal or strategic and so we put new inventions into those categories and I’ll give you a quick one – it’s sort of an interpersonal one.  We had a woman that came to one of our programs that had just moved into a new position and she really wasn’t enjoying the work that she was doing.  We spend some time looking at creative space and arranging your space in such a way that it will signal the occasion for you to be creative.  And it dawned on her that when she moved into this new position she just brought her stuff in, set it down on the table and began working.  And that her office didn’t represent who she was. So she decided she was going to paint it over one weekend.  Got the maintenance people to move all the stuff out, went in and painted it and now it’s Sunday afternoon and she’s moving it all back in.  And she’s looking around and she’s saying ‘you know, that is not going to look good here anymore and I don’t even know what that thing does.  And it dawned on her that there were probably a whole lot of other people in her organization that had a lot of stuff that they weren’t using.  So, she decided to have a yard sale.  And the following Friday she got a multipurpose room, had it all cleared out, sent out a memo and everybody brought stuff that they weren’t using.  They had the accountants there so they could track it and people walked in and they could take anything they wanted. And people started seeing stuff that they had requisitions in for that was there on the floor. When it was all said and done, they estimated that it saved that company about $100,000.  Now, there’s a – I mean, here’s a person who didn’t go in to say how can I make or save my company $100,000.  She saw an opportunity, she seized it, she looked at it from a bigger perspective and moved it into operations; took it through to completion.  Now at that organization, every quarter they have  a yard sale and if there stuff there that nobody wants they donate it to the school system or some other folks and write it off their books.   So, that is one example.

15:13:09:25

15:14:12:00

[Example # 2]

Another is, it was a small company that deals in children’s books and they’re always sending out promotional materials and they have rows and rows of stuff and they – people have to pull them out and slide them down and the manager after coming to one of our programs walked down and said is there anything we could do that might make your job a little better and someone said absolutely if you could go out a buy a piece of plastic that we could lie down on this table, we could do this job a lot faster because we could slide things around. It cut that job in half with a piece of plastic.  OK.  And it didn’t take a big problem solving session.  Frequently we discover that people who are doing the job know how to do it better than some manual says, but nobody ever asks them. Hey, can you do this job in a different way that would speed it up or change it?

15:14:25:00

15:16:14:22

[What can a manager do to promote the culture that will respect small changes and hopefully big changes as well?]

Well, asking people to begin with is the first step and most don’t.  A lot of times it’s like in the old structure, the manager who told these people to do x.  They were the problem solvers, those were the workers.  That is not, that is not the norm today.  But there are still those out there that are still doing that.  I’ve got this theory and my theory is that it is almost impossible to be creative in work that you hate. I just don’t think it’s possible for that to happen.  If that is true and if organizations could help people discover what are their core competencies.  What are they here to do?  What uniquely are their gifts?  And then could find the place within that organization for them to do that work, it would just unleash they’re natural creativity.  And I think that would be a real competitive advantage for an organization that would do that.  That would allow people to find out and discover what they’re supposed to be doing.  And get them into work that just taps that genius that we all have within us.  I mean, we’re all highly creative people. We just have to find where that creativity is and use it in ways that will be of value to ourselves and to the companies that we work with.

15:16:38:20

15:17:33:22

[Take # 2]

Well, one is to ask for it and that’s a simple answer but the norm in corporate America, for many years, was I’m the boss, I come up with the ideas and you implement them. That is the old paradigm, that is not the new one. I believe it is almost impossible somebody to be creative when they are involved with work that they hate or that they don’t like. And that I believe it would be a strategic advantage for an organization that was able to put together people in work that represented their creative genius, it represented their core competencies.

15:18:04:06

15:20:38:09

[… other anecdotes you could share with in terms of successful projects you are aware of] 

As we look at creativity, four areas, technical, interpersonal, organization, strategic working - I’m going to talk about one in the strategic area.  I have a friend that has come up with an idea, it’s a big one, that is going to revolutionize the way people find work and the way companies find people to work with them and what he has done is he has put together an opportunity for individuals to develop a digital portfolio and they can put in any information that they want and there will be video in this as well.  And when they go out and corporations are looking for a particular position, what they do is the corporation starts to answer questions about what it is they are looking for and as they answer those questions the people over here start to rise to the top, so at the end of this they’ve got the 15 or 20 people that absolutely match what the corporation is looking for.  But it doesn’t stop there.  It reorders those people’s portfolios in the order that the corporation is most interested, so you get what you are looking for right from the very beginning. Some corporations today go through 200,000 to 300,000 applications a year and it is a huge job.  Well if they only had to deal with 25 to 30 of the most outstanding candidates.  Back in the 30’s the labor unions served as the buffer between management and labor, I believe this is, this is going to take its place.  Not only can you - once you’re in this system – it’ll cost you a couple hundred bucks for your portfolio and $10 or $12 a month to be a member of this – and when you’re a member and you’re not looking for a job but your name is still – not your name, you can be anonymous – will come up and each quarter you get a report on how many times your name came up, how far did you go, why you were eliminated.  And you can begin to then look at what your employability history is.  It’s almost like insurance for the individual now.  And that’s a big idea.

15:20:39:26

15:21:42:28

[and how was that idea generated?]

It was out of his head. It’s about a six month old company with venture capital that’s come out of the Hizuenga, the Wayne Hizuenga group.  And many organizations are just really looking at it.   Because you can go now internally.  Companies like GE, Disney have huge resources of people out there.  But as they go about putting together in teams for projects they don’t – it’s hard for them to sort internally.  So some of  those companies are beginning to come to them and say can you do this just for us internally.  Big, huge problems with airlines today, not enough pilots.  I mean they can’t find pilots.  They have come to them and said we need something that will help us out.  So that’s an example of some real strategic, I mean, big picture kinds of thinking.

15:21:42:28

15:23:13:29

Another of that sort from the big to the small was in the supermarket not so long ago, it’s a Saturday morning, in walks in a father with three kids, the youngest of which was two, one was four and the oldest one was about seven.  He’s got cutoffs on, he hadn’t shaved, it’s about 8 o’clock in the morning.  Obviously, breakfast wasn’t there so, he was out getting it.  As they came around in back the little two-year old decided to throw a temper tantrum and she is screaming. It was so loud that those of us in line, that were checking out, turned.  And I had kind of followed them and I am saying to myself, you are dead.  There is no way you are getting out of this.  He looked down at his daughter and he looked up at the rest of us and he said, ‘does anybody know who’s kid this is?’  And we all starting laughing, I mean the whole place and the kid on the floor looked up, and it surprised her, she stopped crying. He picked her hand up and walked away. People literally started applauding, real creative way of going about looking at what could have potentially been, you know, a disaster and I’m going through all my strategies and they all tended to be on the punitive side.  And he looked at it entirely differently.  So that’s another example of personal – we all run into those everyday.