The difference between skill and creativity

Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity.

NEETS, a problem too important to ignore.

Social problems are damaging for individuals and society; and are some of the most intractable problems.  One that shames us all is the tragic waste of potential for an increasing number of young people.  The statistics are truly disturbing.

There are currently around one million young people between 16 and 24 not in education, employment or training (NEETS) in England.   This represents 15% of all young people and is has increased by 50% in the last 10 years.  Even more alarming is the fact that of those that stay in this category, around 1 in 7 of these will die within 10 years – usually from drugs or suicide.

The financial cost to society is huge, estimated to be in excess of £20Bn per year –crime, benefits, health.

They are the generation of tomorrow and they have no confidence, no prospects and no future – some of them have never even seen a cow!  This is a by-product of the society we are building today.

Government initiatives and programmes have achieved little, the numbers just keep going up.  Creating supermarket ‘jobs’ is not a solution, these kids want to be valued, they want to make a contribution, they want to be useful.

Thankfully, there are people who are doing something to remedy this wrong.  Cat Zero is a charity in Hull that is doing some remarkable work with these kids.  Read this report about a BBC radio item on how Cat Zero is transforming their lives. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01cvk8b)

Cat Zero restores their spirit - the confidence, prospects and future just follow on naturally. What a great organisation to work for.



http://www.catzero.org/

How to get Marketing Ideas

I recently I took part in discussion to come up with some marketing ideas.  However, on this occasion I was a participant rather than a facilitator.  As a facilitator I look to make the ‘process’ work, whereas as a participant, I was more interested in the results. 

I was also able to observe somebody else managing the process, and I learned something useful.

We were a group of about six volunteers, all keen to help.  The leader went through the background to the meeting and outlined what we needed and we came up with a list of useful ideas.  But I noticed that we never managed to take the step from ‘useful’ to ‘imaginative’ ideas.  We seemed to be held back by the original context - and the youngest member of the group never said a word.  This is what I noticed;

* If you don’t ask for imaginative ideas, you are unlikely to get any.  In a group setting, most people stick to ‘safe’.
* To get imaginative ideas, you need to go ‘off piste’.  But you need to get people to agree to it.  Ask permission, some people are reluctant to go without a good reason.
* Being a facilitator is a bit like being a good manager, you have to encourage people and give them room to succeed, help them to do more than they think they can.
* Avoid practicality or detail – keep that for the implementation stage.

Challenging Assumptions

I recently watched some brilliant videos about innovation but there were some really interesting ones about questioning assumptions.  They are part of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. 

In one,  Tina Seelig, the speaker, talks about giving some students an exercise in entrepreneurism.  She gave each group $5, and told them to see how much money they could make in two hours and to give a three minute presentation on the results.

The students came up with variety of innovative schemes that met the challenge.  Most of the groups quite reasonably considered what they could do with $5 in two hours.  However, a couple of the groups did rather better.  They chose to ignore the assumptions of the initial problem – the $5.  One group booked tables at a very popular restaurant and when the usual queue formed outside, they sold their reservations to the queue.  Another group found a company that wanted to sell services to students, so the students sold their three minute slot to the company and did their presentation about the company’s services.

The link below is to a different five minute talk she gave about “Challenging Assumptions”.  In it she gets her audience to solve a simple problem.  The real lesson of the talk comes at the end.  A brilliant observation about solving problems, which I won’t give away. 

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2779

A Supply Chain Management Problem

How would you change the fishing industry?

In Japan, the aftermath of the tsunami left large parts of the country’s infrastructure in tatters.  So it was for the fishing industry.  Trawlers were lost, harbours devastated, buildings destroyed, everything gone.  A monumental problem.

An article in the New Scientist details an attempt to rebuild a fishing business in a new way.  The fundamental problem for the fishermen was that the fish markets had been destroyed. They had nowhere to sell their catch. 

So somebody had the idea of turning it into an internet business.  They equipped the boats with webcams and laptops and posted details of their catch in real-time. Their customers bought the fish as it was caught.  They did away with the physical market, and radically changed the nature of the business

Faced with total disruption of their business, they were forced to rethink the way they did business.  Normally, it would require a considerable leap of imagination to ‘do away with market’, but in this case it was taken away from them.  The fish market has been a part of the industry forever, how could you consider not having one?

Rebuilding the old infrastructure would cost millions.  This is a solution that has changed the supply chain and provided real benefits for customers.  Whether or not it solves any of the other problems the fishing industry has, is still to be decided. 

 It shows you what can be achieved when you are forced to question your assumptions.

How to reduce energy consumption

How do you reduce domestic energy use?

If you think about it logically, there a number of ways.

You can put the price up, but that penalises lower income groups. You can build or convert houses to conserve heat, but that takes a lot of time. You can also redesign domestic equipment to consume less energy, but this also takes time. Lastly, you can encourage people to use less energy by installing energy monitors that give them direct feedback of their energy use. 

All of these methods have associated drawbacks and costs.

I recently a read a report that explains a new idea.  It uses ‘social norms’ and is incredibly simple.  All you do is let people know how their energy consumption compares with other people.  You just print their performance on the energy bill.  You let them know the average for similar houses for that period, and what the best performers achieved.  That’s it, you leave the rest to them. 

Most people recognise the benefit to the community of saving energy and will be motivated to aspire to do better.  The method is ‘aspirational’.

How effective is it?  Typically, it reduces consumption by an average of 2%.  That doesn’t sound much, but it is equivalent to the reduction you get by increasing the price by 11%.  Furthermore it doesn’t ‘wear off’, it motivates people to improve their relative performance.

It is such a great solution, and as with all great ideas, costs little.

 Great solutions to difficult problems are found by thinking in a new way.

Problem Solving - The Value of Uncertainty

Should organisations avoid uncertainty? 

Usually, organisations manage their affairs in order to minimise uncertainty.  Shareholders and potential investors dislike it as it leads to uncertain returns and uncertain returns mean lower value.  It is tempting to think that organisations would be more effective if they could avoid all risk and uncertainty, especially since people naturally dislike uncertainty.

Unfortunately, we have no control over events.

Military campaigns were often planned in minute detail; every contingency was taken into account in order to eliminate uncertainty.  But modern warfare no longer enables conflicts to be planned in such detail.  Campaigns have strategic objectives, but the nature of asymmetric warfare means that day to day events are impossible to predict.  So there is little point in training officers in standardized tactics, they need to be able to interpret events and react accordingly.

I read a story about an organisation that was planning a complex reorganisation.  A senior executive distributed a handout of his presentation, but the pages were in complete disorder.  Everybody was confused, “what order are these supposed to be in?” they asked.  His reply was that ‘he did not know’.  He knew roughly what needed to be done, but he could not predict every eventuality – they needed to be able to react to events as they went along.  They would only know the right order when the task was completed.

Not only should we not avoid uncertainty, we should embrace it. It makes us better at dealing with problems.