Thinking and Actions for Innovation

The section on improvement examined how Alex Osborn developed the concept of brainstorming as a way to increase the generation of ideas for improving processes in order to improve the effectiveness of suggestion systems, and how brainstorming became a common tool in what became known as tool boxes for quality improvement efforts.

Sometimes, however, the assessment of an organization leads to the realization that incremental improvement alone will not be adequate to meet the needs that an organization must address. Something new, which contradicts the historical means that have been in use, needs to be invented.

Brainstorming is versatile in that it can be used to both generate ideas for incremental improvement as part of a diagnostic process, and it can be employed to generate revolutionary ideas. But there is a distinction in how we think and the methods we use between generating ideas for improvement and ideas that promote the reinvention of a process or system.

Creating ideas –whether for gradual improvement or revolutionary change – both fall under the concept of innovative thinking. We can generate innovative ideas through trial and error, through scientific experiments, through brainstorming, and through a variety of approaches to thinking that fall under the classification of “synectics.” (1)This section will focus on synectics as a cognitive framework for developing innovative ideas that can be both incremental and revolutionary, and on an approach to creative thinking known as the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ). (2)

Doing Brainstorming Correctly

Before delving into synectics, it will be helpful to pause to note that few people actually conduct brainstorming exercises in the manner that Osborn intended. Osborn observed that the key inhibition to generating ideas is the rush to evaluate or judge a new idea. (3) When someone shares an idea, we are likely to dismiss it immediately as impractical or exclaim that it is brilliant. When people hear their fragile, new-born ideas immediately squashed, the do not want to share any other ideas that would cause the pain to be repeated. Similarly, if one person’s idea is immediately embraced as brilliant, other people with other ideas may decide to withhold their ideas out of concern that their ideas will not be as well received. Or, in some cases, as soon as the “brilliant” idea is offered, the brainstorming process is shut down because a desirable idea has been generated. Ideas that are potentially even better do not get shared.

Osborn’s method demands strict adherence to silence as ideas are generated and strict adherence to giving all participants an opportunity to offer ideas. Brainstorming was designed to be a two-step process – idea generation followed by idea evaluation – with a clear break in time between the two steps. This interval in time is meant to allow people to digest the ideas that have been offered, to ruminate and consider them, and to give people time to come up with additional ideas that may piggy-back on the list of ideas developed in the first session.

Many readers have perhaps experienced a so-called brainstorming session that ignored Osborn’s guidance and have experienced the frustration this creates.

Over time, practitioners have expanded on brainstorming by combining it with nominal group technique (NGT) – a process of forced prioritization where each individual silently selects what they consider to be the best options from a list, being restricted to selecting the best one-third of the ideas. NGT enables a group to identify its consensus about the best idea without debate or undue pressure or influence from the more outspoken or powerful participants in the exercise.(4)One of Deming’s collaborators from the 1980’s Bob King, and Dr. Helmut Schlieksupp recommended the structured approach to brainstorming, where individuals write their ideas on worksheets that are circulated silently within a group.(5) This approached, called “brainwriting” was introduced developed by Gueschka in 1975.(6)Participants then circulate the pages and individual select the best one-third of the ideas on each worksheet in a process they labeled as brainwriting, which should be part of every practitioner’s tool kit.

Synectics

The term “snyectics,” from the Greek meaning to join together, was used by Harvard psychologist, Dr. William J. Gordon, in the early 1960s to describe the study of creative thinking methods that was being pursued in the 1950’s among scholars in the Cambridge Synectics group.(7) These researchers established the view that creative thinking is a psychological process that can be studied and learned and their work led to many elaborations and insights by dozens of other practitioners in the ensuing decades. Gordon’s bibliography runs from William James and John Dewey in the early 1900s, up through George Santayana, Warren Bennis, and Arnold Toynbee’s works in the 1950s, with a strong reference to the work of Alfred North Whitehead.

Synectics sought to understand the “underlying non-rational free-association concepts” that occur when individuals and groups are engaged in creative thinking. These researchers found that studying creative thinking does not inhibit creativity, thereby establishing a new dimension in metacognition – thinking reflectively about creative thinking – which is vital to radical quality.

A key discovery about creative thinking by the Harvard Synectics group in the 1950’s was that their work repeatedly came back to a common starting point “to make the familiar strange.” The fundamental step in creative thinking is to shift our perception so that what is familiar to us is suddenly seen as strange and new. Old patterns of perception must be abruptly contradicted, enabling new patterns of perception to emerge.From this core realization, numerous researchers and consultants have developed a wide variety of methods that help us generate new ideas by finding new ways of perceiving, or “framing” a situation.

Analogies and Metaphors

One of the first methods that creativity researchers deployed in the 1950’s was the use of analogies and metaphors. In an experiment with an engineer developing an altimeter, for example, the engineer was encouraged to ask: “What would I feel like if I were a spring?” (8)

Playing with metaphors turned out to be one of the most effective approaches to helping people see the familiar in a strange and new way. Metaphors that are similar to the circumstances can be employed as well as metaphors that are shockingly different.

For example, using sports metaphors has been shown to be an effective method to promote critical self-assessments in organizations. (9)

Many contemporary writers on creative thinking advocate the use of metaphors to shock people out of their normal perceptions and to abruptly open up new perceptions and insights.

Lateral Thinking

One of the world’s leading experts on thinking processes, including creative thinking, was the British physician, psychologist, teacher, and philosopher, Edward de Bono. As part of his broad work on defining how people think, de Bono offered insights into how to assist people in seeing the familiar in a strange and new way. He observed that creative thinking is a significant factor in the overall approach to quality as cognition. “When quality is poor,” de Bono wrote, “there is a need for improvement, but as quality improves, there is a need to supplement quality with creative thinking.”(10)

In a significant contribution to the understanding of metacognition, de Bono proposed a metaphor in which we envision different approaches to thinking as being like wearing different hats. He proposed a Six Hat theory, suggesting thinking approaches that are applied to seeing the positive possibilities in a proposal as a yellow hat, the negative potential as a black hat, seeking facts and information as a white hat, considering emotions and feelings as a red hat, and considering creative possibilities as a green hat. An additional hat, the blue hat, is metacognitive in being devoted to seeing the big picture and the deliberate taking off and putting on the various hats, as appropriate to the circumstances. (11)

An important aspect of the green hat (creative thinking) is to be able to slide out of our routine ways of seeing situations and to slide laterally into other methods of perception. De Bono offered a variety of methods to create this lateral shift in thinking, such as random word association, the use of provocative statements, and challenging our perceptions by asking “why?”

The Wild and the Whacky

Other teachers and consultants in the field of creative thinking have offered useful elaborations on activities that can dislodge us from our normal perception of a situation in order to see things in a new and strange way.

Roger von Oech assembled his Whack Pack card deck, along with his book, A Whack on the Side of the Head to offer techniques for using “crazy, foolish, and impractical ideas” as ways to stimulate our thinking that leads to practical invention of new concepts and methods.(12) To von Oech, a “whack” is any circumstance - planned or unforeseen – that hits us and forces us to re-think a process or system. Much of his compendium of whacks focuses on actions we can consciously take to stimulate new perceptions.

In a similar vein, Doug Hall authored Jump Start Your Brain, which offers numerous approaches for shocking or stimulating people out of their comfortable perceptions. He notes that there are some self-evident truths about creative thinking that quality practitioners should keep in mind.(13) Having fun is usually fundamental to helping people enthusiastically think about new ideas. Reality, in a sense, is irrelevant, since we are setting out to change reality by creating new ideas and methods. Any new breakthrough in thinking will change what we have historically done in our organizations. And, in order to generate some good ideas, you must generate a lot of ideas, which ties back to the earliest observations by Alex Osborn.

Hall and von Oech have had successful careers as consultants working with organizations on creative thinking, but their wild and whacky methods are not necessarily conducive to some organizational work settings. Getting people to participate in metaphorical thinking exercises may sometimes be more appropriate. Another approach, known as TRIZ, might provide quality practitioners and leaders with a set of methods that can be more readily adopted in the workplace.

TRIZ

Concurrent with Gordon’s work at Harvard in the 1950’s, a Russian researcher, Geinrich Altshullar, develop a powerful approach to creative thinking which he called the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (Teorija Rezhenifa Izobretalenhskh Zadach), which is shortened to TRIZ.(14)

Like Gordon’s work, and all of the synectics researchers, Altshuller started with the same observation that the challenge in creative thinking centers around moving past our normal way of perceiving situations in order to perceive them in new ways.Altshullar called this the challenge of overcoming “psychological inertia.”

Just as a chess master studies thousands of possible permutations of a game, Altshullar organized a massive analysis of innovations and inventions and concluded that they all fall into 40 possible categories, or creative principles.

Where Thomas Edison conducted 50,000 trials to invent the accumulator battery, Altshuller was looking for a methodology for minimizing the number of failed trials by enabling us to quickly harness an appropriate creative principle suitable to the situation to use to overcome our psychological inertia.

Ideas for creative solutions to problems that have low levels of complexity might be solved by the knowledge in one discipline, Altshullar hypothesized. Higher levels of complexity often require bringing in new and different ideas from other disciplines.

Altshullar recommended starting by defining the situation as one part of a technical system that keeps you from optimizing another part of the system. Situations can be thought of as contradictions where mutually opposing demands create conflict within a system. We start by stating what the contradiction is and expand our understanding by examining the widely used areas of quality characteristics put forward by Ishikawa – materials, equipment, methods, people and environmental conditions. With this information in hand, we then set about describing what we would like to see happen, defining the ideal state of performance.

With a statement of the contradiction to be resolved and a description of the nature of the contradiction and an understanding of what an ideal state of performance would be, people are ready to get down to creative thinking by utilizing one (or more) of the 40 creative principles that Altshullar identified. (15)Examples of a few of these are:

Segmentation -the principle of breaking an object into independent parts, such as subdividing a large room into smaller rooms. With segmentation, you seek creative ideas associated with splitting things apart, such as making it easier to disassemble. If an object or process is already somewhat fragmented, look at how it might be fragmented further.

Removal – the principle of separating one part of the process or equipment and putting it in another location. Remove a noisy engine and put it in a special area to minimize the noise.

Local Quality – the principle of having different parts of an item carry out different functions like the hammer that has a nail puller included. Look for ways to accentuate different functions in a process to obtain new results.

Asymmetry – the principle that jolts your thinking by telling you to change the shape of an object from symmetrical to asymmetrical. If it is already asymmetrical, increase the degree of asymmetry.

Merging – the principle that encourages you to brin objects closer together and to assemble similar objects, such as networking multiple microprocessors. With merging, you think about how you could bring objects together, such as developing medical instruments that can perform multiple tests at the same time.

For more detail on TRIZ, visit the TRIZ website at www.aitriz.org

(1) William J. Gordon. Synectics. Harper & Row, 1961.

(2) Geinrich Altshullar. Creativity as an Exact Science. Gordon and Breach, 1984.

(3) Alan Osborn. Applied Imagination. Scribners, 1953.

(4) A. Delbecq and A. Van deVen. “A Group Process Model for Problem Identification and Program Planning.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 1971.

(5) Bob King and Helmut Schlicksupp. The Idea Edge. GOAL/QPC, 1998.

(6) H. Gueschka et. al. “Modern Techniques for Solving Problems” in Portraits of Complexity. Battelle Monograph Series, 1975.

(7) William J. Gordon. Synectics. Harper & Row, 1961.

(8) Ibid.

(9) John Dew and Jane Johnson. “What Game Is Your Team Playing? Quality Progress, August, 1997.

(10) Edward de Bono. “Integrating Creativity, Innovation, and Total Quality.” Journal for Quality and Participation. September, 1991.

(11) Edward de Bono. Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step, Harper and Row, 1970.

(12) Roger von Oech. A Whack on the Side of the Head. Warner Books, 1983.

(13) Doug Hall. Jump Start Your Brain. Warner Books, 1995.

(14) Geinrich Altshullar. Creativity as an Exact Science. Gordon and Breach, 1984

(15) John Dew. “TRIZ: A Fresh Breeze for Quality Professionals.” Quality Progress, January, 2006.