Back to School—Playing Out Effective Ideation at NC State

By Ty Hagler

Earlier this month, I had an opportunity to go back to school—no, not like Rodney Dangerfield in the 80s, but back at the invitation of one of my favorite professors, N.C. State’s Dr. Jon Bohlmann, as he brings a fresh perspective to the Creativity in Management course by anchoring it in the principles of Design Thinking.

Dr. Bohlmann, whom I consider one of the most engaging and influential teachers I’ve had, invited me to guide his masters-level students through real ideation sessions centered on both products and services.  Rather than simply talk about ideation, I wanted the class to practice it.  But first we needed to cover some core concepts.

Thus, for the first portion of the class, we covered insights from giants like Sir Isaac Newton, Malcolm Gladwell, and Tom Kelley.  In particular, we spent time to understand how Gladwell’s research into successful improvisation and the “Rule of Agreement” applies to the central tenets of design thinking as articulated by IDEO’s Kelley in The Ten Faces of Innovation.  It’s striking to me how the same principles that make for great improv actors, also make teams more creative.

We set up the context of ideation within innovation, to promote greater understanding and results from the coming ideation sessions. We used the Innovation Network’s definition of innovation—“teams of people, creating value through the implementation of new ideas”—as our launching point from that front.  And then we took our company’s definition of ideation—“the creative synthesis of a team’s collective insight into new ideas”—to leap headlong into ideation sessions around products and services.

For our ideation sessions, we built upon this foundation of positive, creative, collaborative thinking and discussed the difference between divergent and convergent thinking.  Divergent thought seeks ever more expansive opportunities, deferring judgment on each idea.  Convergent thought seeks to synthesize and analyze each idea to bring it to reality.  The trick is to delay convergent thinking until you are satisfied with the full exploration of divergent thinking.  We usually provide Nerf guns for defense against those who critique too early in the process!

We are constantly experimenting with new ideation techniques, and this class was a great opportunity to build on the good improvisation analogy with an exercise called Act-It-Out.  The activity was originally one of our Ideation Divergence Cards that had been rolled out earlier this year.  Act-It-Out was so effective at drawing out observational insights from our client ideation session as a mini-activity, that it made sense to create a full ideation exercise. 

The students were given a service challenge to act out in groups of four – with each student acting out a role from the service experience.  After identifying problems and prototyping a solution, the class came back together with an impressive, detailed understanding of the customer’s service experience and an equally impressive range of ideas for improvement.  In wrapping up the class, I wanted to know if the exercise had limitations, posing a theory that it would only work if the team members had direct experience with the problem area.  To the contrary, I was surprised when one of the students remarked that the Act-it-Out exercise was even better when some team members are experts in the problem areas and other team members have no experience at all.  That exchange of expressing expert assumptions and being challenged by novices perfectly captures the value of an ideation session to pull brilliant new ideas from teams of people to drive market success. 

The Importance of Visual Scribes in Ideation

By Ty Hagler

Some of the best work we do at Trig involves venturing out to companies and leading innovation teams in ideation sessions. I almost enjoy writing about this service as much as I do deploying it on behalf of clients and partners.

There’s almost nothing more exhilarating than being part of early-stage ideation sessions with organizations that you know have the human and financial capital to exploit the best ideas born from them. While the product design and development process as a whole can take months, sometimes years, depending on the industry and the product, great ideation sessions can provide the vision and roadmap for the product development portfolio. The ideation process itself generates multiple options for product managers to choose from as they plan the next several years of development.

From the time I entered the innovation management profession, I have interacted with many other business consultants and think tanks who also conduct ideation sessions, and I've been amazed at how these firms—many of whom are filled with individuals who inspire me in different ways—under-utilize visual scribes in these sessions.

A large component of industrial design education is learning how to communicate effectively through drawing and sketching.  We know from many scholarly critique sessions that great sketches can give ideas a competitive edge, to the degree where a poor idea with an awesome sketch can win out over a great idea that has been crudely drawn. It’s sad, but quite true, just as some companies with inferior products and services ultimately win deals through better salesmanship, marketing, or packaging.

Visual scribes pull from the industrial design discipline to quickly sketch out an idea during an ideation session. The imputed value of sketch quality simply cannot be underestimated, and it must drive us as scribes to ensure that our work outputs during sessions have a proper, balanced level of influence on our audience.  

As scribes, we have to be careful to evenly distribute the quality of our sketches during an ideation session to not overly influence the group's decision-making process. Thus, not only must we strive for a high level of communicative drawing, but we must ensure we maintain the same level of achievement on behalf of each idea expressed, almost as a lab control, so that our constituents can evaluate each idea within its own merit framework.

Great visual scribes are those who listen well and accurately communicate through their sketches, what they hear. If a scribe has done his job correctly, then an ideation team will be able to hold up the sketch as a rallying cry for the idea as they build critical mass buy-in with other teams and eventually across the entire organization. 

"The Pitch" - When a Win Isn't a Win

by Brian Castle

As we’ve expanded our work in the area of interactive marketing services for the companies we serve in other areas such as industrial design, ideation, and other aspects of product development, we often turn our admiring eyes on the work that other fine companies do in marketing, advertising, and public relations activities.

Recently, AMC, the network known for its 60s ad agency drama, “Mad Men,” launched a new agency reality series called “The Pitch.” While most reality television involves people who really shouldn’t be on television in the first place, the participants in “The Pitch”—creative professionals representing mid-sized agencies from across the country are offering a window into their intense, inspiration-fueled world where the next big idea can make or break a company’s future.

In the pilot episode, Durham’s own McKinney battled against a Los Angeles-based agency, WDCW, for a new piece of business at Subway aimed at getting 18-24-year-olds to eat breakfast.  In last week’s premiere episode, SK+G of Las Vegas battled the Ad Store of New York for the opportunity to rebrand global garbage giant Waste Management.

It’s readily apparent, in just minutes of watching, that these agencies are loaded with great talent. They’ve all won multiple awards for branding and advertising Fortune 500 companies and their products and services, and in recent years, they’ve flexed out their services to capture hearts and minds in interactive spaces across the internet, leveraging sites, video, animation, and social media.

What’s interesting to find at this level of the advertising/marketing world is how the high stakes and resulting pressure affect the creative culture of the respective firms involved in the series. While all of the agencies exhibit masterful levels of collaborative force in the end, they seem to all embrace a spirit of competition in order to get to a collaborative point to reach creative assets and deliverables.

More simply put, they seem to pit the sometimes willing and other times unwilling egos and personalities of individual people against each other.  In effect, they are transferring the high stakes and competition that the agency faces versus the opposing agency to their own creatives, forcing an internal battle of wills. The results of this stress transfer are telling—a slew of negative emotions, backroom meetings, and ill will toward colleagues viewed as obstacles between creatives grabbing a win for themselves, and, thus, the agency.

With every agency involved, it seems, the people are put at risk as potential collateral damage—someone always loses in a competition, after all—to the agency taking the battle. The individuals end up sacrificing their families, experiencing sleep and eating deprivation along the way, and souring existing relationships.  It should be noted that in the end, everyone seems okay, but as a viewer, you have to wonder about the obvious groundwork that’s been laid for heavy blows to self-esteem, team demolition (as opposed to team-building), and creative firepower.

We view all of these dynamics, of course, through our own lens at Trig Innovation, a place where we’ve carefully cultivated a set of values that we not only uphold, but are completely unwilling to sacrifice. One of those values, collaboration, is perhaps the one we hold most dear, especially as we think about our team and the individuals who are so critical to its success.

We’re not a group of Pollyannas who view collaboration on critical client projects—or internal projects that promote our company as walks in the park. The clash of ideas is often that—a clash.  We agree that tension has a place in the creative process—it’s natural that, in order to brew up a set of good ideas and distill down to the great ones, companies must require people to assert and defend their ideas with an almost assault mentality.

However, we all still have to remember that we’ll all be here, living together, working together, when each piece of work reaches completion. To that end, we require, with the same amount of force, a true spirit of fun and collegiality during the heat of battle.

We know from seeing several firms duke it out that high levels of tension in these types of organizations are almost allowed as “part of the game.” And we also know that there’s a potential in us not accepting that norm, that we may lose something in our work. If that’s the case, then so be it. But we like to think that our work is not only quite good, that it’s great. And it’s great because of the way we collaborate, taking the best inspiration from our people and from our clients. We think having fun, being collegial, and challenging people lift each other up—even during the hottest times of a battle for great ideas—is a winning formula.

See You at PDMA Innovate Carolina 2012

This week marks an exciting time for Trig Innovation, as we celebrate the expansion of our business through our presence and sponsorship at the Product Development and Management Association’s Innovate Carolina conference on Friday, April 20th.

An annual event of the PDMA Carolinas chapter, Innovate Carolina has quickly become an essential conference for us for a variety of reasons.  We routinely meet great people who help us expand our network of clients and service partners, and each of the sessions are informative and provoking, to the point where we always leave with new ideas to explore for the benefit of Trig’s clients.

This year’s conference is particularly special for us, since we are bringing a much bigger team of “innovation athletes” to intersect with product development professionals from across the Carolinas.  

During Friday’s conference, the Trig team will be talking to friends in product development, both old and new, about our dynamic and evolving set of innovation management frameworks:

•      Industrial Design
•      Ideation
•      Customer Research
•      Brand Identity
•      Interactive Marketing
•      Graphic Design
•      Patent Drafting
•      Animation
•      Video Production

We’ve come a long way since our founding almost five years ago as an industrial design boutique. While our expansion reflects a desire to broaden the scope of our work to challenge ourselves, we can look back and see that most of our own innovation has come from listening to our clients and demanding that we integrate new solutions to meet their needs.

This year’s conference has all of the ingredients to be even more successful than the high standards set by last year’s event in Charlotte and the previous year in Chapel Hill.  From all of us at Trig Innovation, we look forward to seeing you there.

Relating to Ideation--Part Two

In the first installment of this two-part series, we looked at how ideation yields powerful results that transcend particular industries.  In part two, we’ll take a look at behavioral differences that either drive successful ideation sessions or, in some sad cases, sabotage them. While in the course of normal social situations we may accept certain behaviors and even celebrate them, certain behavioral frameworks can run entirely contrary to the goals for effective ideation, leading to watered-down results that companies can’t even utilize post-session.

The Ethos of Improv versus the Devil’s Advocate

Great ideation emulates some human interactions and behaviors, while it eschews others.  For example, the best brainstorming sessions mimic the positive thinking and, better yet, positioning or opening up to thinking, as the world of improvisational comedy.

On the other hand, ideation sessions are increasingly hampered by the presence of Devil’s Advocate-type personalities, which basically run antithetical to the premise of ideation. Instead of a “let’s see where this takes us” approach, Devil’s Advocates tend to put the brakes on discussions where they fear the possible outcomes by cloaking themselves in this negative philosophical stance.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s, Blink, The Power of Thinking without Thinking, the author explores the art of improvisational comedy as a way to train one’s thinking in new directions. The most important rule of improvisational comedy is the idea of agreement.  In order to create humor, the characters must accept everything that happens to them and around them, by virtue of the actions and words of the other characters in the mix.

As Gladwell states, “In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action.  All the improvisation teacher has to do is reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers.  Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill.  Good improvisers develop action.”

Similar to the bad improviser who blocks action, someone who invokes the role of Devil’s Advocate can shut down the creative process. Tom Kelley discusses the role of these black hat thinkers, who are, in truth, the destroyers of innovation, in his work, The Ten Faces of Innovation.

“The Devil’s Advocate persona may be the biggest innovation killer in America today… It encourages idea wreckers to assume the most negative possible perspective, one that sees only downsides, problems, disasters-in-waiting,” Kelly states.  “By invoking the protective power of ‘Let me just play Devil’s Advocate for a minute’ the speaker is now entirely free to take potshots at the idea with complete immunity.  Essentially saying, ‘The Devil made me do it.’”

Ultimately, the Devil’s Advocate stops short.  In an ideation session, you need to balance constructive criticism based on a deep understanding of the problem with encouraging your team to move toward a better solution.