>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. My name is Amy Draves, and
I'm here to welcome Alan Iny to the Microsoft Research Visiting
Speaker Series. Alan's here today to discuss his book, Thinking
in New Boxes: A New Paradigm For Business Creativity, which I see
is actually named differently there.
So five essential steps to spark the next big idea.
>> Alan Iny:
The other one on top, right?
>> Amy Draves: Ah, perfect. Human brains really are not wired
to think outside the box. Rather, we need boxes or mental modes,
frameworks and theories to make sense of the world's complexity.
A strategy or vision help leaders interpret and simplify the
complex world in front of them. Alan Iny is the senior
specialist for creativity and scenarios at the Boston Consulting
Group. He has trained thousands of executives, runs workshops
and speaks around the world about developing a new strategic
vision for the future. Please join me in giving him a very warm
welcome.
>> Alan Iny: Thank you very much, Amy. Thank you all for being
here, and thanks to those of you who have joined online as well.
So let's check this first of all. What I'd like to do over the
next little while is share some stories. When I do use slides,
you'll find that they're hopefully the
not the typical Boston
Consulting Group slides, anyway. Put it this way. Not the
typical consultant slides. I'm going to show you some pictures,
some cartoons, some visuals, and I encourage questions in
whatever way or time you feel like. And then more time for Q&A
at the end. But if something's really burning, don't hesitate.
So let's start with some quick questions for you. Go for the
audience engagement right up front. He's chuckling already.
That means I should be warned. What is the probability that five
years from today, September 19, 2018, the amount of air travel in
the world is 95 percent less than today?
probability?
>>:
What is the
Very small.
>> Alan Iny:
Very small.
>>: Zero.
>> Alan Iny: Zero. Okay.
this is good warmup. We're
it's September 19, 2018 and
air travel has gone down by
How did this happen?
>>:
Different question. We're getting
getting warmed up now. Assume that
this has come to pass. Assume that
95 percent since five years earlier.
A new way for transportation.
>> Alan Iny: A new way of transportation, like teleportation,
something like this, okay. What else?
>>:
Quantum computer.
>> Alan Iny:
Quantum computer.
>>: Carbon taxes.
>> Alan Iny: Carbon taxes, right. Carbon taxes because energy
got so expensive and only the richest five percent can afford to
flying some like that. Something different.
>>: Terrorism.
People are scared.
>> Alan Iny: Terrorism. People are scared to fly. 95
people
are so scared to fly because there have been a lot of terrorist
attacks. Something different?
>>:
A pandemic.
>> Alan Iny:
different?
>>:
A pandemic, a bird flu or something.
Something
Star Trek becomes reality.
>> Alan Iny: Star Trek becomes reality, yes. Or, more simply,
there's just sort of game changing new, you know, 3D Skype type
stuff that, okay, or teleportation, I don't care. Any of those.
That's fine. All right. So how long was that? About a minute,
minute and a half? We just came up with five or six hypotheses.
I'm not going to try and weigh how likely any of them are. We
don't have to go back into the probability side. But we can
agree, surely, that those two questions were fundamentally
different in terms of the way you had to think. The first one,
very deductive, logical, analytical. What is the probability of
something, and you drew upon your knowledge and your intelligence
to just spit out a number. Zero or whatever other number.
The second one, more inductive, more ambiguous. I gave you a
situation and invited you to make something up. That was the
invitation to be creative, really, and you came up with a bunch
of options very quickly using inductive thinking. Okay. So
we'll come back to that. We'll come back to that. Let me ask a
different question now.
Welcome, welcome, come on in.
Completely different question.
rainbow.
How many colors are there in the
>>: All of them.
>> Alan Iny: So some people start whispering, their immediate
reaction is seven. Seven, you know, that's what my five year old
niece would say, seven. Yes, of course. But okay now you say
all of them because there's a lot of people here who know about
physics and white light and refraction and infinite number
okay, yes, fine. Correct.
So when of those answers actually is correct?
>>:
Clarify the question.
>>:
What was the purpose of the question?
>> Alan Iny: What was the purpose of the question? See now
you're the one sounding like the consultant. That is good,
though. Okay. So both of them. Yeah. So seven, the way I see
it, is a simplification that many of us have in our minds because
we were taught it in kindergarten or whenever, which is a useful
simplification of the model of physics. Okay. We'll come back
to the rainbow.
Something completely different. Last warmup question. Have you
been to Greece and seen the Parthenon? Any of you? Have you
seen the Parthenon? Okay, good. Maybe a third of you have been
there and seen. So those of you who have, and those of you who
haven't, because I haven't, by the way, so Parthenon, even if you
haven't been there, you can imagine in the acropolis, a Greek
temple in Athens, top of a hill. You can still have an image in
your mind, right? Whether you've been there or not, you have an
image of the Parthenon, yes? So everybody focus on this image,
look at it for a second. How many columns are there in front of
the Parthenon?
>>:
Six.
>>:
Seven.
>> Alan Iny:
>>:
11.
Other guesses?
16.
>> Alan Iny: 16. There's an interesting thing.
said, and depends on why you asked the question?
Eight, somebody
>>:
What was the purpose of the question.
>> Alan Iny:
>>:
That's true too, yes, yes.
Now or when it was built?
>>: Now or when it was built. Well, happily, never mind the
rainbow, we're done with that, but there are actually eight along
the front of the Parthenon, and it looks like the same number as
when it was built. So here's another answer. It doesn't matter.
Unless you happen to be a Ph.D. in antiquities or a tour guide in
Athens, it doesn't matter how many columns there are in front of
the Parthenon. And let me pull this all together and explain
what I mean with all of these warmup questions.
So in the world, in front of us, we have our company, our life,
our customers, our competitors, everybody who uses our products,
everything. The entire world in all of its complexity and
uncertainty and randomness and all the rest call this the world
in front of us, and all we do all day long is take this and
simplify it into these mental models within us so what I'm about
to start calling boxes.
So these mental models, these boxes can be very, very simple ones
like the rainbow has seven colors, ROYGBIV, or Canadians are
nice, or whatever you want. Right? Anything very, very simple.
It can also be more complex ones like a market segmentation or a
strategy or a model of accounting or the model of what we think
about freedom or democracy, anything. All of these are mental
models that we use as working hypotheses as concepts to simplify
the world in front of us.
Now, the rainbow, if you think about it, which we saw, it's
exactly the same thing as a market segmentation because the
market segmentation takes, you know, 300 million customers in the
U.S., or 6 billion in the world on that side, and turns it into
five segments or seven segments in the same way that the rainbow
has an infinite number of colors coming into seven in our model.
The Parthenon as well is an example that most of these mental
models we have are slightly fuzzy. You know, we have a pretty
good image of the logo of a company or a picture of the Parthenon
or whatever the case may be, but if I ask you to describe the
specifics of the logo of a company or how many columns there are
in front of the Parthenon, it doesn't really matter. Your
picture was still good enough for most of your day to day life,
unless you happen to be a tour guide there, because all we do in
our day to day life is actually use these models as well. In
other words, we spend a lot of time coming one these models in
the creative process and then using them, using a market
segmentation or any of these other models to go about our day to
day.
Now, let me give you two or three examples just to try and cement
this a little bit. One may be from a daily life and then a
couple from the business world. So imagine that you see a couple
walking down the street. A man in his mid 50s, you know, well
dressed in a suit, gray hair, carrying a briefcase, yeah? And
with him is a woman who is also elegantly dressed in a dress with
a handbag, but she's quite a bit younger so late 20s, maybe early
30s, something like this.
So you see this image in the world in front of you. You cannot
help but immediately, in one millisecond, come up with a box,
come up with some working hypothesis for what these
maybe you
see them, and they say, oh, they're two colleagues walking on
their way to a meeting. Or this is a husband and his second
wife. Or I don't know what it is. Whatever it is, and we can
have different, different versions of it, different boxes among
all the people in this room and online, but whatever it is, you
can't help but see this image in the world in front of you and
then come up with a box.
And over time, maybe if you see them later in a restaurant and
you see that, you know, they're looking over some printouts of
financial stuff together and you say, oh, I was right, they're
colleagues on their way to a meeting. Oh, I'm wrong, they're
probably not spouses after all. And then at the end of the meal,
maybe she said thank you, daddy, or something like that.
Whatever it is, we keep going round in this circle as we get
it's the scientific method. As we get more information in the
world in front of us, we update our working hypotheses. We
change our boxes all day long, and this is a cycle of developing
new boxes and using our boxes. And there's very, very simple
terminology here for what these arrows represent. Deduction and
induction. And most of the time, like when I asked you what is
the probability of something, like air travel going down 95
percent, most of the time we draw on our existing knowledge.
We're asked a question something like that. We use deduction to
immediately spit out an answer. But then the second question I
asked you before, imagine this has happened, imagine a scenario
here how did we get there? That was inductive thinking. That
was the invitation to be creative and come up with something new.
So you're with me so far. I see some nodding. Let me give you a
business example to try and cement it even more. One of my
favorites. Bic. I don't know if that pen you have in your hand
is a Bic pen or something else, but Bic, I think, most of us
know, B i c, well known French company. Most of us probably
think of it now as a company that makes pens and lighters and
razors and a lot of other plastic objects. But for their first
30 years, they only made pens. They were founded in the mid
'40s.
So imagine now that it's the '70s. And they are having a
creative session because they want to come up with new ideas for
growth. And for 30 years, they've only made pence, right? So
the executives of this company gather together and they're coming
up with new ideas. And, you know, one of them says, for example,
oh, we can make these four colored pens. I have this idea for
what we can do. It's a fine idea. Oh, very interesting. Okay.
And somebody else says, well, we can make erasable pens, because
the properties of this new thing I've been working. Okay, good,
fantastic.
And maybe we can make pens that say, you know, Sheraton or
Marriott or Microsoft on them and sell them to places like that.
And then suddenly, somebody else says, we can make lighters or
razors, right? So first thought, what is the natural reaction of
everybody else in the room? What? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we are a
pen company. We are a pen company. You're crazy. You have a
fever. You should go home early. Whatever it is.
But with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight, we know that these
ideas really opened the door to a lot of new possibilities for
them. So what had to happen? Because here's a hint as to what
had to happen. Bic did not invent the cheap disposable plastic
razor. Gillette was already doing that. Bic did not invent the
lighter either. This already existed. In other words, what I'm
trying to say, nothing changed here. Nothing changed in the
world. They did not invent anything new in the world. The only
thing that changed was on this side of the equation, meaning in
here.
All they had to do was change their box from we are a pen
company, at which point lighters and razors are completely stupid
ideas, to we are a disposable plastic object company, at which
point they're completely logical ideas and they make eminent
sense. And this fundamental change in their mental model, in
their box, opened the door to all sorts of new possibilities
without coming one a single new idea.
Creativity does not need new ideas. Looking at existing ideas,
looking at your company differently, changing the way you look at
something is often sufficient to open the door to a lot of new
possibility. So that's one story. The Bic story. And we can
come back to it a bit after.
But I want to tell you another one, lest you think that the idea
of changing your box, of thinking in new boxes, of changing the
way you look at things only applies to the big existential
questions like the grand vision of a company. We are this, we
are that.
So I give you at example just from last week. On the day the
book launched, nine days ago, I went across the street from my
office in New York to a coffee shop, and at the register, instead
of a tip jar, as is often present, there were two tip jars,
actually. And in between the two tip jars there was a piece of
paper that said
there was a question on it. Which TV family
do you prefer? The Huxtables from The Cosby Show, with an arrow
pointing to this tip jar, or the Tanners from Full House, and an
arrow pointing to this tip jar. And I thought to myself, this is
a new box. This is amazing. This is a new conception of what a
tip jar can be. Because if you're thinking the way I was
thinking, you realize that this is a question that maybe people
feel very strongly about, and so they're more likely to leave
tips. It's fantastic. It's a new box for the tip jar.
So
and by the way, the Huxtable jar was much fuller than the
Tanner jar. So I asked the ladies, this is interesting. Can I
take a picture of this? So I took a picture and I tweeted it and
then I went and sat down. But then I came back up, and I started
talking to them some more, but since I'm a consultant, I was very
curious about what this actually meant. And they told me, you
know, they change the question every day, and they try and come
up with questions where people will feel very strongly, like it
was the U.S. Open in New York last week. So the day before, the
question had been, you know, who's the greatest ever? Federer or
Nadal? And people have a strong opinion. So they want to, you
know
and they said that the tips increased by 50 percent since
they instituted this new thing. It's amazing.
So I tell you this because to me, it's an amazing example of a
new box. These people could have gone through life with the old
box of, okay, a tip jar is something I put here. But instead,
they reconceived it. They came up with a fantastic new box. It
happened to make a huge impact on their life, on their take home
pay, and it was a brilliant thing affecting their tiny little
slice of the world. So it doesn't have to be the grandiose
vision of a company which many of us, quite frankly, are not
able, at least in a big company, are not able to impact directly.
But you can do it to change something in your particular group, a
particular problem you're facing, a midlife crisis, whatever it
is. The idea of changing the way you look at something, coming
one a new box to interpret the world in front of you, can have
dramatic impact on whatever the particular issue is.
So then, of course, the obvious question is, okay, how do we
think in new boxes? How can we come up with these types of
solutions? And since the book, which many of you already have
and others of you is at the back, since this book is meant to be
a mass market business book published by Random House, there are
happily five steps, five practical steps for how to think in new
boxes. And so what I'd like to do now is take you through each
of them one by one and, in so doing, I'd also like to address one
of the biggest issues that I see whenever I talk with people in
the corporate world, which I do a lot at BCG, which is basically
if I ever ask a group of people
we could try it now
how
many of you have, in the last, I don't care, six months,
participated in some form of creativity exercise or a brainstorm,
right, almost everybody says yes. Almost everybody's done that
in some way.
And then when I say how many of you have been unreservedly, 100
percent delighted with the results, nobody's raising their hand
anymore. Right? So this is a common occurrence. It's
absolutely not you. To me, this has to do with the way
creativity sessions are set up. You know, people have this
perception that all you need to do is gather five smart people
together in a room and have a bunch of flip charts or Post Its
and a plate of cookies and say, all right, we need to grow. We
need to cut costs. We need to solve this, solve that. Whatever
it is.
right?
Think outside the box.
Come up with a lot of ideas,
People jump straight into that, and they do come up with a lot of
ideas. You wallpaper the whole room with flip charts, and yet
nothing really sticks, or the ideas don't really hit home or get
it's not useful. It's not practical, and the claim I'm going to
make and try and give you some suggestions toward fixing is that
really, this concept of the way it's done now is not sufficient,
which is one of the reasons we wanted to write the book.
So the five steps. First step, doubt. Now, doubt has a bad rap.
A lot of people think doubt is a bad word. You know, we want
leaders who are confident and assertive and who can make a
decision. And that's fine. I don't object to any of that. But
I also think doubt is critical for the following reason. If we
accept the fact that all of these boxes that we use are working
hypotheses, are strategies, all of these models are simply that,
they're working hypotheses, which means they're subject to
change, just like in the scientific method, if we accept that,
then it means we have to doubt. We have to remember to challenge
them sometimes. And yet, as human beings, we don't like doing
that. We like having a routine, sticking to the same boxes, take
the same route to work every morning, looking at the monthly
report with the same logic every month, and we don't like having
to doubt, having to challenge our perspectives.
And so if we accept that all of our ideas are just working
hypotheses, then we have to doubt them because we don't see the
world as it is. We see the world as we are. We see the world
through our own lenses. And the first problem with that is that
we all use boxes to look at the world, and they're subject to
change. The second one, of course, is that we all have slightly
different ones. So even if we all think Bic is a pen company, we
might have slightly different approaches. And if we need to
change our boxes, then you'll find that, you know, maybe the head
of manufacturing might need to be convinced differently than the
head of sales or the CEO. Maybe the head of manufacturing, when
they think about going from pen company to disposable plastic
object, they say, okay, well, we know how to get the plastic and
if we just tweak the machine a little bit in the process flow,
okay, I can see it. Whereas the head of sales needs to look at
revenue projections and so on. And maybe the CEO has a very
emotional connection to the pen box because he founded the
company 30 years before.
So we all see the world through our own lenses, and even if these
boxes appear to be the same, they're not always. And this quote
is not mine, it's from the philosopher, Immanuel Kant,
paraphrased a little bit. We don't see the world as it is, we
see the world as we are. And this is Immanuel Kant's favorite
cartoon.
So we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.
So what do I mean by that? What do I mean by actually doubt,
doubting everything? Basically, we have to identify the current
models that we are using to look at the world, to the extent we
can. You know, this is the way we do things around here. We're
a pharma company, and this is way we do R&D. We're a defense
contractor, and this is the way we work with the government.
We're Microsoft, and this is the way we package and sell our
products. Whatever it is, identifying some of the current ways,
the current boxes you're using, and then thoughtfully challenging
them. Recognizing, for example, that we cannot always go with
our gut, go with our instinct, even though most of the time, it
does lead us in the right direction.
You know, when we come up with these new ideas, these new
potential boxes, we have a very natural tendency to say, oh,
that's a crazy idea. The boss will never go for that. We tried
something like that a couple years ago. The customers will never
accept this. But how do we think about our customers? How
what boxes do we use to define our competition? What boxes do we
use to look at the data that's in front of us? The more we can
identify and thoughtfully challenge some of these mental models,
the better off we will be and the more likely to get practical
results. That's what I mean by doubt.
And I'll give you a couple of visual examples just to illustrate
this as well. This is one of my favorites. It's in Chapter 3 of
the book. What do you see?
>>:
A picture upside down.
>> Alan Iny:
A picture upside down for George W. Bush.
>>: A metaphor for the economy.
>> Alan Iny: Well, let me give you
let me save you the
trouble, actually, of going like this. Okay? Because all of our
minds immediately, and I've seen this 300 times or something, all
of our minds immediately say this is George W. Bush upside down.
But to save you the trouble, look what happened. So somebody has
photo shopped the mouth and the eyes so that it is a deformed
image of the former president. So now a couple of points
>>
Can you go back?
>> Alan Iny:
I'll go back, yeah.
>>: Okay.
>> Alan Iny: It's a very interesting thing, actually. Because
first of all, to your point, you can do this with Obama or
whoever you want as well, right? This is not meant to be a
political statement. But more than that, and more relevantly,
the interesting thing is that over and over, every time I see
this, you're seeing it now for the second time, and when you open
Chapter 3, you'll see it for the third time. I'm seeing it for
the 100th time. I still, my mind immediately says, oh, it's
George W. Bush upside down, okay, great. Fine. And I move on to
whatever other thing. But the brain is lazy. Even when we know
that it's been photo shopped, the brain is lazy when it processes
information. It always goes for the simplest possible solution.
Now, to be clear, most of the time, the brain is correct when it
jumps to conclusions. Most of the time, in fact, this is an
amazing benefit of being human, that Microsoft and IBM and many
others have spent billions of dollars trying to replicate, right?
I mean, if you think about Watson trying to replicate the way the
human brain works or even the early chess playing computers,
whatever you want. There have been so many companies like you
who have spent a lot of time and effort trying to replicate the
way the human brain works. And yet, sometimes it leads us
astray. Sometimes we need to doubt our initial instinct.
Another example. What's this? Now you're not answering because
you think I'm trying to trick you.
>>: Right, it's a tricky number.
number.
It's almost like a B can be a
>> Alan Iny: Good point, quite right, because most people would
immediately say 12, 13, 14. And yet, if I show you this, most
people would immediately say A, B, C, and most people would not
say A, 13, C, or 12, B, 14. Okay. What's the point? Again,
there are multiple correct ways of interpreting things. And lest
you get confused and think this is only silly visual tricks, I'll
give you a couple examples from business, because it's really
important.
Let's take the annual report of a company. Like Microsoft or any
other. You have the annual report. You open it up. What's on
the first page? Letter from the CEO, basically. Letter from the
CEO, right?
>>:
President.
>> Alan Iny: Yeah, the president, something. I'm going to
oversimplify, because that's what I do, and I'm going to tell you
there are only two possible letters from the CEO that could
appear on this annual report. I'll tell you what they are.
Number one, dear shareholders, we have had excellent results this
year thanks to some solid strategic decision making, blah, blah,
blah, blah. Letter number two. Dear shareholders, we have had
disappointing results this year due to the recession, terrorism,
volcanic ash, all this other stuff that was outside of our
control. We're going to do better next time.
So are you ever going to have a letter that says dear
shareholders, we've had great results this year because we were
very lucky and we hope that
or, you know, dear shareholders.
We've had terrible results this year because we made some pretty
stupid strategic decisions, but give us another chance. We
promise we'll do better next year. No.
And yet, all of the data, all of the subsequent pages of the
report could be exactly the same, and you could have
fundamentally different interpretations of this. That was a
caricature, of course, an over simplified example. But when you
get a report of customer research or competitor intelligence or
the latest industry trends, when you get this kind of stuff,
again, there are multiple correct ways of interpreting all of
these facts. There are multiple ways to interpret this kind of
information, and the more we doubt, the more we challenge our
perspectives and allow ourselves to look at it in fresh ways, the
better.
So that's what I mean by doubt. Now, another cartoon showing a
lot of different contexts. That one took me a few seconds when I
first saw it. And here's one more, which actually is relevant to
the corporate world, and what often happens to so many of us.
What it says at the bottom, I'll read it. This really is an
innovative approach, but I'm afraid we can't consider it. It's
never been done before. So imagine your boss comes to you and
says, hey, all right, we have this big problem. We really need
out of the box solutions. We need fresh solutions. And you come
back to they are three days later with all sorts of ideas, and
they say, oh, this is great. Can you just give me some
benchmarks of where this has been done before so that we can
justify it? Right? It's very real. To doubt our initial
perspectives, like this boss, is the hallmark, the first step,
really, towards creativity. And it's the step that is most often
skipped when people jump straight into a brainstorm without
actually thoughtfully preparing. Okay. So the good news is I
spent a lot of time on doubt on purpose because I think it's the
one that's really important that a lot of people skip. I'm going
to go quickly through the next few.
The idea of exploring is to recognize that all of these ideas do
originate in terms of what we get from the world. And so it's
quite useful for your creative process to gather a set of inputs,
and these can take the form of, you know, the trends in your
industry, all the stuff I said before, the customer research,
competitive intelligence, network analysis, whatever you want.
Gathering all of that is good, as long as you remember to keep
this atmosphere of doubt alive, and that is illustrated through
this cartoon where at the bottom it says just checking. Just
checking, no matter how much data you have, no matter how well
you try to predict the future, there will be surprises. We will
not have perfect information, and there are multiple ways of
interpreting the same information. So yes, gather all the data
you want. We're in a world where people, especially in business,
like to make decisions based on data. But take it with a dose of
doubt. Take it with a grain of salt. And this is also another
reminder of that in terms of thinking about the future. When we
think about the future, there will always be these things that
people have called wildcards or black swans, which are the high
impact but unanticipated events, like the volcanic ash. Or, you
know, in the world of development, like Bill Gates announcing one
day that he's giving all his money to charity. These are the
sorts of things that are high impact, generally unanticipated to
the masses, at least, but really change the world.
And so taking all of that, we also know that no matter how nicely
our bar graphs purport to predict the future, no matter how much
information we gather, we will never be able to do it properly.
There will always be uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in the
way we think. And so given that the world in front of us has all
of this uncertainty associated with it, we have to recognize that
we are not good at it, and there's a lot of quotes like, you
know, Margaret Thatcher saying I don't think there will be a
woman prime minister in my lifetime. And, of course, seven years
later, she, you know, she proved herself wrong.
There's no shortage of quotes like this. Albert Einstein once
said, you know, there's no indication that energy will be
obtainable from the atom in 1932. Again, 12 years before or ten
years before, depending how you count. So a lot of people, no
matter how smart, by the way, no matter how brilliant a CEO, have
quotes like this that, you know, purport to say, you know, we
have no idea what's going to happen in the future. Remember
these. Remember that we cannot do it. We have to explore with a
dose of doubt.
Then the good news, the next steps, divergence and convergence.
After you have doubted and explored the world in front of you
with a dose of doubt, then you can go into divergence and
convergence mode, and this is what most people think of as the
classic brainstorm, the problem is they start here. But this is
the classic so divergence, get a lot of ideas on the table, Linus
Pauling, double Nobel Prize winner, says the best way to have a
good idea is to have a lot of ideas. And frankly, as long as you
set your criteria in advance for what constitutes a good idea,
which is another area where people often fall down on the job,
because if they don't set their criteria in advance, then once
you've come up with a lot of ideas, you're instinctively drawn to
the ones that fit the boxes you had before.
But if you set your criteria clearly in advance, like we need
ideas that implementable within less than six months or cost less
than X or are consistent with our brand potential, something, I
don't know what, if you're very clear about constraints and
criteria up front, it's a good thing. So you get lot of ideas on
the table and then you converge. This is what we know how to do,
the selection process, the prioritization.
Now, one of the most frustrating things in the world is when half
the room is in divergence mode, getting a lot of ideas on the
table, and the other half is in convergence mode, systematically
shooting them down and picking them apart. It's frustrating for
these guys and it's frustrating for those guys, right? And so
remembering that there's a time for divergence and a time for
convergence both are important, but not at the same time. And
it's also an interesting thing to think about, you know, some
people might be naturally more divergent type thinkers, right.
And so people more naturally convergent type thinkers. And this
is an interesting thing when you think about your teams and
leveraging people.
And, indeed, there were scientific studies about, you know, some
of the great partnerships of all time, you know, Hewlett and
Packard or Rolls and Royce and even one of the teams in that list
was Bill Gates and Paul Allen, right. I'm not going to come here
and talk to you about those guys, but the idea that in all of
these sort of pairs, that there was one who was generally the
more divergent type, at least the way it was seen, and one more
the convergent type. Taking advantage of both of these can be a
really fantastic thing.
So again, a time for divergence, getting a lot of ideas on the
table. Thomas Edison to me exemplifies this. Please?
>>: So when you say set your criteria in advance, it sounds like
to me, limiting the box. We're a pen company and here's how in
advance, and we're not going to evaluate ideas outside of that
box. How is that different than setting your criteria in
advance?
>> Alan Iny: I'm glad you asked, actually, because people often
go into a brainstorm or something and say, you know, we need to,
you know, no constraints. Blue sky. Everything's on the table,
right? And I actually don't believe in that. I actually believe
that constraints can be very helpful for creativity, because if
you know in advance that you need less than this, more than that,
fit with this, whatever it is, then why not state it and then the
ideas that you eventually come up with through all of these
creative approaches will actually fit with those constraints and
be much more likely to be practical and implementable.
That said, your point is well taken that we need to still allow
ourselves to doubt and allow ourselves to challenge what's
binding us. And so what that boils down to is we all use
thousands, millions, probably, of boxes. Taking the time to
identify them and then figure out which ones of these constraints
and assumptions we are actually willing to break, and many of
them we won't. We can't change them all at the same time. There
are some constraints that really are binding, and some that maybe
if we challenge them, they're not.
So Edison, again, you know, when he was on the verge of the light
bulb but had been working on it for a lot of time and a reporter
asked him, you know, are you ready to give up, and he said no. I
must be about to succeed, because now I know 999 ways that it
doesn't work. This is what it is. This is what the divergence
mode of getting all these ideas on the table is.
And for me, one of the really interesting things about Edison is
as follows. You know, with this incandescent electric light
bulb, before that was invented, how did people make light? How
was light created?
>>:
Chemical reaction on container
>> Alan Iny:
>>
Chemical reaction on
[indiscernible] I think it was called.
>> Alan Iny:
Before the light bulb.
>>: Yeah.
>> Alan Iny: Yeah, but also oil, fireplace, wood, candles, yes.
All of these. Basically, you created light by burning something.
Fair to say? Over generalization, as always.
Afterward, right, in the incandescent light bulb and the
scientists know more about it than me, but basically there's a
filament, and the idea is that the current goes through it and
the filament heats up and glows and so on, but it doesn't burn.
So basically, you create light by preventing something from
burning. It's a fundamentally new box, kind of like the shift of
the pen company. And before that shift happened, you could have
a lot of incremental innovations. You could improve your oil or
improve the type of wood you use or
and afterward, you could
too. You could try different things for the filament or
different types of glass. And these types of incremental
innovations can be very good ideas, by the way. Nobody is saying
that the four colored pen and the erasable pence and all these
things are bad ideas. They're just nod transformational ideas
that forced you to change the box. Two bladed razor, three
bladed razor. iPhone 3, iPhone 4, iPhone 5. You know, these are
not as transformational as the original razor or the original
iPhone, if you see what I mean.
So again, when you do this kind of creative session, you'll have
no way of knowing apriori, up front, which are the more
incremental and which are the more transformational ideas. Both
can be valuable and profitable, but it's the transformational
ones that really require you to change the box. And also, you'll
have no way of knowing which are the good ideas and which are the
bad ideas up front. All the more reason to allow for divergence
and then narrow things down in the convergence phase. And
there's a lot of questions in Chapter 5 and 6 that can help you
with that. There's also a lot of them online and all over the
place.
How to get a lot of ideas on the table by challenging your
perspectives. And so, you know, if you're trying to cut costs,
put yourself in the shoes of Ryanair or Toyota. How would they
do it? How would Disney improve the situation for our customers?
What if we had billions of dollars to do a joint venture The New
York Times? How would I have approached this problem the day
after I graduated from college? How would my grandmother think
about our company? Things like this. Changing perspective.
Trying new analogies. All of these are useful techniques to get
quantity, to get a lot of ideas on the table.
Now, fifth, last step, reevaluate. No good idea is good forever.
And this is a very simple scientific thing for me, because if the
world is constantly changing, there's no doubt about that, and
our ideas, our boxes are relatively fixed. So at some point,
every box will be out of date. And this can be any good idea,
the Model T Ford, the iPhone, penicillin or anything else will at
some point not be good anymore. And so it's a question of do we
proactively foster doubt and challenge our perspectives and try
to come up with the next big thing, or do we wait for someone
else to do it, at which point we have to play catch up because
the world has passed us by. And so those are really, to me, the
two over simplified but still the two choices.
I give you a couple of demonstrations of this. Imagine I'm
building something piece by piece here. And I've just added the
first three pieces. Now, before I add the fourth, just like the
two people walking down the street, your mind has created a box
of what it is that I'm building. So what is it that I'm
building?
>>:
The floor plan of an apartment.
>> Alan Iny:
else?
>>:
H.
The floor plan of a building, yeah.
Something
>> Alan Iny:
>>:
The letter H, capital H, yes.
Something else?
A maze.
>> Alan Iny: Okay. Three perfectly reasonable possibilities.
Let me add the next piece. What happened? So if it was the
floor plan of a house, okay, it can still sort of be
and if it
was the maze, it can certainly still be a maze. But if your box
was that I was building the letter H, I forced you to update your
working hypothesis. I forced you to change your box. And this
is, again, a quick visual example. So you didn't really care too
much. But what ended up happening is in a split second, when I
added that extra piece, you suppressed an urge to run up here and
say no, no, no, that's not how it goes. And then you quickly
changed from an H to a maze or something else. And moved back to
whatever else your mind was doing. All of that in a split
second. I think.
Because we don't like it, actually, when we have to change our
box. We don't enjoy the process. It's
you were probably even
if you had an H in your mind, you were probably, for a split
second, annoyed with me for forcing you to change your box. But
then you got over it really quickly because it doesn't really
matter and so on. But in the business world, it can be hugely
impactful, and a great example is Henry Ford and the Model T.
You know, Henry Ford was an amazing entrepreneur and innovator
and, in fact, the whole reason it was called the Model T is
because he started with A and kept trying different things,
right? It's true. But what happened afterward? This car, he
invented the assembly line, he improved the undercarriage. It
was the first mass market car. Fantastic. It sold 15 million
units and so even today, it's one of the best selling cars of all
time. Amazing.
But then what happened? You know, the world kept changing around
him. General Motors started making higher end versions and lower
end versions and blue cars and different colored cars and Henry
Ford famously said at that time, my customer can have any color
car they want, as long as it's black. He went into denial. He
fired people for coming to him and saying that they should
change. Because in his mind, the box was still the Model T is
the future of our company. It's the future of the automotive
industry. He refused to adapt, and it's just a reminder of no
matter how smart or innovative or brilliant a person, we are all
human beings, and we all have to push ourselves sometimes to
reevaluate, to go back to the beginning and start doubting again.
Surviving success can actually be just as difficult as succeeding
in the first place, as a lot of companies know very, very well.
So there is good news, however. And the good news, I'll give you
again in a visual
yes, we don't like it when we have to change
our perception, but the good news is this. Now this is not a
piece of modern art. There is hidden in here a perfectly
symmetrical, elegant, five pointed star. Just shout out or raise
your hand or something when you see it. Okay. You see it.
Okay. Imagine that it's
imagine that this picture is divided
into four quadrants. Which quadrant is the star in?
>>:
Upper right.
>> Alan Iny: Upper right, okay. So divided into four, it's in
the upper right. Does that help? Okay. Somebody else sees it,
somebody else, somebody else. Another one. More people are
nodding. People are helping their neighbors. And now people are
nodding even though they don't see it because they don't want to
be left out and they
okay. But look, here it is, first of
all. This is the one you saw, I'm sure. And now everybody sees
it. But look, if I take it away, you can't really not see it
anymore. So even though we don't like it when we have to change
our boxes, once we do, there is no going back. Once we realize
that we can be more than a pen company or that we can change our
perspective on what a tip jar is or anything else, there's no
going back, which is an amazingly helpful thing and a consolation
after the story of Henry Ford and the Model T.
So let me give you one more story, and then we'll jump quickly to
Q&A. Reuters. You know the company Reuters. If I asked you to
describe the business they're in, you'd probably say, you know,
news delivery or stock price delivery or something like that,
yeah? So they were actually founded in 1851 by Julius Reuter, in
Prussia, now Germany. And what was their original box at the
time? Well, it was news and stock price delivery. It was
exactly the same 160 something years ago.
Mostly, at the time, between the United Kingdom and Europe, back
and forth across the English channel. So how did they do it
then? They had a fleet of carrier pigeons. They had several
hundred carrier pigeons that were carry the news and the stock
prices. And the reason this is such a fantastic example, in my
mind, of reevaluation is because, you know, for Reuters, in order
to stay exactly the same, in order to keep doing the same thing,
they had to change from carrier pigeons to the telegraph to the
radio, to satellite
there was telex somewhere in and
satellites and internet and high speed fiberoptic cables. The
point is in order to keep doing exactly the same thing, they had
to fundamentally reinvent themselves six times. And, of course,
at each stage of the game, you know, there were let's test this
thing out but not get rid of the pigeons just yet. Let's try it
out. Oh, there's some competitors. Maybe some of these guys
will go bankrupt. I mean, it's not to be taken for granted that
they were able to reinvent themselves over and over and over
again. This, to me, demonstrates an amazing capacity to
reevaluate and change and is an example of the fact that, again,
there's two choices. Either we can reevaluate proactively, come
up with the next big thing and transform our company, like Bic,
or keep doing the same thing, in which case we're also going to
have to fundamentally transform ourselves, which is kind of
what's happening in the book industry or in the newspaper
industry or a lot of industries, quite frankly. Trying to find
new ways to sell books and all the rest of it.
So at the end of the day, reevaluation, to me, is so important
and Reuters is a fun example. So let me leave you, then, with
one last thing. You know, this goes back to doubt, right, and
we, as human beings, have this amazing capacity, even with half
of the word hidden, to be able to look at this and realize that
it says be creative. Right? And yet, you know, if you imagine
Watson, the jeopardy playing computer, you know, it would
of
course, it does it quickly and it would have to look at it and
explore all the possible combinations and what might it say and
then eventually, 98 percent probability that it says be creative.
But we have this amazing ability to just jump and in an instant
see that.
And so my message to you, my hope is that you will find ways to
continue to challenge your boxes and look at things in fresh ways
and to be creative, which starts with doubt. It starts with
doubt. It starts with doubt. Be creative but always doubt. So
with that, thank you very much. You know now where to find me,
how to track me down. There's also things like LinkedIn and all
the rest of it. So don't hesitate. For those of you who have
already got the book, I hope you enjoy it and I'm more than happy
to sign it. And for those of you who haven't yet, you can. But
again, thank you so much for having me on campus and let's talk
if you have questions. Let's go through them.
>>: So in organizing a session, trying to create new ideas,
trying to [indiscernible], how do you sort out, like how do you
do you bring in the right kind of people who have the kind of
doubt everything, or do you set the context in some way that,
hey, we need to doubt all the analysis we have?
>> Alan Iny: Well, I think that setting it
first of all,
setting an environment where people feel comfortable doubting is
really important. And that means a culture where you can take
creative risks and where you can challenge each other regardless
of hierarchy, things like that, absolutely help. But for the
actual session itself, once you've established that culture, to
me, you know, since we are all humans and since we are all, you
know, business like and so on, it's different than a regular
meeting. And the idea of a warmup exercise or something can
really be valuable. I'll tell you one of my favorites, just to
get people in the right frame of mind, you know. Try and
describe your company without using the most obvious words. So
take Starbucks, just for the hell of it.
If I ask anyone on the street to describe Starbucks, they'll say
it's a chain of coffee shops or a coffee shop or something. But
if I ask you to describe Starbucks without using the words
coffee, tea, snacks, or meeting place, I'm imposing constraints
on you. I'm forcing you to think about it differently. Now
people will say, oh, Starbucks is the world's largest office.
Starbucks is a massive renter of real estate. Starbucks is
yuppie headquarters. I don't know, whatever you want.
And then, when you're getting warmed up like this, okay, maybe
the world's largest office thing really piqued something in you
guys. So maybe you want to start selling pens, like Bic. Or
maybe you want to install printers and sell printing for a dollar
a page or maybe in select Starbucks' locations you want to
install conference rooms in the back and rent those out. These
might not be good ideas, by the way, but the best way to have a
good idea is to have a lot of ideas. So I'm just throwing a lot
of things out there, and it's a fun warmup. There's a lot of
other ways to get people in the right frame of mind.
Here's the prizes for asking good questions.
Anything else? Please.
What else?
>>: So the [indiscernible] were industries which sort of just
adapted. I mean, [indiscernible]. Do you have any thoughts
about areas where the whole industry is [indiscernible] when a
whole industry disappears so basically not just hold on and view
the existing revenue sources [indiscernible].
>> Alan Iny: Good question. And for the benefit of those
online, I'm going to paraphrase it, which is what happens
you
know, Bic started with pens and expanded and most of the common
examples are like that. But what about other situations? What
about when your city is dying and you're trying to figure out
what to do. And Borders went the way of the dinosaur while
Barnes & Noble survive. And so on and so forth.
So a couple of thoughts. Yes, Bic is the most common example in
terms of expanding in that way. But I give you the example of
Dannon. If I ask you Dannon, it happens to be French as well,
Dannon. But Dannon, if I ask you what you think of them now,
you'll probably say yogurt and baby food and water and health
food type stuff. But originally, well, forget originally.
Before that, they were in the business of just creating good
quality food. They were more like Nabisco or General Mills.
They just had a whole bunch of food things. And then they
decided to focus on the food that's good for you. Instead of
good food, they switched the box to food that's good for you.
They sold their beer division. They sold their cookies division,
and they focused entirely on this stuff.
So that's just to say that it doesn't have to be expanding like
Bic. It can be contracting or anything else. And then more
broadly than that, in terms of dying industries, right, to me, at
the root of your question is where do the next transformational
type things come from, because either they can come from the
Fords or whoever else from the world, or they can come from, you
know, Hewlett Packard in their garage or Zuckerberg in the dorm
room or whatever you want. And it feels like those latter types
are very common, although there's probably examples of both.
So let's take NetFlix as an example, because they, you know,
Blockbuster, in theory, could have changed from this box of DVDs
in a store to DVDs by mail. There was nothing remarkably
there wasn't really some new technology, other than switching
from VHS to DVD, but it wasn't NetFlix that invented that. They
were just taking advantage of things.
And so Blockbuster, by virtue of being a big company, in some
ways was stuck in this existing box and trying to maximize this
and maximize sales per square feet and all the rest. And they
got blindsided by this brilliant new box. Maybe if they had
doubted a little bit more they might have enabled themselves to
come up with it.
So NetFlix went along, millions of subscribers in this DVDs by
mail box. Fantastic. The world keeps changing around them, and
now there's this whole streaming thing coming, right. And
NetFlix decides oh, we're going to split into two for a streaming
business and the mail business. And this, of course, was a
debacle. They lost a lot of money. They were a little bit too
early, basically.
They recovered, and now yet another new box, who would ever have
thought that a company like NetFlix would do original television
programming? Right? So it's to me about reevaluation, and it
can come from you or it can come from some young upstart. But
it's up to you, in a sense.
>>: Just being aware, not being in denial.
>> Alan Iny: Doubt and reevaluating, which is my way of saying
the same thing, yes, quite right. Please.
>>: So couple things. Two questions, kind of related. One,
looking at Kodak, that's recently made one of these shifts. Kind
of what do you think, how do they think they got to where they
are. And then we've talked about sort of making the shift, but
not then following through on it. Do you have sort of thoughts
on what Kodak needs to be aware of and needs to do to continue
through with the new direction they've taken?
>> Alan Iny: So I confess that I don't know enough about the
very recent stuff about Kodak to give an intelligent answer.
But, you know, the fact of them being late to the whole digital
game is to me another example of, you know, having one's lunch
eaten by upstarts, right, in the photo business and struggling to
play catch up once the world sort of partly passes you by.
And I think
I don't remember if there was bankruptcy or not,
but there was certainly a huge financial dip when that happened.
And then, but I don't know enough about the company specifically
to say much more. Forgive me. Please.
>>: Okay. So you praise a lot of ideas to go to one ideas. That
[indiscernible] challenge or [indiscernible]. Do you have any
technique how to go from lots of ideas to one idea?
>> Alan Iny: Yeah, so the idea of convergence, of going from
lots of ideas down to one or three or five or seven, I mean, this
is
there's a lot of selection processes, but whenever I'm
doing a brainstorm or creative type thing, I do find that there's
a lot of different ideas. Like if you look around all the flip
charts that people put up ideas on the wall, there's a lot of
apples and oranges. There are some ideas that are very, you
know, oh, wow, this one we could implement with a team starting
tomorrow. It's very clear, we should just get on with it. And
this one, oh, it's an interesting possibility, but it needs a lot
more research and needs to be more fully baked and so on. So
there's often different categories.
Once you agree on what the criteria and the constraints are for
individual categories, then there's a lot of ways of doing it.
The simplest is to vote. The simplest is just to ask people, you
know, what are your top two in this category and your top two in
that category and see how people feel. Or maybe, in a more
dictatorial place, the boss will just decide. Or maybe you can
do a secret vote or you can ban people from voting for their own
ideas to force them to think a little bit differently. Or you
can give everybody four votes instead.
But at the end of the day, I don't know any way other than just
choosing and deciding.
>>: There's a governance process generally that comes in to play.
>> Alan Iny: Yeah, exactly. Whatever it is, that's what it is.
There's a question from online as well.
>>: Online, we have one person write strangely, in my experience
[indiscernible] more conscious effort at weighing the options.
How do you find the right balance?
>> Alan Iny: Yes, I agree with you. And just to paraphrase the
question, for those who couldn't hear, it was, you know, people
who doubt everything are known as downers. And how can you
actually be a good manager if you're just doubting everything and
second guessing everything and so on. I think that's the gist of
the question. And what I tell my clients, because it's a fair
question, is always doubt but never hesitate. In other words,
you have to always doubt, because all of your boxes are just
arrived the by induction. They're working hypotheses, everything
we've seen. So you have to be willing to challenge them at the
right time. However, a manager who is only doubting and
constantly second guessing everything and never making a decision
is not a recipe for success. And so once you do make a decision,
you implement it. Off you go, you know. The machine is broken,
we fix it. You know, you can't hesitate always doubt but never
hesitate when it comes time to make a decision. And if you need
to reevaluate it and go around the circle again, then that's what
you do. But you do have to make decisions as managers. There's
no doubt about it. Please. And I'm sorry I have no more of
these things.
>>: That's the only reason I raised my happened.
>> Alan Iny:
I can mail you one.
>>: Excellent. Okay. So let's say that we take this new
information that we've just learned from you today and we go to
our next meeting at 3:00 and we go through this process and you
have a healthy discussion and implement some of the things and
some of the five sets that you talked about. And with doubt,
there's oftentimes resistance. So when everyone knows that this
is a great idea, but the decision maker, let's say it's in your
manager in that case, how do you bring people on board whom are
resistant to going in this direction of being able to think about
creating their own boxes that have never been seen before?
>> Alan Iny: To paraphrase, I'll repeat the end of your
question, which is how do you bring people on board? You know,
if you're ready to doubt and ready to jump in and so on, how do
you bring your manager and others along with you? And to me,
that boils down to you remember what we were saying before about
the different Bic people, where the, you know, the head of
manufacturing has this box for this reason and the head of sales
needs to see that and the CEO needs this emotional connection.
The more you actually understand where people are coming from,
which may have to do with their incentives or their culture ask
or how long they've been there or whatever else, but why they're
holding the boxes that they are, to me that's at the heart of the
answer. Because if you actually say, all right, let's identify
some of these constraints, this is the way we've always done it.
This is the way we've always thought about our customers. This
is
and you are ready. You're willing to challenge one or two
of those constraints and really think about the customers
differently. But your boss isn't. Why is that? Is it because
they are about to change jobs in three months and don't care? Is
it because they're the ones who implemented the previous customer
model and so they're kind of attached to it and it will make them
look bad if you come up with a better one? Or whatever it is, to
try and understand which boxes others are holding and why is the
beginning of bringing them along for the ride.
At the end of the day, you know, just like it's reasonably well
known that you can't force somebody to go on a diet or stop
smoking unless they actually want to jump in and doubt, you know,
you can't force somebody to doubt and to change their boxes, but
you can help. You can try and bring more information, try and
understand where they're coming from, and try and make a
difference in that way. Okay. I think one more. You had a
question? No. Okay.
>>: There is one more. Is doubting everything going to slow the
organization down by doubting everything?
>> Alan Iny: That is an interesting question. Will it slow the
organization down by doubting everything? You know, I'd like to
think that maybe with a short term view, it might. If you
actually take time to sit with a blank sheet of paper for half an
hour, yes, it will slow you down by half an hour. But to me, the
impact and the results of doing so are well worth it. The idea
of challenging your perspectives and looking at things in fresh
ways can open so many new doors that the actual half hour it
takes in terms of slowing things down or whatever
it may be
more than a half hour
is well worth it.
So let me pause there, because it's 2:40, and I know others
I'm happy to talk individually. Happy to sign. Whatever you
guys want. But thank you again for having me. I enjoyed talking
about it. Thank you.