What don’t people have the time for?

All ideas either solve problems or create opportunities (they can be seen as the same thing in many cases). If you are thinking about products or services, you could ask what things do people still do for themselves that they would pay someone else to do? Thirty years ago most of us still took our lunch to work. Now most of us buy it while we are at work. Thirty years ago most of us cleaned our car with a bucket of water on a Sunday morning. Now a big machine does it at the local petrol station. Or some entrepreneurial types do it for me in disused petrol stations and old car lots. Amazon understood that many people don’t have the time or inclination to go to a bookshop and has responded to that.

What don’t people like doing?

Think about some of the tasks that many people don’t like doing and how the creative minds responded.

• Searching for the best financial deals – so we go to websites that bring it all together in one search.
• Unblocking the drains – so we pay increasingly large sums for someone else to do it.
• Physical exercise – so we buy short-cut solutions that counteract the effects of lack of exercise – stomach-reducing belts, newly created ‘diets that really work’ and a variety of tablets.

What about your own customers or stakeholders. What annoys them? What annoyances do they put up with about the service or product you offer?

What is it impossible to do now …

… but if it could be done would fundamentally change the way we do things?

The routine of the present often blinds us to the possibilities of the future. Many people, with the rigidity of their ‘This is the way we do it’ thinking are disinclined to break out of conventional thinking modes. Asking this question will help you to make the supposedly impossible ‘possible’. If we all had the same view about what is impossible, very little that is genuinely new or radical would happen. Change the way you see a problem or opportunity, and suddenly the impossible becomes possible.

What if?

A classic trigger for idea generation is the ‘what if’ question. This could be in the form of a Miracle Question: ‘What if you woke up tomorrow and the problem had been solved. What would success look like?’ But it can also be stated in comparative terms. For example ‘What if walking into the reception at work was like walking into a forest after it had rained?’ You can start making connections with smell, ambience, peace, colour etc..

Why me? What can I offer?

Can you tell the truth about yourself truthfully? What I mean is – are you able to accurately define the things you are capable of? Most of us dramatically underestimate the things of which we are capable. And most of us barely begin to explore the extent to which we can stretch ourselves. Those that do report a remarkable level of personal fulfilment in their lives compared to those who just tread water.

The ‘mental dimmer switch’

Forcing yourself to come up with business opportunities can be counter-productive. We are often at our least imaginative when under pressure. Consciously disengaging from a challenge for a time can de-clutter your mind and return it to a more relaxed state. Think about when you have your best ideas? In the bath; on a bike; out walking; in the toilet? Probably not when you are at work and really trying to solve problems or create opportunities. Slowing down your mind can lead to solutions that a hard search may fail to find. It’s like the way you use a dimmer switch to control lights at home. Keep the switch on but don’t have the lights burning brightly all the time.

Although there is no ‘hard advice’ on how to have eureka moments, we do know that the relaxed mind is much more likely to have them.

Finite to infinite

Keep playing with your ideas – let them grow. Don’t just accept that what has come into your imagination is perfect already. The fact is that most ideas, when they get launched are very different from the time when they were first conceived. Explore and develop your ideas alone and with the support of others (Part Two which covers ‘risk’ has lots of advice on how to involve others).

One technique for this is known as idea ‘piggy-backing’. You can jump on the ideas of others, or your own, improving them, taking out the bits that don’t work, pulling out the risky bits and so on. Ask James Dyson how many prototype vacuum cleaners he developed before he went to market and there were many of them. It’s the same at work.

Premature criticism

You know how it feels when you hear ‘yes … but’ after you’ve made a suggestion. It’s hard to avoid the temptation to be an idea assassin so one of the dangers for you to avoid is to step back from criticising your ideas as soon as you have them. Save the analysis for later.

‘Yes … but’ often plays out as ‘Yes, it’s an interesting idea, but the reasons we can’t do it here are …’. There’s an assumption made that because the idea isn’t familiar or routine that it won’t work. It may not, but that judgement is better made later on.

What to do

Think about the things you have to do in your job. You can break this down as much as you like. Don’t just look at your job description – over time you’ll start to realise that your job description never catches up with what you really do. Then take a look at the description of each box below and start placing the different roles you perform in the relevant box.

The ‘no go’ box

This box contains things that really have little scope for change. All companies have safety policies (they have to by law) and you can’t deviate from those. We can’t break the law. Basic safety and legality issues cannot be compromised and will therefore remain in the ‘No Go’ box. But there will be others. If you work in a manufacturing environment there will be safety issues that are specific to your business. If you work in a law or accountancy firm there will be codes of conduct specific to those industries. If your job role relates to finance e.g. investment banking, there will be – or at least there should be if the lessons from the 2008 global crash have been learned – rules about what you can or cannot do. So, simply the question here is – does your idea break the ‘No Go’ box rule. In assessing risk, violating what’s ‘no go’ is not a good idea. If in doubt, check.

The ‘yes then go’ box

This box captures the parts of your job where you need approval before you can go ahead and do things the way that you want. There is more space for you in this box than the ‘No Go’ box but you will need to talk this through with others, particularly your manager. A lot of your ideas will fit in this box, particularly those ideas that impact on other people’s work.

The ‘go, then let know’ box

This is the space you have in your job to create ideas and then apply them without seeking permission to do so. At the start of your new job role it’s likely that very little will exist here, but over time, you should find that the space grows for you to both create and initiate without needing the approval of others to do so. You must be clear where the space is to do this and you should have a conversation with your manager so that you know you are free to do so. ‘Go’ means total freedom, though it is unlikely that you will have too much of this initially until you have earned credibility and trustworthiness.

Example: A good example of how these boxes work occurs in call/contact centres. For many young people working in this kind of environment is a first step in the world of work. In some contact centres a script is given that you are to follow at certain points during a call with a customer. You think you can say it better in your words so you make some changes so that you can be more authentic with customers … less like a machine. It may be that you can – and that your employer sees the script as a guideline. Here we have ‘Go Then Let Know’ or ‘Go’. However, there may be good legal reasons why certain things need to be said in certain ways in which case ‘No Go’ or ‘Yes Then Go’ apply.

Your score

• Over 80 per cent. Is it time for a reality check? If your score is this high, have another look at your strategy – have your really thought through the issues? Particularly people issues. What is the likelihood of success – is the idea a ‘big’ one in which case the likelihood of success will be reduced? But if, after this re-check you are sure then idea impact is likely to be high. If your idea is routine or mildly evolutionary i.e. a small incremental change then the impact will be as you want it to be. In reality any idea that involves other people is unlikely to score at this high level.
• 50-80 per cent. Any ideas with strong ‘big idea’ characteristics (see the next section ‘Idea size’) are unlikely to appear here unless they are based on an existing and highly successful idea. Smaller ideas, which involve others are likely to appear here.
• 30-49 per cent. Some of your bigger ideas will appear here if your strategy is as good as it can be (remember with bigger ideas there will be many unknowns so you just cannot apply a high score to ‘likelihood of success’ even if you have a great strategy).
• 0-29 per cent. This doesn’t mean don’t go ahead. It just means that to be taken forward, real leadership and a great vision will be needed.

Force field analysis

One of the comments that young people, full of enthusiasm, excited by new opportunities, make when they start a new job is that they find people more apathetic to their ideas than they expected. While it’s true that we all come across apathy from others at work (and the best organisations have the fewest people spreading the apathy virus), it may just be that they see the world differently to you and that what you see is apathy is just simply disagreement. One way of overcoming this, in advance, is to see that your persuasive arguments are merely one way of seeing the opportunity you have generated, but that there will be opposing arguments building a force against you. These opposing arguments are likely to come from others, but they could just as easily be things like budget restrictions and wider disruption your idea could generate.

The advantage of force field analysis is that you can either make the decision that the opposing forces are too strong or that if you work at the opposing forces e.g. strengthening your idea, using better persuasion techniques, reducing costs, that you increase the chances of success and therefore reduce risk. It’s a great way to identify weak points and work on them. So, how does it work? Here is a visual example, and following this is a description of what’s happening.

Example

One issue a lot of organisations grapple with is the overuse of email – people have stopped talking to each other. A 2-D idea you have had is to recommend an email-free day every other Friday, because you have a friend who told you that her employer has started doing this and it’s had some success. This isn’t a classic ‘entrepreneurial’ initiative but it’s a usual guide to the kind of thinking needed. So, you do a simple force field analysis to assess the strong/weak points in your own argument. It might look like this:

You will notice that there is a number beside each driver and resister. This score relates to the force with which each one either drives the result you want or acts against ‘resists’ the result you want. 5 indicates the strongest force, with 1 the weakest. Add up the scores on each side and see what the score is. In this case the score is 27–24 in favour, but clearly there are significant resisters, and you will need to address these before you decide to go ahead. Work on the highest score resisters to bring them down.

Empathy

People can be the greatest accelerators or the greatest consumers of your own energy. Taking a ‘we’ rather than ‘me’ approach – climbing into other people’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, wants and needs will significantly increase the power at your disposal to have ideas that succeed. You must listen and ask questions of others if you want to reduce the risk that others kill your ideas before they’ve got to the launching pad.

Questioning

Here are some examples of the kinds of questions you can ask as part of your people-centred approach:

• ‘I’m trying to do X. What are the key issues for you?’
• ‘How would this affect the work of your team/department?’
• ‘What would you like to see happening?’
• ‘How might this work for you?’
• ‘What do you see as the challenges?’
• ‘What do you think we could do to overcome this hurdle?’
• ‘I am trying to do “X”. What would you do in my situation?’
• ‘In your opinion…?’
• ‘You’ve had some experience of this. Has anyone tried to do something similar before? What happened?’
• ‘Can I be sure that I’ve understood you right? Are you saying …?’
• ‘I’d like to ask you more about that specific point?’
• ‘So, the key issues for you are …’

Listening

Some of the questions above are designed to illustrate that you have been listening to people and that you understand what they are saying. People need to know they have been heard. These are key points for you to remember when listening effectively:

• Be genuinely curious about what other people think and feel.
• You cannot listen properly if your mind is occupied with preparing a reply. Turn down the volume on your inner voice.
• Leave your feelings about others to one side – be neutral.
• Good listeners really listen rather than jumping on the first thing they agree or disagree with – so hold back until you have the full story.
• Try to relate what you say to the world of the person or people you talk to rather than your own. If you’ve asked questions and listened properly.