Project Management in the Age of AI: Interview with Ben Royce, Google

Tom Jaques and Ben Royce interview

Project Management in the Age of AI: Interview with Ben Royce, Google

During the recent 12th Annual International Project Management Association Global Research Conference, Tim Jaques, Founder and CEO of Teaming Worldwide, sat down with keynote speaker Ben Royce, who leads business development efforts for Google’s Cloud AI Services and is a lecturer of digital transformation and AI at Columbia University. 

During the fireside chat, Tim, who serves as President of the Member Association for the United States for the international association, and was also the General Chair of the conference, and Ben discussed the role project management in the age of AI; whether project management roles will changes as more businesses opt in to utilizing artificial intelligence; how AI will change certain functions within project management; and what new competencies may evolve as AI becomes more and more a part of how we do business. 

Click here to watch the quick five minute video with Tim and one of the AI industry’s best of the best.

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Ready to learn more about assembling effective innovation teams, Intentional Innovation®, and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect.

Visit www.teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

Are You a Disruptor? Find Out Here!

Colorful foosball table

Are You a Disruptor? Find Out Here!

This is the first in a series of deep dives into the Innovation Team tasked with making your business truly (and successfully) innovative.

About Innovation Teams

Team composition is a critical success factor when developing a new innovation. Many initiatives go off target before they even start because the team members were misaligned from the beginning. I remember, on one occasion, meeting with the Chief Digital Officer of a mid-sized hospital system who lamented  that his big ideas always ended up smaller and less impactful. He blamed the outcomes on the process, but as we will see, the root cause was actually team composition. More recently, I had coffee with the CEO of a medical startup that was developing a solution for running patient drug trials. She shared that her team was enthusiastic about their solution, however, when they would do investor pitches, the concepts tended to flop under pressure. Why was this, she asked? 

These two examples highlight the trouble that innovation teams get into, but also provide clues to the path forward. When we are faced with building a team to solve complex problems, we have our “go-to” methods for team selection. Whether based on comfort, familiarity, or falling back on what has always been done, it is easy to default to certain groupings, even if the mix of members isn’t quite right. The least impactful tends to be the “friends and family” team that comprises work pals, even if they may not have the right blend of skills for the task at hand. Team members in this arrangement often have thinking profiles that resemble the team leader, and therefore don’t offer much in the way of differentiated problem solving. 

Many organizations erect cross-functional teams, which are composed of team members across a range of disciplines, so you have a blend of perspectives at the table. While variety can bring diversified solutions, this tactic can also fall short because it doesn’t take into account the creative or critical needs of advanced problem-solving. Still, other organizations assemble teams based solely on skills or expertise. These tend to be tilted toward a group of individuals who are so skilled in their particular field that their biases and critical filters can be insurmountable, which may also lead to suboptimal outcomes. An example of this frequently occurs in healthcare, where we often see a technology bias in innovation, which creates an invisible barrier and can stall out innovation. 

To explore teams more deeply, and how best to assemble them to achieve your innovation goals, we can begin by looking at the types of innovations that bring teams together. 

Innovative Ideas Happen along a Spectrum

Not every idea is going to reinvent an industry. In fact, new ideas occur along a spectrum, usually driven by the mandates of the organization. If we are seeking to make the current solutions in the marketplace obsolete, we will naturally strive for innovations that require bigger risks and deeper R&D. Other times, we may be looking to protect our market share or capture more margin. These types of innovations are lower risk and the impact is much smaller and less differentiating. 

At Teaming Worldwide, we utilize Intentional Innovation®, a commercially proven innovation operating system designed to simplify and implement higher-performing, longer-lasting solutions that drive growth, new revenue streams, and deeper customer engagement. Through this lens, we’ve identified four basic innovation types, shown below. 

hi-lo graphic

Consider the impact that different innovation types have on a team. If you are going to build big, leaping innovations, you need a team that is biased toward game-changing ideas that can blend big future states with managed risks. On the other hand, if you are protecting your marketspace, you will need a bias toward concrete ideas, strong planning processes, and predictability. 

So how do you put together the right team with the right mix of skills to bring about the right outcomes? Keep reading!

People Solve Complex Challenges Differently

When it comes to team building for innovation, variety is truly the spice of life. When we create cognitively diverse teams, we seek to find individuals who problem-solve in fundamentally different ways and, therefore, ensure a team with a blend of critical thinkers, creative thinkers, and individuals who switch back and forth between the two. As such, Cognitive Diversity is overwhelmingly the best method for building effective and efficient innovation teams because it brings the right blend of critical and creative to the table, allowing for ideas to be created and improved.

In order to create a cognitively diverse team, we begin by looking at an individual’s Thinking Profile and determining which of the six profile types they possess. Each type is defined by its tendency to problem solve using critical or creative thought patterns, and each of the six profiles uses a unique blend of critical and creative thinking for advanced problem solving and is plotted accordingly on the following graphs.

Six Thinking Profiles

The work we undertake for clients building out their innovation teams is to plot our Thinking Profiles on a simple graph. The x-axis measures low-to-high creative thinking and the y-axis measures low-to-high critical thinking. Each of the six profiles is positioned on the chart to represent its unique blend of critical and creative thinking.

chart of thinking profiles

Criticals, Creatives, and Switchers

When we plot these innovation Thinking Profiles, here is how they come out:

As shown in the graphic:

  • Stabilizers and Optimizers lead with critical thinking, using analytics to inform and build out their strategy. 
  • Differentiators and Ideators lead with creative thinking, using imagination to create and distinguish ideas.
  • Evolvers and Disruptors switch back and forth, with Evolvers tending to lead with critical thinking and Disruptors leading with creative thinking to create and problem-solve ideas. 

My response to both the Chief Digital Officer and the Start-Up CEO was somewhat the same: 

  1. The team is the vehicle that creates greatness in our organizations. 
  2. Getting the composition and chemistry right is an ongoing practice that we should be striving to improve every day. 
  3. Although everyone uses both critical and creative thinking every day, each profile has a more dominant trait that they prefer to lead with when faced with a challenge. We must honor that to get the most out of our teams. 

 

 

With the right balance of Thinking Profiles, teams can evolve over time, learning when to rely on one type of thinking or another. 

Up Next in the Series

Hero Tasks. Bringing out your genius and resilience in your innovation teams. 

All Call to Action

Ready to learn more about assembling effective innovation teams, Intentional Innovation®, and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. Visit www.teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

Ready to Launch? De-Risk Your Big Ideas Using an Implementation Series

Rocket launch

Ready to Launch? De-Risk Your Big Ideas Using an Implementation Series

Corporate innovators beware – your leadership team is not ready for your big idea. Even if your innovation program is robust and you are designing big solutions, it is important to realize that your organization may not be willing to implement the significant changes required to jump directly to a big investment. Finding ways to de-risk your innovation while proving business value is paramount. Therefore, corporate leaders need a stepwise approach that has pivots, exit ramps, and scaling options built in. The most effective tool to build consensus around a long term investment is the Innovation Series, from Intentional Innovation.

The Innovation Series

The Innovation Series creates a way to advance big ideas while minimizing the risk and uncertainty involved in bringing those ideas into fruition. This systematic, results-proven series creates a clear, well-defined path to your Future State concept from where you are today. The Innovation Series is not a project plan. It is a build-out of the incremental innovations that will help you evolve from the present day to the Future State. It allows you to show results along the way while giving you the choice to modify or pivot from upcoming launches. Its intent is to minimize risk, not lay out the project plan.

To do this, you start at the end by writing your Future State in the last arrow. Then, you consider where you are today based on your Portfolio View and your Innovation Assets, building a path or series of incremental launches to help get to your Future State.

Here are the fundamentals of the Innovation Series: 

Flow chart for Innovation Series
  • First, the Innovation Series is populated with  three or more identified launches leading you to the disruptive Future State. 
  • Next, each launch is incrementally calculated so that you aren’t taking giant leaps into the future, rather moving with intention and with less risk. The goal is to make the first launch as easy for the organization to say “yes” to as possible. 
  • Finally, and perhaps most importantly, at each of the launches, the value proposition improves to transition your existing customers to the subsequent launches while bringing in more customers with your iterative improvements.

Ready to use the full template? Click here.

Replication and Ideation

In order to build out the best path forward, you will rely on replication and ideation to create three different Innovation Series for each Future State. The goal is to understand all the possible ways to reach the Future State and what the core value proposition may be for each Innovation Series.

For example, one Innovation Series might increase the range of products or services offered to your customers. Another might increase the channels or means of access to the product or service as it expands your customer base (e.g., from offline to online).

Creating three different Innovation Series helps identify which series will be the most feasible, the most appealing, and have the highest potential to produce high growth and lead to the Future State. Sometimes, two or three of these Innovation Series might naturally merge into one.

Once you have laid out the areas you want to explore with each launch, you next must explain how each launch evolves toward the future via these areas. The Value Proposition; Products, Services, or Segments; and Launch Essentials are three areas that must evolve.

So, as you can see along the top row, we improve the value proposition with each launch. We do this in order to keep customers engaged and to continue to increase growth by meeting customers’ needs and offering them something that they do not have. The second row shows the products, services, or segments that are delivered in order to meet each improved value proposition. Here is where the different elements that are required to keep the initiative moving across each launch are listed. The final row lists launch essentials, where you can expand on what critical infrastructure pieces the initiative will need at each launch. 

Taking big, big ideas off of paper and into practice can be a daunting task. With big risk, comes big reward – but with de-risk, can come quicker progress and achievement. 

All Aboard

Ready to use the tool? Get it here, and schedule a discovery call today to find out more about working with our team.

 

Thinking Outside of the Cubicle: Unleashing Creative Genius at Work through Team-Based Creativity

cubicle farm

Thinking Outside of the Cubicle: Unleashing Creative Genius at Work

Cultivating workplace creativity is no easy task. It is most stifled by a rigid organizational culture that discourages unconventional ideas or limits freedom of expression. But even if a business is totally on board to foster an environment that supports creative thinking, various factors can make it challenging to get to that state. These roadblocks might run from the pressures of meeting deadlines, achieving targets, and focusing on immediate outcomes to time constraints and very real fears of failure. Moreover, lack of adequate resources, limited opportunities for collaboration and brainstorming, and a lack of support from leaders can further hinder creative thinking. 

So how do you get from wanting to encourage workplace creativity across teams to living those values? Promoting workplace creativity requires a conducive environment that values experimentation, encourages diverse perspectives, and provides the necessary resources and support. Your first step is to make making change the priority. And that’s where we come in

Team-Based Creativity

Team-Based Creativity is a five-session, hybrid training series that puts workplace creativity in the spotlight. The course covers topics such as building and fostering creative environments; building team trust; creating big future states; understanding cognitive diversity; developing disruptive ideas that lead to huge breakthroughs in innovation; and maintaining teams that operate at the highest levels of efficiency, collaboration, and creativity.

During the customized, collaborative series, participants will:

  • Understand the characteristics of high performance innovation teams

  • Learn how to recruit and develop the right talent for your innovation team

  • Develop a clear innovation strategy and identify areas for growth

  • Create an environment that fosters creativity and experimentation

  • Develop effective communication and conflict resolution skills

  • Learn best practices for managing innovation projects, including agile methodologies and design thinking

As with all of our training series, Team-Based Creativity is designed to equip you and your teams with the knowledge and skills necessary to foster a culture of innovation and help drive further growth within your organization. And, we do it all while having serious fun. An enjoyable, fun, and creative training environment creates a safe space where participants are encouraged to disregard any fears of making mistakes, in the name of collaboration and innovation. Engaging with our teams through thought-provoking, results-based, and fun training activities is what we’re all about. And, we’re here to provide that to you and your colleagues too.

All Aboard

We delivered dozens of Team-Based Creativity training sessions in 2023 and are offering a steep, one-time BOGO discount in the month of February for new clients ready to help ignite the creative process that drives innovation (and revenue) within their organization. Schedule a discovery call today to unlock the deal!

 

Intentional Innovation® Powered by Teaming Worldwide

Intentional Innovation® is a commercially-proven innovation operating system designed to simplify and implement higher-performing, longer-lasting solutions that drive market disruption, new revenue, and deeper customer engagement.

Ready to learn more about Intentional Innovation® and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. Visit www.teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

Steering around Organizational Roadblocks to Innovation: Are Your Leadership Mandates Clear?

Steering around Organizational Roadblocks to Innovation: Are Your Leadership Mandates Clear?

When starting innovation, it is often best to begin by gaining an understanding of what roadblocks exist in your organization today. We have two ways to classify roadblocks: (1) some roadblocks are mandates. These are things you can’t change. And, (2) others are barriers. These are things you can change.

Mandates and Barriers

Mandates take the form of leadership directives, whether they are spoken or unspoken. An example is the statement, “Our charge is to drive productivity to the bottom line.” Although it might not be 100% clear, this statement declares that this organization’s focus is on incremental innovations. It does not care to disrupt the world, and we can determine that the appetite for innovation is very limited.

Barriers, on the other hand, are resolvable issues. An example is this statement: “It’s hard to wrap our arms around innovation. We just don’t know where to start.” This is something that can be resolved with new answers, better answers, or proof based on the unique situation leading to the issue. As the bubble graphic here shows, there are nine major categories of barriers for innovation: some easier to manipulate, and others are much harder to transform. The good news for barriers is that they can be assessed, analyzed, and mitigated. 

chart

Clarity and Communication

 The best resolution for mandates is clarity and communication. You need to get clarity on what leaders mean in their statements, and provide them with examples and be sure everyone is on the same page. Then, communicate that mandate widely and clearly.

The goal of a strong innovation process is to equip you with new answers and proof points to help you resolve barriers and achieve sustainable and substantial growth.

Going deeper, in order to understand leadership mandates, you must have clarity on what your leadership’s commitment to innovation is. With this understanding, you will know how far you can go with your innovation strategy. And this hierarchy helps you understand the different mandate possibilities and their impact on innovation.

Attributes chart

Leadership Commitments, Legacies, and Impacts

Most leaders have a low commitment to innovation and are primarily interested in harvesting and protecting the products and services the organization provides today. This means you are pretty much allowed to innovate at the margin level (e.g., operations) but not much further. The legacy and impact of these types of leaders on the world is pretty minimal.

As we go up the pyramid in this illustration below, the leadership commitment to innovation increases, as does the leader’s potential to leave a legacy and a lasting impact. However, there are fewer leaders open to these increasing levels of commitment. Let’s take a closer look at the key takeaways from this graphic:

  • Leaders who are focused on improvements allow innovation at the product and service level. As such, these leaders are most open to innovation that makes better versions of what already exists.
  • The leaders who are committed to transformation allow innovation at the category level. These leaders are open to changing their industry and the way things are done. And these leaders are open to big ideas.
  • At the top of the pyramid are leaders who are committed to disruption. These leaders want to change the world and the ways things are done, no matter the industry. Additionally, we know that these leaders are very open to big ideas and do not have much tolerance for small ideas.
  • Leaders with the highest levels of commitment to innovation will, of course, leave behind the largest legacy and impact since they are open to not only disrupt the industry, but also the world. 
Pyramid

Conclusion

Keep in mind that each of these approaches is legitimate. Not every leader is equipped for disruptive change. But, by understanding where your leadership falls on the innovation spectrum, you will have a clearer idea of what kind of innovation strategy you’ll have license to pursue moving forward.

All Aboard

Ready to learn more about steering around organizational roadblocks and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. 

Intentional Innovation® Powered by Teaming Worldwide

Intentional Innovation® is a commercially-proven innovation operating system designed to simplify and implement higher-performing, longer-lasting solutions that drive market disruption, new revenue, and deeper customer engagement.

Ready to learn more about Intentional Innovation® and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. Visit www.teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

Assessing the Risks of a GenAI Implementation

Abstract image depicting AI

The year 2024 promises to be the full unleashing of Generative AI (GenAI) with industry- and company-specific solutions popping up like boom towns during The Gold Rush. Innovators, product leads, and project managers need a new vocabulary and more sophisticated implementation models to address these novel technologies. While we are learning a lot about GenAI implementations today, as with anything that is state-of-the-art and new concept, one thing remains the same. And that is with new promise comes new risk. Read on for early predictions on potential trouble spots, starting with large language models (LLMs). 

The Rise of Large Language Models

GenAI projects rely on an LLM, which must be trained to provide the types of insights and responses needed. As more industry- and company-specific LLMs are deployed in 2024, we will see a need for deeper contextual cues and rules to ensure that the GenAI model is delivering the way it should. GenAI will be able to drive new insights in all aspects of corporate operations. This will include strategy, sales, manufacturing, resource management, customer delivery, and support. We will see shifts toward complex automation in core corporate planning actions like supply chain management, portfolio management, governance, and more. Also in 2024, there will be a new raft of projects and products based around GenAI.

The teams charged with working on these will undoubtedly be a mix of professionals possessing either or both experience and technical acumen with AI. As such, businesses engaging in GenAI will need to be clear about the big ticket risks of these systems. Below are six risks to be on the lookout for, along with my recommendation for two new project team roles to help you better safeguard your business in this brave new world of GenAI. 

Looking around Corners: Six Potential Risks with GenAI

  1. Data Privacy and Security. Perhaps the biggest risk in a Generative AI environment, the use of sensitive data in a large language model presents a need for continuous testing and refinement. For example, data security in a financial system is non-negotiable. As such, building in the learning-based contextual rules around an AI-enabled FinTech product or system must be priority #1.   
  2. Process Automation Validation and Integration. Deploying Al requires rigorous testing to ensure outputs improve process outcomes and don’t introduce new risk or work. For example, does a new AI chatbot cause an uptick in call volume? 
  3. Data Availability and Quality. Getting the data right in an LLM is dark magic, and should be iterated. Inadequate data hinders training and performance of Al models. Conversely, large and diverse datasets challenge the organization with privacy concerns. Likewise, biased or incomplete data can lead to inaccurate outputs, exacerbating disparities. 
  4. Investment and Return. Today, GenAI solutions are the purview of large tech companies and startups, although that is rapidly changing. For the Great Middle — traditional companies that see the potential and promise, but must shift and adopt AI — there is a bell curve of adoption. Those who adopt early will realize great leaps in their productivity and the value they deliver to their clients. However, cost is paramount, and as we know, developing and implementing a GenAl model requires substantial resources. These resources include researchers, clinicians, infrastructure, and high-quality data to name a few. As these costs come down over time, more companies will dive into the LLM market. 
  5. Ethical Issues. Creating the right accountability and explainability for a GenAI’s output is important. As LLMs evolve, they will be driving decision making, policy, and eventually will be creating new knowledge themselves. A lack of transparency for how Al arrives at its decisions may lead to deep mistrust and deteriorate brand loyalty. 
  6. Regulatory Approvals. Change comes hardest to the industries that need it the most. Implementing a GenAI platform that requires regulatory approval can be both complex and time consuming. In the world of health tech, for example, new precision medicine algorithms are leveraging LLMs for customer-facing guidance. The FDA and other regulators require extensive validation and evidence of safety and efficacy — and rightfully so. So, plan for these actions early and work closely with the regulatory body to ensure proper compliance.

Two New Roles To Consider in Your GenAI Implementation:

  • LLM Trainer. This role would be assigned early in the project, and the individual would be responsible for working with the AI platform to build the context-sensitive use cases. This role will prove to be critical for the translation of neural algorithms into actual user inputs and outputs.  
  • Prompt Engineer. This would be a customer-facing role that would help your users to get the right types of responses from the system, especially early on. These resources should be assigned at the outset and ramped up before testing begins, so they can understand the strengths and weaknesses of the system.   

We are all learning new things at a rapid pace in this novel environment, so we wish you patience and sanity in 2024 (and perhaps a bit of reassurance knowing more about what to look out for and who to hire to help keep watch). Happy LLM training! 

A Call to Action

Want to learn more about healthy stakeholder engagement and how Teaming Worldwide can help your company take the guesswork out of innovation? Visit teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com for more info.

Intentional Innovation® Powered by Teaming Worldwide

Intentional Innovation® is a commercially-proven innovation operating system designed to simplify and implement higher-performing, longer-lasting solutions that drive market disruption, new revenue, and deeper customer engagement.

Ready to learn more about Intentional Innovation® and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. Visit www.teamingworld.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

An Innovation Leader’s Quest for Credibility

An Innovation Leader's Quest for Credibility

Notes from the Field

In a recent one-day workshop with a group of healthcare executives, the frustration arose that innovation leaders (i.e., those whose portfolio covers innovative investments) must fight for the credibility of the innovation program in ways that their counterparts do not need to. These innovation leaders felt their existence was constantly being called into question, even today, when innovation leadership is needed more than ever in healthcare.  

This exchange got me thinking about how important credibility is to a leader whose charge is to innovate. The act of creating the next generation of products and services involves making promises that are inherently risky. So when we are making a series of risky bets in new technologies and solutions, our stakeholders sometimes conflate these individual risks with the overall innovation program. 

Moreover, an organizational leader must possess a high degree of credibility already in order to operate effectively. Yet, the leader’s individual credibility is not always extended to the innovation function. So there is a disparity – a tremor in the force that must be continuously addressed for innovation to excel. We must evolve our stakeholders capacity for taking risks and making big bets.

An innovation leader would do well to have methods and tools for reinforcing the essential promise of innovation. 

Innovation comes in many different forms, however the leadership function at the heart tends to have golden threads across all innovation programs. As we go about innovating new and inventive ways to grow the business, four particular leadership practices may be useful: 

 

  • Set the Vision. In the messy work of a typical innovation program, we see pivots and fast failures, and early partnerships come and go, and strange new business models. We need a compelling, articulate vision of the future that overrides the individual portfolios. 
  • Engage Others. The leader should be meeting with teams, learning and hearing many perspectives. Engagement is a multi-sided game, so the leader needs great EQ to do this effectively.  Leadership begins and ends with people – and therefore engagement is the first task. 
  • Be A Sense Maker. Innovation leaders are storytellers and sense makers. How does AI fit into the future of our organization? How will we work with robots in the future? These questions should be storylines that evolve over time in order to form innovation narratives to help other leaders and teams make sense of the wide open future.   
  • Manage Creativity. We need deeply creative teams that can blow up the assumptions of today’s business and reformulate new models for tomorrow. But how do we do this without causing panic? Begin by building firewalls around the creative process – make it safe for stakeholders to engage in a full throated creative agenda. But also ensure that that process has a conclusion and the results are filtered through analytical tools like risk management.
A leader’s stock-in-trade is credibility.

Without it, she has no ability to build trust, influence others, or create momentum.  Leading an innovation program is a potential cred-killer, so the leader must take care to position herself accordingly.  

Want to talk more about leadership and innovation?

Join us over in our LinkedIn Community: Intentional Innovation where we explore a wide range of topics around modern innovation practices and work together to define The Future of New.

You may also enjoy this related article: A Quick Reflection on Grit.

A Simple Tool to Ignite Workplace Creativity

An innovator smiles, pointing to a lightbulb signifying her creativity in the workplace

Workplace Creativity

Do your best ideas hit you in the shower? Or maybe during your workout?

This is not uncommon. Creative insights often happen on the periphery of our rational thought. Driving or daydreaming – we are able to make insights and connections that our logical brain doesn’t always see. Corporations like IBM have been teaching executives creativity since the 1950s. The rationale is that complex problem solving skills creates better managers and leaders through their ability to challenge assumptions, think in opposition, and derive new insights from unorthodox places. IQ alone is not enough. 

 

Case-in-point: the amazing work of Dr. George Land. In the early 1960s, to help select the best engineers and scientists in the race to the moon, NASA brought in Dr. Land. His role was to implement an assessment model for complex problem solving that included creativity. The challenge NASA leadership faced was that the organization had been on a hiring spree and getting lots of PhDs, yet the hiring teams could not effectively understand which candidates were going to have the right stuff. They needed experts who possessed a mix of creativity and intelligence to solve the new breed of challenges that NASA was encountering. 

 

The moon launch required astrophysicists, metallurgists, propulsion experts, chemists, materials engineers — specialized personnel who had to work together in never-before ways. The challenge was a low correlation between smart candidates and complex problem solving. And the missing link was creativity. Many early PhDs were bounced out or relegated to less important work tracks due to their lack of imagination. Think about those scenes from Apollo 13 when a team of rocket scientists were trying to create a CO2 filter to save Tom Hanks and the crew…with duct tape! 

But we jumped ahead...

Dr. Land, a researcher and social scientist with a penchant for creativity, developed a test that looked beyond IQ. He delved into whether a person could think along a critical scale as well as a creative scale to generate enough ideas to get to viable solutions. The assessment tool worked exceptionally well, resulting in many successful hires, an eagle landing on the moon, and later, perhaps most importantly, Tom Hanks making it back to Hollywood. 

And so, George Land, wanting to dive deeper into the core of creativity, began what would become a multi-decade longitudinal study. He tested the creativity of 1,600 children ranging in ages from three-to-five years old who were enrolled in a Head Start program. Additionally, he used a similar construct at NASA and re-tested those same children at 10 years old, 15 years old, 21 and beyond. And the results were astounding: there was a steep drop-off of creativity as the participants grew up: 

5 year olds: 98% scored genius 

10 year olds: 30% scored genius

15 year olds: 12% scored genius

 

What all of this means

By age 31, a mere 2% of the original participants scored in the “genius” level of creativity. In the years since, the test has been administered nearly 300,000 times to adults and the 2% holds steady. 2%…the same consistency as skim milk. 

Ultimately, he found we are born with high degrees of creativity. It turns out it is natural and essential to our growth as humans. However, somewhere between nursery school, standing in line at the DMV, barely passing BioChem, staring at YouTube for 10,000 hours, job hunting, and other assorted attempts at adulting, we effectively unlearn creative thinking over time. Our brains have turned to skim milk, creatively speaking. And, we fear the blank page, we are afraid to stand at the white board, we don’t offer ideas in the staff meeting anymore. Or worse, we let Loudmouth Bob talk over everyone when we have a good solution in mind.  

This dearth of creativity is a national challenge, and you can see the lack of imagination wherever you go. You see it in sterile playgrounds designed by lawyers, or those ugly aisle end-caps heaping over with unlovely, forgettable things. And we see this lack of imagination in missed client expectations and lost sales because we offered them skim milk instead of cream. 

Furthermore, we’ve gotten very good at putting up critical filters between us and the flow state of creativity. The critical filter is that voice inside our heads telling us “that won’t work,” or “silly idea,” or “I don’t know.” It also tells us that it’s easier to be a 2-percenter, better to fit in. 

To get to the heavy cream, we need to turn off the critical filters.  However, don’t fret – 98% of us began with genius levels of creativity, so most of us are good to go…most…you know who you are…

The challenge is to get back to deep creativity. But how?

The best ideas come from strong teams, so you need to start by building trust.  Like a musical group riffing on certain melodic themes, pro-innovation teams use techniques like opposition and non-sequitur to spur deeper insights into new products and business models. And so, try this exercise for fun…

  1. Gather the team: set the intention to do great work – it creates a strong container. Psychological safety is important  especially if this is a new skill.  
  2. Tell the team: In two minutes, come up with as many ideas as possible to reinvent a light bulb. It can be broken, cut, reassembled, buried, cooked, placed, frozen, glued, planted, or anything else. Use the filament, the screw piece, the glass, the frosting, etc.  
  3. Go for quantity:  not quality. We don’t care if they are good ideas – ‘logical’ and ‘useful’ are critical filters that will stifle flow. Go for 20 ideas in 2 minutes. 
  4. Read out the best ideas:  the silliest or most inventive – and do it again. By the way, the average in Round 1 may be 5 or 7 ideas per person. Look for the high producers – 12 or more – they are your natural-born creatives. 
  5. After 2-3 rounds, inject a new concept:  “What is the opposite of reinventing a lightbulb?” And go again. 

And, as you will see, the quantity and depth of creativity will increase as people reengage in this flow. Now, try this exercise to invent a new product, or rethink your supply chain, or disrupt the staffing paradigm.

Trust the process – you are a creative genius.  

The approach works!

The two-minute clock creates heat and the quantity lowers inhibitions. These key ingredients open the door to workplace creativity. At Teaming Worldwide, we use this concept of workplace creativity regularly with engineers, scientists, medical professionals, executives, sales reps – you name it. We see them unlock the gate to creativity like wizards in Middle Earth. 

 

In 2008, the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York inducted a curious item into the Toy Hall of Fame: The Stick. The Almighty Stick! It is perhaps the oldest toy in the world. Why it wasn’t inducted 1000 years ago is beyond me! But isn’t it amazing to watch a five-year-old pick up a stick and suddenly have a pet, a ray gun, a rocket – or all three in succession. It reminds me that we were all once that kid – we have the ability to get lost in creative thought. 

 

So, is it time to tap into your 5-year old genius?  Go ahead – take a hot shower and find out! 

 

Want to talk more about creativity and innovation?

Join us over in our LinkedIn Community: Intentional Innovation where we explore a wide range of topics around modern innovation practices and work together to define The Future of New.

 

You may also enjoy this related article: Find Your Spark of Madness.