Ted Tuesday: Alan Iny— Reigniting Creativity In Business

"True creativity requires you and your company to constantly doubt your current boxes and eventually replace them with new ones. In an ever-changing environment, no idea is good forever."

Good Morning Folks,

The face of business is changing and whether an individual or corporation, the pressure is on to innovate. Employment in America is increasingly operating in a new reality. The constancy of change requires today's career employee to think and act differently, because the path to the American Dream is no longer a guaranteed right of passage.

Creative disruption is shaking every industry. Global competition for jobs is fierce. The employer-employee pact is over and traditional job security is a thing of the past.

CREATIVITY is key to surviving and thriving against all odds. Alan Iny's Ted talk is very much aligned to our way of thinking.

That's why FSO's core strength is to (re)IMAGINE new and better ways of doing business. To give our clients the people, solutions, technology, and cost efficiencies to ensure a fundamental transformation from the back office as we know it today

It’s a paradox. Creativity has never been more essential to competitiveness in the business world, but the critical approach to practical creativity in organizations is often lacking. Alan Iny offers a key to the well-meaning exhortation to “think outside the box:” Apply doubt to the very models and philosophies that make up the box itself.

Even the greatest minds know the frustration of trying to come up with a brilliant idea but constantly ending up with boring thoughts and a trash can filled with wasted paper. Alan Iny suggests a new perspective for reviving creativity in your business. Believe it or not, says Iny, the key to creativity is doubt. Watch this fascinating talk that encourages viewers to adopt a new approach to thinking “outside the box.”

As the senior specialist for creativity and scenarios, Alan Iny has trained thousands of executives and BCG consultants on how to think creatively. A member of the firm’s strategy leadership team, he has vast experience in advising companies worldwide in innovation, scenarios, transformation, organization design and change management across industries. In 2013, Alan launched “Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity,” written with Luc de Brabandere, and published by Random House.

Here is an excerpt that was originally published in The Economist Group’s Lean back marketing blog.

Seeking new insights into who your markets and customers are, what they really want, and how best to reach and engage them requires thinking in new boxes. A “box,” in our definition, is a belief, concept, working hypothesis, or other mental model you use to interpret the world in front of you. 

True creativity requires you and your company to constantly doubt your current boxes and eventually replace them with new ones. In an ever-changing environment, no idea is good forever. 

The brain’s hardwiring will tend to lead you and your organization to hold on to tired assumptions and constraints. You’re likely to be seduced by a natural bias toward ideas that confirm, rather than contradict, your current way of seeing things.

Henry Ford famously failed to heed even obvious market signals (and insistent colleagues) suggesting that customers were evolving to want different styles and colors after the phenomenal success of his simple all-black Model T. In the 1970s and 1980s, executives at Hindustan Lever Limited assumed that customers for laundry detergent in India were primarily affluent individuals willing to pay for Surf; they didn’t notice that Nirma, a low-cost competitor, appealed to a growing segment of lower-income customers who hadn’t used any detergent before. 

As you seek to understand your organization’s customers and market, stay open to multiple interpretations of the data you collect. There are different plausible segmentations of any customer group, many legitimate ways to break down the market, and multiple ways of perceiving the underlying desires of your customers. 

Consider listing and then challenging your most fundamental beliefs about your customers and markets. Who do you currently think of as your most loyal customers? Ask bold questions that take you and your colleagues outside of your comfort zone. If you are one of the world’s largest designers and retailers of lingerie, what if 10 years from now, 95 percent of your customers were men? If you lead the world’s most popular online search engine—think Google—what if, just 10 years from now, most of your customers were looking to you instead for driverless cars? 

The first step to practical creativity is challenging some of your existing boxes. If you manage this, then you can arrive at a very successful new box simply by changing the way you think about your customers, your competitors, or your own company.

Watch Video: Have a look at Alan's short 8-minute talk, which is accessible by this link which will take you directly to the Ted site.

TED@BCG was an event produced by TED in conjunction with their partner, the Boston Consulting Group.

At FSO all of us strive to be remarkable, not average. FSO provides an environment that rewards innovation, is rich in resources, and respects the incredibly talented team we’ve built over the last six years. Personal, Passionate and Productive, we get the job done to perfection every moment and every day.

Have a GREAT day as I look forward to seeing all of you soon.

Mitchell D. Weiner

Chief Happiness Officer  

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.