Idea Surplus Disorder #86

Good morning, and welcome to the newsletter! This week: envelope thinking, idea dumbness, grilled cheeses, mall shopping, metric-less success, playing shirori, post-it doodles, the importance of ThinkWeeks, some work-in-progress from Filament, and more.

I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here!

Ideas + Insights

When you're collaborating on a new idea, start working together on the back of an envelope:

First, I asked everyone in the audience to individually draw a marketing idea as a doodle, complete with stick figures. Second, I asked them to exchange that drawing with someone around them.

That second request caused a mild panic. The idea of sharing a sketchy, unpolished drawing with a colleague is fear-inducing. But that’s exactly the state and stage that ideas are best shared with colleagues — when they’re unformed and half-baked, not when they’re polished and perfect in a lengthy slide presentation. I think the fear of sharing ideas at this embryonic stage is part of what gets in the way of collaborating inside an organization.

I asked everyone to build on their colleagues’ back-of-the-envelope sketches with more drawing and then return them. I don’t think that simple, informal exchange of ideas happens enough in business.

And with the ideas you share, don't be afraid to explore their dumbness:

One of my favorite steps in a creative process is to ask, “What are five reasons why this might be the dumbest idea ever and could blow up in our face?” I mean, it’s not always fun but it is really illuminating if you’re candid. And, if you work through that question in depth, you can A) better protect an idea as it moves through various layers of approval, B) learn a lot about why the idea is “right,” and works well. It’s a form of due diligence that gives ideas strength, or helps address weaknesses before they become liabilities.

I can't resist sharing lists of things people learned. Here's another:

• Once you are ok with people telling you ‘no’, you can ask for whatever you want.
• Figure out what gives you new ideas, and make sure you incorporate that into your routine.
• The most valuable feedback usually hurts a lot.

I'm doing a few of these ThinkWeeks before the end of the year and may even turn this into a formal Filament offering.

Want to brainstorm better? Play shiritori:

The Japanese game of shiritori is an easy way to guide your brainstorming session, whether you’re looking for ideas for a new project, book, or physical product.

The basic idea behind shiritori is that you start with a word and then come up with another word that starts with the letter the first word ends with. Tweak this to apply to brainstorming by thinking of ideas as well as the next word.

Most of the ideas you’ll come up with won’t necessarily be very useful, but that’s okay because the goal is simply come up with as many ideas as possible. You’re bound to end up with one or two great ones, and the important part of brainstorming has already happened: You’ve opened the floodgates and you’re thinking creatively.

These Eleven Innovation-Killing Bad Habits are worth keeping in mind as you do strategic planning. We've seen nearly every one of these in our work, but the most common is:

Bad Habit #10: Innovation is siloed from Execution: Companies struggle to get the “execution engine” and “innovation engine” to collaborate, rather than to compete. Rather than realizing that managing the present and inventing the future are equally important and should be equally resourced, they often fight for the same resources. Often the execution engine deprives the innovators from access to valuable resources like customers, brand, or skills. That means the innovators end up competing without any competitive advantage against the more nimble and agile startups.

Remedy: Create a culture where executors and innovators collaborate because they understand each other’s value to the organization. Create processes and incentives that grant innovators access to customers, brands, and skills so they can outcompete the more nimble and agile startup ventures.

I love this simple story:

The villagers had been coming to the local wise man every week, many complaining about the same problems each time.​

One day he told them a joke and everyone roared in laughter. After a couple of minutes, he told them the same joke and only a few of them smiled. When he told the same joke for the third time, no one laughed.​

The wise man smiled and said, "You can’t laugh at the same joke over and over. So why are you always complaining about the same problem?"

Maybe we should concentrate more on metric-less success?

The people that will be crying when you depart the world are not doing so because of any number that is tied to your name. They are doing so because you were a loving partner, a caring friend, or a shepherd of kindness. You are dearly missed not because of what you’ve earned, but because of what you represented.

Jason Womack's advice on saying no:

I understand what you’re asking me for, and unfortunately I’m completely booked this week. If you can wait, I’ll be able to look at what you’re asking me for next week. Or you can ask someone else to help you in the meantime. Which would you prefer?

Practical Betterments is a collection of one-off actions that improve your life continuously, even marginally, like:

• Turn off voicemail
• Opt out of junk mail
• Eliminate app rating requests (this is a game changer!)

If you use an automatic scheduling tool like Calendly to let people book meetings with you, here's a fantastic tip:

Make the agenda a required field. Make it known that the meeting can be cancelled if the agenda is not filled out exhaustively.

Fun Finds

• The Perfect Grilled Cheese Essay
• Hospitals need more Gamers in Residence.
• 10,946 Post-it Doodles. Recommended!
• The Public Domain Review is an online journal dedicated curious and compelling public domain works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.
• Why are cassette and CD players so bulky now?
• Christmas shopping – in 1995!

Words of Wisdom

"Forever is composed of nows." – Emily Dickenson

"The world is a museum of passion projects." – John Collison

"You wouldn’t expect your laptop to run without ever closing tabs or restarting. Stop expecting that from yourself." – Joan Westenberg

“There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence – and in the end, you make it look like a quantum leap.” – James Dyson

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next." Ursula K. Le Guin

"One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done." – Marie Curie

“Stop trying to be cool. Be nerdy and obsessive about the things you love. Enthusiasm will get you farther than indifference.” – Tina Roth Eisenberg

“If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.” – Montesquieu

"Fear kills creativity. Humor is our most powerful tool to drive fear out of the system." – Hiroki Asai

Something New From Filament

Is your organization brimming with innovative ideas but struggling to turn them into real-world impact?

We've begun working on a framework that can help organizations create an agile innovation ecosystem with a disciplined, end-to-end process that empowers your teams to surface high-potential ideas, advance them through experimentation, and scale the winners.

If you're hungry for a more structured way to drive innovation in your organization, this might be a great place to start. Stay tuned for more!