William Duggan - Creative Strategy

CREATIVE STRATEGY

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2013 William Duggan

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53146-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duggan, William R.

Creative strategy : a handbook for innovation / William Duggan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16052-0 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-16053-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-53146-7 (ebook : alk. paper)

1. Creative ability in business. 2. Creative thinking. 3. Diffusion of innovations. 4. Strategic planning. I. Title.

HD53.D843 2013

658.4012dc23

2012036053

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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Cover design: Alexandrine Koegel Lambert

Cover image: Shutterstock

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Lynn and Emmaline

CONTENTS

This book is a practical guide to a big idea about innovation. Its an idea with roots in modern neuroscience, classical military strategy, and Asian philosophy, and its played a part in countless cases of creative innovation in business and other fields. Over the past decade, Ive explained the idea in a series of books and articles, and Ive taught the idea to thousands of graduate students and executives in courses at Columbia Business School and in sessions at companies around the world. This book offers a method to apply the idea, in a form that any innovator can learn and use, without any advanced training in business or economics or any other technical field. All you need is a passion for ideas and a desire to put them into action for personal and professional fulfillment. You can use this method as an individual, in a team, or throughout your organization.

The idea is creative strategy. It solves the problem of innovation, not just for designing new products but for coming up with creative ideas for strategy at any level: the overall company, a division, a team, or just yourself. It applies to businesses, government agencies, nonprofits, and your own career and personal development. In all kinds of strategy, you always need a creative idea to some degree because the world around you is always changing, so the future is never exactly the same as the past. Your strategy must change to keep up with the times. But how should it change, exactly?

There are two kinds of traditional methods that claim to yield creative ideas for strategy: methods of creativity and methods of strategy. You will see that neither set of traditional methods actually solves the problem. Methods of strategy show you how to analyze your strategic situation, but thats where they stop. They dont give you the next step, how to get a creative idea for what to do. Methods of creativity show you how to come up with lots of creative ideas, but they dont connect those ideas to your strategy. So you end up doing lots of strategic analysis first, and then go into a room to brainstorm creative ideas. There is no connection between the two methods.

This common sequenceformal analysis, then creative brainstormingactually comes from an old theory of how the brain works. Youve probably heard this: the left side of the brain is analytical, and the right side is creative. So first you do your analysis (left side) and then let your creativity (right side) take over. Unfortunately, this is not how the brain really works. In the past ten years, neuroscience has overturned that old model of the brain. We now know that analysis and creativity are not two different functions on two different sides of the brain. In the new modelcalled learning-and-memoryanalysis and creativity work together in all modes of thought. You cannot have an idea without both.

The new science of learning-and-memory reveals at last how creative ideas form in the mind. When you do something yourself or learn what someone else did, those details go into your memory. When you face a new situation, your brain breaks down the problem into pieces and then searches through your brain for memories that fit each piece. It then makes a new combination from those pieces of memory. The combination is new, but the elements are not. These three stepsbreak it down, search, combineare very different from the two conventional steps of analyze and brainstorm. Creative strategy puts the three steps of learning-and-memory for new situations into a practical method that fits how the human brain actually works.

, you will see that each creative strategy step differs in key ways from traditional methods of strategy, creativity, and innovation. At various points I pause to explain the differences to keep the distinctions clear.

shows you how.

offers miscellaneous materials that provide more background for you to refer to according to your interest or need. It includes a brief summary of the creative strategy method and a review of key sources that led me to the main ideas of this book. As it turns out, I used creative strategy to create creative strategy, and this section shows where the ideas came from that made up the new combination.

As you go through this guide, try to look at creative strategy with a beginners mind, as they say in Zenitself a key source for creative strategy. Try to clear your mind of other methods and allow it space to consider this new idea. At the end, when youve gone through it all, you can decide whether to toss the book away or try to apply its methods, at least in part. Of course I hope, if youve read this far, youre willing to give it a chance.

Part I of this book immerses you in the method of creative strategy. It shows step-by-step how to use creative strategy for innovation problems of various kinds. By the end you become an insideryou know how it works, what makes it tick, and all the moving parts.

Each step in creative strategy has its own complexity and calls for different skills to master. Here I present a much simplified version, which will fit no situation exactly. But it does fit all kinds of situations to some degree. Whenever you face a complex problem that you dont see a way to solve, you need an innovation. But you might not realize thats what you need. You were hired because you know the answers, and its hard to admit that you dont, that instead you need something new.

Normal planning methods often hide the need for innovation. You lay out your goals and initiatives and timetables for marketing, operations, product development, or your overall strategy. You know how to plan, so thats what you do. But for every goal you set, every initiative you design, there might be a better one just beyond your graspan innovation you dont yet see. Creative strategy helps you see it.

This chapter shows how the human mind creates solutions to new problems and then translates that mental method into a series of formal steps that an individual or group can use for innovation of any kind. The mental method is strategic intuition, and my previous book Strategic Intuition explains it in detail. Creative strategy is the set of formal steps you can use to apply strategic intuition.

Strategic Intuition

To start, we must go back to three key milestones in the recent history of the science of the mind. The first came in 1981, when Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the two sides of the brain. Sperry concluded from his experiments that one side of the brain is rational and analytical but lacks imagination and that the other side of the brain is creative and intuitive but irrational. This conclusion fit the much older idea that human thought is sometimes rational and sometimes irrational. Sperry located these two kinds of thinking in two different parts of the brain.