The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business
- BY Gary Buck
- November 3rd, 2009
The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business
[Author: Jerry Hirshberg]
I re-read this old favorite when while developing the new VIBE process. It is tremendously interesting to see connections between Hirshberg’s stories about Nissan and recent conversations I’ve had with Nike Lean Sensei Tom Young. These concepts about “creativity” are powerful and universal, crossing industries and disciplines and geographical borders. Read it now.
Author Jerry Hirshberg tells his story as “a firsthand account of an ongoing enterprise, one that began by identifying idea-making as the centermost concern of a business.” In 1979, Hirshberg is lured away from his safe job as chief designer for Buick to be the founder and president of Nissan Design International (NDI). From the beginning, he designs NDI to be something very different from the stifling, staid, stuffy and “that’s the way it’s always been done” atmosphere of Detroit. This new firm, located in sunny, energetic San Diego, becomes an example of how creative and innovative a design firm could—and SHOULD—be. Hirshberg describes the principles and strategies upon which he bases NDI as what he calls “the creative priority”.
Read this text with an open mind and you will certainly find at least a couple—but probably dozens—of ideas that will make your company, department or next project dramatically better through increased and improved creativity. As Hirshberg quotes from Silvano Arieti, “Another requirement for the creative person which is even more difficult to accept: gullibility … a willingness to explore everything: to be open, innocent and naive before rejecting anything.”
- Jerry Hirshberg
The Creative Priority
The first element of Hirshberg’s “creative priority” is “Polarity”, which encompasses a wide variety of “thinking opposite” concepts. He details stories of working with the Japan-based Nissan corporate managers, whose mindset is quite different from the American viewpoint, especially those of old-school Detroit automakers. These stories are even more interesting in light of my experience with other books I’ve been reading, including Jeffrey Liker’s “The Toyota Way” and James Womack’s “Lean Thinking”, as well as recent conversations with Nike Lean Sensei Tom Young, who explained to me how Nike is using Lean Thinking techniques in their Asian production facilities.
Polarity includes “Creative Abrasion”, the concept of creating project teams of people with diverse and even conflicting viewpoints. The friction caused by these combinations often sparks innovative ideas that would never have been generated by like-minded teammates. Hirshberg on the traditional strategies of compromising, diluting or aligning positions: “That’s a fine procedure for rowing a boat; not so fine for creating one.”
“Embracing the Dragon” is another “Polarity concept” that is described as creating “a dramatic shift in perspective, revealing new angles, previously unseen patterns, and unimagined possibilities” by flipping your position to that of a “threatening” party. In other words, take your opponent’s point of view and debate against your own to see the problem from a completely opposite direction.
Hirshberg calls the second creative priority “Unprecendented Thinking”, which holds a special place in my heart as it relates to our new methodologies of creative problem solving. His story of designing children’s furniture for daycare centers (NDI designs much more than cars) is a favorite of mine that I’ve used time and again with my clients. Only by asking the right questions (“What’s a kid?”) does NDI arrive at the right answer (not “a little adult”, but “a misshapen adult!”) and thus be able to design the correct solution.
Another “Unprecedented Thinking” concept is “Stepping Back From the Canvas”, described as the need to physically and mentally move away from a particularly difficult problem. Another is “Failure, Cheating and Play”, which entails idea-sharing and interplay within a group and the overarching thought that “two heads are better than one.” Interdisciplinary group brainstorming in Creative Problem Solving sessions, anyone?
Next, Hirshberg lists “Beyond the Edges” as his third creative priority. NDI takes advantage of their breadth of skillsets in “The Blurring of Disciplinary Boundaries” between their marketing, design and engineering departments. How many times has a project of your suffered because the various departments wouldn’t play well together? Hirshberg tells a number of stories about NDI staffers not only wanting to share and work in areas outside their own, but actually revel in the innovation that it generates.
“Intercultural Creativity” continues this theme by bringing the Japan-USA connection back into the story as Hirshberg talks more about assumptions and cultural differences and how initial problems were turned into dramatic revelations. He describes the use of a profiling test called “Personalysis” to help NDI co-workers understand and work through their differences in the same way the Basadur problem-solving profile has worked so incredibly well with our clients and their teams. His last concept in this area is “Drinking from Diverse Wells”, described through stories about how NDI learns new ideas, thought processes and techniques by working on non-automotive projects such as yachts, vacuum cleaners and desktop computers.
- W. C. Fields
Finally, “Synthesis” is defined as the fourth creative priority as the uniting, categorizing and combining of ideas and solutions. This strategy also seems to correspond to our new methodology in the way both encourage and value the need to find connections between ideas and rationally unite them rather than merely brainstorming then jumping to action. The components of this priority are described as “Informed Intuition”, which discusses facts and how they should be gathered and utilized, and “Porous Planning”, which encompasses the need for plans to be flexible and adaptable as solutions are formed.
This is one of my favorite books about creativity because it uses real-world examples to describe specific techniques for the creative workplace. Rather than the usual text that speaks in broad brushstrokes about “thinking outside of the box” and “empowering” and “innovation”, Hirshberg actually uses these strategies at NDI and tells you what happens as a result. The author is wonderfully candid and forthright, even about his own shortcomings as a manager and how he has struggled to create a continuously improving company. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who wants their teams to be more creative, more effective and more efficient. And isn’t that all of us?
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