The Leader's Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills

Unlock the Creativity and Innovation in You and Your Team

Paul Sloane

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780749481025
• eBook ISBN: 9780749481032
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Management

Lateral thinking can help you transform your ability to generate ideas, unlock the creative potential of your team and make your organization more innovative. With a lively, energetic and practical approach, The Leader's Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills will teach you dynamic, up-to-date techniques to unleash the creative energies of your people and show you how to put the techniques to work immediately. Lateral thinking can turn your organization around and make you a better leader.

In The Leader's Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills, highly acclaimed author, trainer and presenter Paul Sloane demonstrates how the lateral leader develops the vision, culture and processes that transform a regular business into an innovation hothouse. This book is packed with real-life examples, practical methods and lateral thinking exercises that you can use today.

APPENDIX 1

Tools and techniques

A Brainstorming

The most popular group creativity exercise in business is the brainstorm. It is quick, easy and it works. There are variations and enhancements to make it more powerful. But many organizations become frustrated with brainstorms and have stopped using them. They say they are old-fashioned and not so effective. The real reason for the frustrations is that the brainstorms are not run properly. Here are some simple rules to make sure that your brainstorm works well.

Set clear objectives

The purpose of the brainstorm is to generate many creative ideas to answer a specific goal. It is best to express the goal as a question. A vague or woolly question is not helpful. ‘How can we increase sales?’ is not as good as ‘How can we double sales in the next 12 months?’ However, the parameters of the questions should not be too detailed or it can close out lateral possibilities. ‘How can we double sales, through existing channels and with the current product set?’ is probably too constrained. Once the question has been agreed, it is written clearly for all to see.

It is worth setting objectives for the number of ideas to be generated and the time to be spent. ‘We are looking to generate 60 ideas in the next 20 minutes. Then we will whittle them down to four or five really good ones.’ The brainstorm should not be too long – between 30 and 45 minutes is generally best. The best size of group is somewhere between 6 and 12. Too few people and there are not enough diverse inputs. Too many people and it is hard to control the meeting and to retain everyone’s commitment.

Suspend judgement

In order to encourage a wealth of wacky ideas it is essential that no one is critical, negative or judgemental about an idea. Any idea that is uttered – no matter how stupid – must be written down. The rule about suspending judgement during the idea generation phase is so important that it is worth enforcing rigorously. A good technique is to issue water pistols; anyone who is critical gets squirted.

Quantity is good

The more ideas the better. Brainstorming is one the few activities in life where quantity improves quality. Think of it as a Darwinian process. The more separate ideas that are generated, the greater the chance that some will be fit enough to survive. You need stacks of energy and buzz driving lots of wacky ideas. Crazy thoughts that are completely unworkable are often the springboards for other ideas that can be adapted into great new solutions. So keep the crazy ideas coming – you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find one prince!

Number and display

Number each idea. This makes it easier to cross-reference the ideas and to set goals. ‘We’ve come up with 65 ideas – let’s see if we can get to 80.’ Each idea should be written down as a short action statement in just a few words. The ideas must be clearly visible to all participants. Flip charts work well for this purpose. As each page is filled it is posted on the wall of the room so that the whole catalogue of ideas can be seen. When it comes time to analyse the ideas, all those that are linked can be circled in the same colour.

Analyse and select

The final step in the brainstorm session is to analyse the ideas. One of the best ways is to quickly go through them and perform a triage. Divide the proposals into a) promising, b) interesting possibility and c) reject. For example, you can quickly mark each a) with two ticks, each b) with one tick, and cross through the rejects. This is a group activity led by the moderator, and there is usually good consensus on what to do with most of the ideas. Any that are disputed can be put into category b). If time permits it is a good idea to then categorize and collect the ideas. If time is short do not worry; some people find that it is best to let the ideas stew for a while before returning to them at a later time when the subconscious has had the opportunity to turn them over. Either way, write on a separate flipchart all the ideas in categories a) and b) that are marketing ideas, say, and on another chart all the sales ideas, and so on. This process of rearranging the ideas can help you see new combinations and possibilities. You may well then find that you can synthesize ideas by putting together an a) with a b) to come up with a real winner. For further detailed analysis, a technique like six thinking hats (see S below) can be used.

An alternative method of selecting the best ideas is to give everyone 10 points that they can allocate to their favourite ideas in any way that they want. They can give one point to 10 separate ideas or all 10 to one idea. Then you total the points.

B Random word

As a stimulus to a brainstorm a random word, image or object can work wonders. Just pick up a dictionary and choose a noun at random. Then force connections between that word and the problem to be solved. You will find that all sorts of new associations spring to mind. Say the problem is how to get more people to use buses. The random word from the dictionary is – shark. Some of the ideas it triggers are:

• Free trips to the aquarium as lottery prizes using bus tickets as entries.
• Preferential loans for bus passengers (not at loan shark rates).
• Hot soup on buses in winter (shark’s fin could be one variety).
• Music on buses to make the trip more pleasant (triggered by the Sharks and Jets in West Side Story).

Why does the random word work? I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 01 The need for innovation
• 02 Characteristics of the lateral leader
• 03 The innovation test
• 04 Laying the foundations for change
• 05 Making the vision real
• 06 Challenge your assumptions
• 07 Ask searching questions
• 08 Take a different view
• 09 Combine the unusual
• 10 Adopt, adapt, improve
• 11 Break the rules
• 12 Analyse first
• 13 Increase the yield
• 14 Introduce the random
• 15 Evaluate
• 16 Implement
• 17 Welcome failure
• 18 Use the team
• 19 Organizing for innovation
• 20 Common mistakes: 12 great ways to creativity
• 21 21 Great ways to innovate
• 22 Summary
• 23 The lateral leadership course
• Appendix 1: Tools and techniques
• Appendix 2: Answers to lateral thinking puzzles
• References and recommended reading
• Index
• Backcover