Nearly all organizations and their leaders feel the imperative to grow and to innovate and thereby to generate value for shareholders and society. Responding to this imperative demands creativity and discipline in equal measure—and most executives would say that, of the two, creativity is the harder to come by.
BCG creativity experts Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny, who have helped innumerable clients generate their next big breakthrough ideas, have detailed their approach in their new book, Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity. Recentemente, eles compartilharam seus pensamentos sobre como dirigir criatividade prática.
Por que você escreveu este livro? É oportuno?
O ritmo acelerado de mudança de hoje torna a criatividade essencial para o sucesso. Mas em todas as indústrias, a vida útil de boas idéias, necessárias para alcançar e sustentar a liderança, está ficando mais curta. Portanto, é imperativo adotar uma maneira melhor e mais sistemática de gerar as novas idéias - produtos, serviços, modelos de negócios, processos e similares - que garantirão liderança futura.
As abordagens tradicionais para a criatividade - compensando e pensando fora da caixa, por exemplo - são ferramentas úteis em si mesmas, mas elas não foram empunhadas de maneira eficaz. Pensando em novas caixas, uma abordagem que emergiu de nosso trabalho com os clientes e nossa compreensão da mente, é uma solução prática para o desafio de promover a criatividade. A empresa foi fundada como fabricante de canetas e estava se saindo bem como fabricante de canetas. Você pode imaginar que, se os funcionários da BIC naquele momento tivessem sido instruídos a pensar fora da caixa, eles poderiam ter proposto idéias como canetas de quatro cores, canetas apagáveis ou canetas personalizadas com o logotipo de um cliente. Mas se alguém tivesse sugerido fazer isqueiros ou barbeadores, a reação pode ter sido: “Do que você está falando - somos um
Can you give some examples of what effective creativity looks like in practice?
BIC provides an excellent real-life example. The company was founded as a pen manufacturer and was doing well as a pen manufacturer. You can imagine that if BIC employees at that time had been told to think outside the box, they might have proposed ideas like four-color pens, erasable pens, or pens customized with a customer’s logo. But if someone had suggested making lighters or razors, the reaction might have been, “What are you talking about—we’re a PEN Company!”
Indeed, if you are boxed in by the idea that “we’re a pen company,” then lighters and razors are bad ideas. But consider what happens if you shift your mental construct entirely and adopt a new outlook—something like, “we make disposable plastic items.” When you look at BIC’s business capabilities from that perspective, then lighters and razors become perfectly logical ideas, and you open the door to expanding profits and revenues.
Good examples of business creativity can be found in companies of all sizes. A Russian café chain called Tsiferblat, for example, has reinvented the entire coffee-shop business model. The cafés roast their own coffee, but it’s free. The Wi-Fi is also free—and so are the snacks. You pay only for your time. Lots of people look at coffee shops as places to sit and work or have a meeting, but the mental box of the people running most coffee chains is still, “we sell coffee.” Tsiferblat adopted a completely new mental box of, “we’re a comfortable meeting venue.” Within that new perspective, coffee, food, and Internet service become amenities, not products. The space is the product, and time is the commodity you pay for.
The history of business is teeming with examples of this kind of creativity, where someone or some company replaced an old mental box with a new one, thereby changing their company—and sometimes even their entire industry—as a result. Even a small change can have a big impact. Two employees in a sandwich shop, for example, replaced their standard tip jar with dueling receptacles, each bearing the name of a popular TV show, and asked customers to vote for their favorite show with their wallets. A new question to vote on appeared every day. The result? A 50 percent rise in tips—and a lot more fun for everyone.
Why isn’t thinking outside the box enough to help companies break free of old ideas that have them boxed in?
Thinking outside the box is impossible to do: even if we do manage to get out of any given box, we cannot help but climb into another one to make sense of the world around us. It’s also a buzzword that fails to embrace the most important first step to breakthrough creativity: identifying what your current boxes are and then doubting them. When people are pushed to think outside the box, rarely do they stop to ask, “Well, exactly what box am I in that I need to escape from?” And these invisible biases may be holding them back or pushing them in the wrong direction.
Our minds need all kinds of constructs to organize the world around us and to come up with practical ideas. That’s why we need to think in new boxes. They focus a team’s creativity and make it easier to build ideas. They also keep brainstorming sessions from generating hundreds of random notions. To be useful and practical, the creative process needs to address a specific question or problem that is well defined in advance—and it should respect specific criteria and constraints to ensure that solutions will be sufficiently practical to implement.
Brainstorming, in particular, can be frustrating for organizations. How can the process be improved by thinking in new boxes?
To people who think that brainstorming is painful and unproductive, we would say that it is like getting mad at the hammer when you hit your thumb. You need to learn how to use the tool properly rather than throw away the hammer. So for creativity, you need to use brainstorming sessions properly, identifying your current mental boxes and thoughtfully questioning and doubting them. Randomly trying to think up ideas that no one has ever had before is an unfocused, high-pressure activity that rarely leads to useful results—and it can feel threatening and risky for participants.
Uma observação: é importante distinguir doloroso do improdutivo. Uma sessão eficaz de brainstorming é desafiadora porque o tira da sua zona de conforto. Se não houver desconforto, não é um sucesso: você está apenas fervendo a mesma sopa repetidamente. Você pode explicar?
We’ve talked a lot about business, but you see Thinking in New Boxes as being much broader. Can you explain?
Nossa mensagem é que há espaço para melhorias para todos. A chave é tornar -se mais consciente da maneira como você pensa e mais consciente dos modelos que você usa para entender todos os aspectos da sua vida. Nos negócios, pensar em novas caixas certamente pode ajudá-lo a desenvolver novos produtos, mas também pode melhorar a maneira como você aborda qualquer problema-desde o design organizacional até o corte de custos. Em sua vida pessoal, quais são suas suposições sobre a maneira certa de criar filhos? Ou a maneira certa de gerenciar sua carreira? Ou a maneira certa de planejar a aposentadoria - ou administrar uma empresa familiar ou apoiar sua comunidade? Tornar-se mais consciente das suposições e restrições em que você está operando e, em seguida, desafiando seletivamente, pode levar a uma maior criatividade ao longo de sua vida. Todos nós podemos ficar mentalmente presos às vezes. Mas uma vez que você entende o papel que as caixas mentais desempenham no motivo pelo qual ficamos presos - e temos uma abordagem atenciosa à criatividade prática - será muito mais fácil, esperançosamente, ser solto. Estratégia e entrega de inovação
There really isn’t any difference in how you apply creativity in your day-to-day life versus how you apply it at work. We can all get mentally stuck sometimes. But once you understand the role that mental boxes play in why we get stuck—and have a thoughtful approach to practical creativity—it will be much easier, hopefully, to get unstuck.
