Blind spot

We all have blind spots. Right now, just because of the way you are positioned in the space you occupy, your point of view, literally is limited. Between two people in the same room, the person who has the larger perspective is likely to make better decision, ask more astute questions and provide a richer context on what she sees than the one with less perspective.

One way to quickly expand your perspective or reduce your blind spots is to find in your entourage someone who will play the role of sounding board. It can be a friend whose judgment you value, a professional consultant, or even a skilled therapist, whom you evaluated and trust. The idea is to explore with someone else, through open feedback. It's a great way to practice receiving feedback and in the meantime opening your perspective to unexpected point of view.

When facing a difficult problem or though knot in a relationship that does not see to go away no matter what you do, it can be disarmingly simple to open up to the perspective of someone you know, who does not know you too well so they can remain objective. I bet that a lot of the stuff we find difficult in our life and our business is connected to blind spots we will never discover unless someone is ready to hold the mirror for you and give you feedback. It's a reminder that we can't do it alone.

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Missed opportunity

In this great article about Microsoft culture of innovation, we are witness of the pitfalls of a workplace that grew allergic  to creative collaboration and its devastating effect on their ability to innovate. What can be done about it? I don't see any chance for a collaborative culture to exist if there is no place for debate and no collective maturity (that starts from the formal leaders of the organization) about the importance of conflict as a source of discovery and growth.

As in a relationship, the inability to use the energy of conflict and debate to create breakthroughs will lead the organization to power struggles without a connection to the collective welfare of the group. It then all becomes about you or worse about your group, your department.  We see how internal power struggle within Microsoft slowed down their process to a point where years later, the Ipad was able to propose to the market a product that much more compelling, although Microsoft had tablet computer out in the market 10 years ago!

There is a great value at adding to the indicators of success for your group, your project and even your small team a qualitative appreciation of your collaborative culture. It can be as simple as a scale from 1 to 10.  You can even ask your colleagues to do the same and use the results to start a conversation about improving the collaborative culture.  Sure there are governance and other high-level corporate approaches to trigger a more collaborative place in bigger companies, but I am almost certain that Microsoft had these corporate governance structures in place.

Sometimes, it is about something much more simple. Assessing where you are, where your team is when it comes to collaboration in connection with innovation?  Figuring out how to improve on the some of the findings. From how you brainstorm as group, to what type of meetings gets mostly  organize and what is the employees evaluation of the utility of the meetings your team goes . These can all be qualitative indicators to help you get a better sense of how to navigate away from creative destruction.

You're a Coward... Me Too

Here is an excerpt of this article in the NYT:

"In January, the chef Jason Neroni of Blanca, north of San Diego, blasted back at anonymous critics who had posted negative comments on Yelp.com. “Yelp is for cowards,” he tweeted, who don’t have the courage “to say anything while in your restaurant.” 

He has a point! Although I love eating in restaurants, there are too many times where for a reason or another, when the experience was either awful, or there was a suggestion I felt would improve things for the owner, I did not act on it. To make it even clearer, one of my neighbors owns a restaurant close to our home and despite observing from going to her restaurant that some adjustment could make a difference in the success of her place, I still feel uneasy when I see her, unable to open up to her. After all, preparing food for people, even in some really bad restaurants, can be a labor of love and who has a heart really wants to crush a dream!

Here is my take on Neroni's comment, he is right, most of us are cowards! But I see an opportunity for restaurants, other type of organizations and even you in your own personal life. How easy right now is it to get real feedback, good or bad from the people you work with and from those you serve? Why not to make it really, really easy for people to give you feedback and complain or rave about what you do? There is an opportunity to offer your customers, restaurant patrons and others, new, easy and compelling ways  to tell you what do they think about you.

Here's one simple proposition that you can make yours: why not creating a board of honor, that could be seen by all of your clients? You could show feedback from customers that made a real difference in the way you deliver your service. You could start raving about clients who respond to what you do, good  or not. Nobody expect you to be perfect,but people love to see you improve.

Imagine if you can start doing this at home!

Clown or buffoon?

There is a fundamental difference between a clown and a buffoon. A clown's motivation is to attract laughter, to act in ways  that will make you laugh. In direct opposition, the buffoon, a different style of clowning is here to laugh at you, to make fun of you  and even to insult you. He is getting away with it because he smiles all along, constantly, grimacing his way into the world. He is ridiculous, but it is in his  absolute disobedience that sits his power.  Because what drives his behavior is the need for food (any kind of food) and cheap sex (if he is lucky!) . The buffoon is much less likable than the clown who despite his fringe and outcast appearance, is constantly looking for love and approval.

Both archetype (among others) exists in us as the exist in the psyche of your ideal audiences. Both have strengths and weaknesses that must be kept in our awareness. When you work on a project to  spread an idea, it can be useful, in the context of making your idea stick, to determine if the identity of your project is more clown or buffoon. This approach can give you useful creative insights as to what tone to give your work depending of your intention to provoke to shock or cajole to surprise.

A new age of mobility

What critics and observers (most) don't understand about Apple's latest move is that the Ipad is announcing a new era of information mobility and the leaders at Apple understand the shift in action. They realize that real digital mobility will not be achieved through mobile phones and smart phones as we know them now; although, the communication tools they provide are indispensable.

Real mobility, (sorry Nokia!), will be achieved by new tools that will truly allow a link to the growing Web, everywhere, conveniently.  In 5 years, we will find incredibly awkward to open a laptop to work and explore the web. Even a netbook in its actual form will feel clumsy. The Ipad, no matter what it's success will be, is accelerating this new transition for the user.


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Does it work?

I was using this hand dryer yesterday and while my hands were getting increasingly dry I realized something completely unexpected, it was working!  I had pushed the button once and by the time the preset cycle was done, my hands were actually dry!

This was a surprise because what I had not realized until then is how ineffective most hand dryers are.  We could create the Angie's list of hand dryers in restaurants, airport washroom and other places all around the world and I sense that the global evaluation of users would not be positive.  We need a global revolution in hand dryers, because I realized through my experience yesterday that we came to not expect much from them.

When it doesn't work, it's expected. When you have to press 5 times on the activation button and your hands are still soaking wet, it's expected. We are just not surprise by these poor performances, but yesterday was different and I started to ask myself why?

Was it because the designer who work on the prototype actually test it? Was is that they had the end-user in mind and therefore manage to calculate how much time you need with a certain amount of water to dry to average human pair of hands? My sense is that they did not built it just to make a profit, but somehow they also cared about the people who were going to use their product.

What about you?  It's great to come up with a solution, but what space to you give to empathy in your conceptualization? When do you start to think about the user of your product, the audience of your presentation, the people that your foundation is going to help, the assistant you are delegating to? If you care, you will think about them sooner rather than later.

Mistakes Happens

Even before we could decide on it, right in the virtual or real womb of our mothers, we were already growing and evolving as unique expressions of a common diversity. Before we even consciously knew that we were a singular manifestation of life's creative force, creativity was circulating at rapid speed in us . During the process, small and big mistakes were possible; yet many of us beat the odds and manage to be carried out  of a human belly and into the world.

Several voices, one of them belonging to Sir Ken Robinson, have recently called for a radical new approach to education. The common theme from this collective call is that our openness to mistakes in the work we are trying to do linked to our  growing ability to accept perceived failures has an integral part of a creative approach to life, has become something crucial.  In other words, we need to adopt a mindset that puts the ability to learn from mistakes and the openness to make a lot of mistakes has a fundamental part of the creative mind of our children, our business and our collectivity.

I am observing in my life that the ability to recognize mistakes, to be open to learn from them becomes pivotal for whoever wants to build and nurture intimate relationships that are truly nurturing. It's interesting to notice that through this perspective, conflicts and other "failures" in our relationships can potentially become gateways to unique and creative approaches to resolving our difficulties. When we become truly curious, courageous; facing the conflicts and hardship in our relationships, we give  our creative mindset a chance to grow and look at things from a new perspective. Sometimes we stay in relationships that are destructive for us, because of that fear of failure (social, psychological, ancestral, etc.). We have yet to realize that the first territory of creativity can be found in our own life.

On this Valentine day, are you staying connected to people who won't admit their mistakes, no matter what? Are you allowing mistakes and failure into your life or trying to be perfect? Sometime, the best creative decisions is to let go, and you can only do that when you accept that failure is part of the creative process, each idea, venture, projects, relationship doesn't always work. If you remain open to failure as a creative engine of change, you realize that mistakes truly happen and that the are sources of profound transformation.