A fascinating conversation with Dr David Hall - Chief Executive of the
Ideas Centre Group.  We talk about the differences between creativity
and innovation (spoiler: they're not the same thing) and how to get the
best ideas and solutions from your creative meetings.

Transcript

My guest today is Dr. David Hall, who is the chief exec of the Ideas Center group. And David is an expert on creativity and innovation, which are not the same thing. So David, welcome. Thank you for coming on. I heard you speak on this, which is why I asked you to come onto the show. So can we talk about the difference between creativity and innovation?

David Hall (00:35 ):
Of course. And it's an absolute pleasure to have the opportunity to get involved with the podcast. Two very simple definitions for me are at the heart of all this. Everyone talks about creativity and innovation, but very few people have an understanding of what they really mean in a very concise way. Creativity is simply the process of generating ideas that are both novel, in other words, hadn't thought of that before, and useful in that you can see how to make that novel idea work. So it's generating ideas. It's the ideation process. And it's all about that combination of novelty and usefulness. Whereas, innovation is the implementation thing. It's the doing thing, is taking that creative idea and implementing it to give you a step function change in the organisational context. So, big difference between the two. Creativity is all about idea generation and innovation is all about implementation.

Kiran Kapur (01:28 ):
So I thought, like probably most people coming to this thing, great, we're going to go and be creative. I need to come up with all these wonderfully creative ideas. I'm a marketer, so I can do this. So we'll all go off and have a brainstorm or a thought shower.

David Hall (01:43 ):
Yes, that's normally the start point for people, and brainstorming is often quoted... When I ask people, "Have you done creative problem solving techniques before?", everyone pipes up with, "Oh yeah, brainstorming. We do brainstorming on a regular basis," is often quoted as being a creative process, but is seldom, if ever, creative, for a whole bunch of very good reasons. We are naturally preconditioned by the past. So when we brainstorm, what we tend to do is rake over our past and identify what from our past we think is going to be relevant moving forward. So we very quickly generate a whole list of ideas that are entirely consistent with everything we've ever done before, which completely lacks any novelty. Novelty is a fresh connection in the brain effectively. It's relatively slow to form.

And actually one of the rules of brainstorming is that you need to eliminate all filtering. We want people to come up with their ideas very quickly thinking that that will add to the creative process. And all it does actually is condemn you to more of the same thinking. We generate long lists of ideas in brainstorms, but they're all variations on what we've done before. So there's nothing new in there whatsoever. It's perfect if what you're looking for is continuous improvement, which is kind of incremental improvement on what you've always had. But if you want novelty, we need to create space to make a new connection in the brain. And that's quite, quite different.

Kiran Kapur (03:17 ):
I think the interesting thing there is the idea of timing. So a brainstorm, we say, we set it up, we go to a room, we all get together, we all come up with the ideas and every idea is allowed, et cetera, et cetera. But you're saying for creativity, you actually need a longer process. So how do you do that?

David Hall (03:36 ):
It's not necessarily a longer process. It's just that we need more time to generate that novel thought process, that new connection in the brain. So within the space of half an hour, you can readily generate novel ideas provided you understand the mechanisms for generating that novel idea. And we need rules. Rules of the game. Playfulness is one of the key elements. Young children are absolutely fabulous when it comes to generating novel ideas because they're uncluttered in their heads by any preconceived ideas. So everything they're generating is a relatively new idea. They are brilliant when it comes to novelty. They're rubbish when it comes to useful, by the way, but that's another story entirely, because they just don't have the life experience to make it work. But when it comes to novelty, they're brilliant. Adults are rubbish at novel because our brains are cluttered with so much from our past. All our education, all our experience and what have you, builds patterns in our brains that then lock us in more of the same thinking.

(04:39 ):
So if we want to play and generate new ideas, adults need rules of engagement. If you take a small group of children and ask them to go play, no problem whatsoever, they will invent thought processes on the spot. If you tell a group of your colleagues to go play for a short time, they'll look at you as if you've lost the plot, quite frankly, because they have no idea how, in a work context, to go play. When what you actually mean is generate completely novel thought processes. Adults can play, but they need rules of the game. And each of the creativity techniques that we use has a detailed set of rules that the facilitator needs to follow to make sure that everyone's playing the same game, everyone understands what the rules are. Then you can release the novelty. It's not that it takes a long time. It just takes special attention to the thought processes and understanding what's happening inside people's heads. Does that make sense?

Kiran Kapur (05:35 ):
Yes. When I heard you speak before, I thought about this idea that, yes, if you tell a group of children to go and play, they just do. But if you told a group of adults, if you have a break time in any session with adults, everybody immediately gets their phones out and starts looking terribly important rather than doing what children do, which is go and find somebody to go and play together with. I thought that was a really, really interesting concept. The other thing I found fascinating was your view of experts. You were saying that you don't always want the experts to be doing the creativity.

David Hall (06:10 ):
No, I think in any organisation we develop a world of what is, which is basically the way we do things around here, based on past experience again. So it's always that backward looking perspective. And everyone in the organisation tends to conform to the way we do things around here. That world of what is. The experts are effectively the creators and the guardians of that world. So they have a vested interest in making sure that the rules of the world of what is are maintained, and you end up with more of the same thinking. Experts have a great role to play in taking a novel idea and finding a way of adapting it, to make it useful, to retain that novelty, but adapt it so that it would enhance that world that they were previously trapped in, hopefully giving you a step function change, which is exactly what you want in the innovation process.
(07:00 ):
So expose the vital in innovation, but when it comes to escaping from more of the same thinking, naivety is at an absolute premium because naive individuals have no difficulty generating fresh thought processes. And that's where the playfulness comes in. Young children are fabulously naive. So if you're solving a problem within the organisation, getting a group of experts together is fine if what you're looking for is incremental improvement of the same world, but if you want people to break the rules, then you need people who are less experienced in that world of what is, that are more liberated in generating fresh thought processes. And it's that interplay between the experts and the naive that gives you that combination of usefulness and novelty, which is core to the creative process.

Kiran Kapur (07:50 ):
So is one of the issues as a company or an organisation you need to actually know, are you trying to do an incremental change? And as you said, that then is the Kaizen principle. That's what you do. You incremental change.

David Hall (08:00 ):
Absolutely.

Kiran Kapur (08:00 ):
And do you need to know that that's what you're aiming for, or we actually want to be innovative? Do you find companies that think they want to be innovative when what they actually want to be as just the incrementally improved?

David Hall (08:13 ):
Absolutely. And key for me is understanding the difference between the two. Kaizen, continuous improvement, Lean Six Sigma, call it what you will, is a fabulous tool for cultural revolution, getting everyone involved in the incremental improvement of the organisation. I am a huge fan of continuous improvement, but it is quite, quite different from the innovation process. And for me, senior management leadership in an organisation need to understand that differentiation between the two because then they can understand the interplay. The two sit beautifully alongside each other, but should not be confused.

(08:51 ):
Many is the time I talk to organisations and they talk about innovation strategies and they say, yes, yes, yes, we've got a system for innovation in the organisation. What they then go on to do is to describe what is effectively a continuous improvement suggestion scheme process. What they say is we've told everyone in the organisation to come up with fresh thinking, to generate innovative ideas, and we're just waiting for them to come up with that blockbuster idea that will transform the organisation. You often find that leadership actually sit, wait, and just sit waiting. They don't see t