Innovation: Teaching HOW Now!

M. Basadur Ph.D.
Professor of Innovation, McMaster University School of Business
President & Founder, Basadur Applied Creativity

GK. VanPatter
Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute
Partner & Co-Founder, UnderstandingLab

Download this conversation as PDF file

1
GK VanPatter: Thanks for agreeing to participate in this series. As Professor of Innovation at McMaster University Business School, I thought you would be a great person to dialogue with regarding developments already under-way outside of design education, that are focused on the direct teaching of cross-disciplinary problem solving process skills. To begin, can I ask you from which educational direction and discipline did you initially approach this subject area?

M.Basadur: I did my doctorate in Organizational Behavior at the University of Cincinnati's School Of Business Administration, however I began my problem solving work in the Research & Development Department at Procter & Gamble where I worked for 20 years, first as a product development engineer and later as an innovation process facilitator.

It was in the course of working with multi-functional internal teams developing new consumer products that I began to look more closely at problem solving processes as well as innovation in general. Procter & Gamble was perhaps my greatest learning institution - my greatest school. There I learned how to identify what I would call inadequacies in thinking among all of us as individuals, in teams and in organizations as a whole. I found that these inadequacies could be significantly improved by learning new thinking and process skills.

My undergraduate education had been in Engineering Physics but I was happy to be given the task, shortly after arriving at Procter & Gamble, of concentrating on developing new creative innovation processes that could be utilized by individuals as well as groups. It was a wonderful opportunity for me. While doing research in this area I connected early on with the Creative Education Foundation, a non profit organization (at State University in Buffalo N.Y.) founded by a man named Alex Osborn. He coined the phrase 'brainstorming' (in 1939) and throughout his life (he died in 1966) believed that people could learn how to think more creatively.

By chance, at an early stage, I happened to be invited to a week long seminar on problem solving. There I was introduced to the work of J.P. Guilford, a giant in the field of psychology and others which seemed to relate to many of the issues facing us at Procter & Gamble. I began to understand that there was something called process as well as content. I realized that we could learn things about how we thought as well as what we thought.

The multi-disciplinary environment of Procter & Gamble became my experimental laboratory and I began to weave what I was learning into my product development work, keeping notes of every application. I noted what processes and structures worked with the R&D community what worked with the marketing group etc.

Bit by bit I talked others into using the concepts that I was learning and developing. Over a period of years, from that very practical research & development beginning, emerged the creation of the transformation process tools that we use in our consulting practice. Today these tools are used by many progressive corporations around the world to help address internal issues and improve external services, products, etc.

2
GK VanPatter: It has been at least twelve years since I first saw you in action Min. I remember the day well and recall that it was in a business setting rather than through the University. You were facilitating an all day design strategy session with a very tough senior multi-disciplinary group. I remember being struck by your ability to externalize and orchestrate process across disciplines.

As you well know, that was an aha! day for me. For years I had worked in multi-disciplinary design consultancies, and always had great interest in tools to help diverse teams better work together. What I saw that day was an adaptable problem solving system that was applicable to complex challenges of all kinds and not discipline or media dependent. That day changed my thinking about what is typically taught as ìproblem solvingî in design school. It also literally changed the direction of my own career.

For those readers who might not be aware of your universe, your work, can you briefly describe what you do?

M.Basadur: Well, at the meeting level that you describe we orchestrate process, often across diverse disciplines. Just as there are subject matter (content) experts, masters of the ìwhatî, we are process experts, masters of ìhowî. To answer your question in another way, inside our consultancy: Basadur Applied Creativity we have 3 central service offerings which I wonít go into in detail here. Suffice it to say that we jump in and help clients do one of three things: 1. immediately address a complex problem, 2. learn such skills for themselves or 3. build entire cultures focused around problem solving/innovation leadership skills. At the foundation of each offering is our Applied Creativity System or Toolkit. In essence these are tools that harnesses creativity. They can be applied to creative problem solving, strategic planning and numerous other challenges. Among the tools is our methodology for finding - solving problems; identifying - overcoming challenges; and establishing - achieving goals.

In many organizations there is a lack of awareness that creative problem solving requires a process and a set of process skills. Most people work with only a limited and unconnected set of problem solving tools. By contrast, we provide a complete interconnected system that is flexible and applicable to any type of problem. As you mentioned earlier, what we teach is not specific to any particular discipline. Use of these tools allows us to bring individual and collective creativity to bear in business and organizational environments where change is the order of the day.

I should stress however that our work is not just about identifying things that are going wrong. Our focus is on recognizing opportunities as well. Perhaps we can come back to this point later.

3
GK VanPatter: Let me try to steer us towards some of the more difficult terrain we are exploring here. As part of this series we are looking at how the mastery of cross-disciplinary process impacts who leads in complex problem solving situations. We are very interested in exploring issues around the question of: Who will lead design in the 21st Century? One of our underlying goals is simply to raise awareness among design education leaders regarding what is at stake here.

For at least 15 years designers have increasingly been called upon to work in collaboration with others addressing problems growing in complexity but their teamwork and process skills are often not up to such challenges.

With few exceptions, mainstream graduate design education still focuses on teaching what we call design with a small d. In such programs designers talk mostly to others within their own discipline, learn discipline specific problem solving skills applicable to match-book sized problems, and primarily work alone at their computers.

The fall-out we see in the workplace is a huge shift in who leads and who follows. What is happening is that other professionals are moving into the leadership void, creating a new breed of multidisciplinary leaders. While we see business schools waking up to the opportunities this void represents, in contrast we see mainstream design education institutions, with a few notable exceptions, lagging far behind.

If we were conducting a competitive analysis of the design education landscape it is evident that there is a considerable opportunity but that open window will likely not remain indefinitely. There are multiple forces already moving to fill that void. Help us place this in context with an alternate perspective from the realm of graduate business education Min. Give us a glimpse of what and whom you teach as Professor of Innovation at the McMaster University Business School.

M.Basadur: I teach creative problem solving to MBA students as well as undergraduates. When I began teaching at McMaster fifteen years ago I had to insert creative problem solving into already established courses. Things however have evolved and today there is more recognition of the importance of such skills.

Now I teach exclusively creative thinking and problem solving. For example: last year all 160 new MBA students took 16 hours of training specifically in creative thinking and problem solving processes. We call it Critical & Creative Thinking. All 400 undergraduates in the School of Business now take one month of training in thinking skills with me.

I also teach the MBA class called Managing Change and Organizational Development. At this point all of my teaching is now based on the Basadur Applied Creativity Tools. These are effectively change-making skills.

4
GK VanPatter: Where did the impetuous originally come from for the Business School to update their curriculum and include cross-disciplinary problem solving skills in this way?

M.Basadur: Outside pressure from the business community demanding that our graduates be able to think better certainly contributed to that evolution as did the students sensing that they were not getting some of the skills they wanted and needed to become effective. From the students themselves came pressure to move more into the forefront of what business and industry is looking for.

Today we teach the process skills and then our students apply those abilities to all kinds of problems depending on their areas of interest. Taking it to the next step, our graduates are then able to help their clients and customers move through the innovation process whatever products or services that might involve.

We think of ourselves as educating leaders. We believe leading effectively today requires cross-disciplinary innovation process skills.

5
GK VanPatter: In the context of business, what are the motivating factors for individuals and organizations? Why is there a high level of interest in obtaining and/or updating cross-disciplinary creative problem solving process knowledge today?

M.Basadur: The size, number, complexity and time frames of the issues facing all of us today impact the interest in such processes. Certainly the reason that I was able to get started at Procter & Gamble was directly related to these critical factors. As the world outside the organization changed it became more complicated, competitive and faster moving. The company recognized that new innovation processes were needed, - that it was impossible to handle all the problems and opportunities coming at them with the old processes and on an individual basis.

No one individual can handle the number of issues because there are so many aspects to them. You have to get people working on inter-disciplinary teams inputting their piece because nobody knows everything. Often we have to operate in areas of uncertainty where the team, assembled from diverse areas of expertise puts together the best it can from many fragmented pieces of the puzzle. It then must trust that judgment.

Most problems are multi-faceted today. Long gone are the days when you could say that a problem is just a product development problem, or a marketing problem or a purchasing problem. Often problems are interwoven, mixed together, to form larger issues facing the organization.

The speed at which we need to address problems and opportunities has also changed. We simply do not have time to do things the way we used to where everything was sequential. We must work in parallel now. We can't wait until the marketing department, passes its ideas on to the product development dept. who then passes them onto manufacturing, etc.. We have to get the groups working together from the start.

With our methods we can get a group of inter functional people coming to a decision in about five hours with the same quality that would have taken nine months of memo writing-sequencing things the old way. With complexity rising and time frames being compressed the need to be able to work together across disciplines has never been greater. For these reasons alone there is considerable interest in what we are doing.

6
GK VanPatter: Can you give us a glimpse of what kinds of problem solving you are asked to facilitate in your consulting work?

M.Basadur: We work with all kinds of organizations, corporations, manufacturers, institutions and individuals. When we are approached for help, the outcomes envisioned by clients cover a wide range of options. Some challenges are directed within the organization while others are related to some aspect of their business externally. They include, inter functional projects of all kinds, strategic planning, innovation and new product development, strategic design, new process development, marketing development, conflict resolution, team building, quality and cost control, etc.

At the individual level we work with people ranging from top management to shop floor workers. Many are professional people. Some are learning how to better consult with their own clients. Some are interested in improving internal innovation abilities. Some are particularly interested in learning how to parallel process with others.

We work with many disciplines, including product designers, systems developers, senior managers, market research, purchasing, advertising people, etc. Name a discipline and we have probably worked with them.

In our work with internal teams we often help create visions and missions as well as plans for getting there. We have done a lot of work with University boards of directors helping them grapple internally with their responsibilities and how to create meaningful strategic plans by involving the faculty and others. We believe strongly in the approach of inclusion. We also work with design teams on product strategy issues of all kinds as well.

The concepts of innovation and creative problem solving are very pervasive and there isn't any part of organizations that are not interested in what we are doing. In essence, we concentrate on teaching and building skills to enable people to work with other people, to creatively define and solve problems. As process facilitators we provide the navigation, the orchestration rather then the content. Developing the ability to separate content from process is part of what we teach.

In the big picture sense we are trying to get corporations and organizations to mainstream creativity in their day-to-day operations. Many organizations have come to the realization that it is not enough just to have a innovation philosophy. To be truly effective one has to have clearly definable processes adaptable to multiple issues and multiple disciplines.

7
GK VanPatter: Your work seems to be partly re-educating and re-conditioning. Does that mean that you think mainstream education has done a bad job of teaching people how to be creative and work together?

M.Basadur: However we define creativity, it is an inborn human faculty, one that we can nourish, cultivate and raise to extraordinary heights in virtually anything we try. As children we allowed our creativity to flourish. As we mature most of us undergo a cultural and educational conditioning process that suppresses our creativity. By the time we become adults we're armed with plenty of judgment and logic but precious little imagination. While all of us do not have the same amount or type of creativity, we have substantially more of it than we use. Most adults use no more than a fraction, perhaps 10 per cent, of their natural creativity each day. Even those who are very creative individually, often encounter barriers to creativity in unorchestrated group settings. Our methodology is designed to uncondition learned habits that block creativity, both at the individual and collective levels.

One also has to appreciate that little of what many managers of today learned in school as they grew up equipped them to develop options or cope with change, - rather, most of formal education was for a very long time and to a large degree still is, based on the concept of rewarding one 'correct' answer with an emphasis on maintaining the status quo not changing it or adapting it.

That educational model had significant impact on those who passed through it. For these reasons new thinking and innovation training which reflects the realities of today can be extremely useful.

8
GK VanPatter: The issues of emphasis and proportion are interesting to consider. We see many organizations focusing on improving and upgrading technology without updating thinking and problem solving process skills in tandem. There is a tendency to strap on these concord jet engines to old underlying chassis and then expect top performance.

When enlightened organizations contact you about working with them on internal issues is it because they have recognized that the underlying chassis also needs some attention?

M.Basadur: That is a very good question. We are just on the verge of people starting to understand that we have to learn how to think differently in order to make any substantial change in how we operate.

Like flavors of the month, many change tools and management ideas have come forward over the years. In western business culture, prosperity teams, quality circles, total quality management are among them. Many such initiatives die on the vine. This is because the organization has not understood that you have to change fundamental thinking skills to make any of these new tools work up to their potential.

Organizations cannot bring in a bunch of training on a new tool without first providing some underlying adaptability and creativity process training. The new tool then fits within this process.

Many organizations would rather write a check and send their people to training on various flavor of the month tools rather then really come to grips with the reality that new change making adaptability behaviors are needed at the top levels and that the top people in the organization must model such behaviors themselves.

9
GK VanPatter: What do you mean by adaptability behaviors?

M.Basadur: Adaptability is a critical factor today. In yesterday's relatively stable world organizations might have been able to concentrate on improving efficiency alone but in a changing world a focus on efficiency alone is no longer enough. While efficiency implies mastering a routine, adaptability means mastering the process of changing the routine. To remain viable today organizations must mainstream adaptability thinking and get it to be part of the day-to-day fabric of the organization. In terms of education at the individual level, this means including both efficiency process and adaptability process training.

10
GK VanPatter: I'm thinking in mid-air here that you are really talking about issues and opportunities inside large organizations today. The challenge that I see here for design education is that presently many of those professionals teaching have only experienced working in tiny, single discipline firms. Many still practice that way. They are simply unaware of what the issues and opportunities are within larger multi-disciplinary organizations.

For many, the issues that we are talking about here have not yet, even at this late date, appeared on their radar screens. There is a significant disconnect here that we hope to explore further in other conversations in this series.

Let me switch gears slightly. In the realm of traditional design, the concept of multi-disciplinary teamwork still has more detractors than advocates. Many see teamwork as a negative distraction. Acknowledging that it can be difficult, can you share with us some of your thoughts on why and what can be done to improve it?

M.Basadur: There are many reasons why teamwork can be difficult and frustrating. Many people are not aware of the difference between content and process and so continuously mix them together, creating confusion. Also people often believe that the way they think (as individuals or as a discipline) is the way everyone else thinks and fail to articulate simply or clearly enough.

People have different styles of innovation. Depending on the nature of the team, some participants might be generators, others might be conceptualizes, optimizers, or implementors. All are needed in the problem solving process and we try to make people aware of these individual differences. This realization is often missing from the teamwork equation. Keep in mind that there are many types of teams. Some might consist of designers, manufacturers, and end users; some might consist entirely of administrators, lawyers, engineers, etc. etc., depending on numerous variables.

In team work, the presence of a visible process is most important. When you get a group of people together, unless they have a common articulatable process that they can follow together, chaos results and much time is wasted. Without process orchestration, common teamwork problems tend to occur, among them: jumping directly into 'solving the problem' without first considering what the real problem is- without defining it properly. Focusing only on content and not process is another tendency, which means meetings turn into undisciplined discussions; facts, ideas, evaluations, action steps and new problems are introduced at random. Becoming mired in territorial disputes instead of focusing on a problem at hand is also common.

In many organizational atmospheres meeting participants say only what they believe the boss wants to hear instead of talking about what the real issues are. Rather then trying to draw upon their wide-ranging backgrounds and experience, they simply jockey to look good and or to ensure the boss looks good. Sometimes group members don't trust one another enough to share what is really going on.

Participants being in different phases of the process at the same time without realizing it is also common. If someone is trying to define a problem and someone else is already trying to solve it there is bound to be conflict.

Often in meetings leaders lacking skills in facilitating group processes themselves, steer towards their own points of view rather than coach the group toward innovative action. Rarely do groups critique their meeting process to see how they might improve future gatherings.

People often settle for holding unproductive meetings as an excuse for not developing bold, innovative solutions. All of these tendencies impact the effectiveness of teamwork.

11
GK VanPatter: As part of the innovation process, you counsel a shared responsibility for something called Problem Finding. In organizations that have already adjusted their internal consciousness towards this kind of thinking such inclusion would be welcomed, but as you well know many organizations including design education institutions, are far behind that change curve. In these settings still based on the command and control model of management, the kind of shared Problem Finding responsibility you advocate, is likely to be misunderstood and not appreciated. Problem Finding essentially changes the culture of an organization.

If innovation is being initiated by the workers or in the case of education, the faculty, or perhaps even the students, who find themselves facing old organizational structures and administrative consciousness, how do the initiators convince management that Problem Finding is being carried out in the best interest of the organization?

M.Basadur: Problem Finding is critical. We try to get people to understand that problems are not bad things. Although In the west the word 'problem' usually carries simplistic and negative connotations, problem finding is actually the beginning of the innovation process.

The Japanese corporate model is interesting to compare. In Japan at Nippondenso and other forward thinking companies people (management and labor) are taught that problems are golden eggs - that workers should be discontented with their work, with their company's problems, products, services, etc. They stress the importance of an excellent, continuous problem finding process. The process itself is considered as valuable as the solutions.

When people come to learn our tools and methodology, no matter what their misgivings, they see that it is very simple and manageable, that people don't go off and do crazy things. It is easier to manage people who are thinking in a disciplined kind of way, then it is to try to do all the innovation work yourself. Our skill-building workshops show managers how to leverage their time by empowering people to find their own problems, solve them and implement the solutions.

Problem Finding activity includes continuously searching for changes, trends, challenges and opportunities, not only things that are going wrong. It includes discovering opportunities for improving existing products, services, procedures and processes, improving customer satisfaction, and improving one's job. Problem Finding is taking the initiative to discover problems to solve instead of waiting to react to problems that discover you.

We place great emphasis on coming up with great problems and exciting, innovative, problem definitions in challenge form. Solutions pop out and are almost automatic when you have spent time and involved people in the problem definition process. We also teach how challenges can be aligned, individual challenges, departmental challenges, etc.

Like all other organizations, universities and education institutions face the challenge of how to mainstream innovation across a wide spectrum of persons and activities.

As I mentioned earlier we often work with universities, so I am familiar with their particular challenges. In the end, the more people in an organization are aware of and are practicing these process skills, the more smoothly innovation occurs across the spectrum. In the education realm that applies to the administration, faculty and students. In the business world it applies to corporate leaders and employees.

A lot of what we do is bring these skills to organizations and ensure that they are understood and integrated across all levels. There is no question that integration of awareness across the spectrum from top to bottom becomes of critical importance to the innovation capabilities building process.

12
GK VanPatter: An approach to teamwork still seen in many graduate design schools is to throw students together for a ìproblem solvingî assignment without any group skills training whatsoever and let them figure out how to work. We see this occurring partly because many of those teaching, lack such training and knowledge themselves. Their approach reflects their own traditional design education from a bygone era. Would it be safe to say that this approach is not something you would recommend?

M.Basadur: Teams can not just be thrown together. To work effectively they need group skills training before they begin. There may be a learning curve in the beginning but the process is designed to be simple and the impact of mastering such skills is significant. We have an equation that we use to underline the need for both process and process skills:

QUALITY RESULTS = CONTENT(What)+PROCESS(How)+PROCESS SKILLS(How Skills)

13
GK VanPatter: Designers tend to have very sharp critical thinking skills. Due to the way design is taught, criticism is often the sharpest tool in a traditionally trained designers toolbox and the one most often used. Despite the many potential connections between your universe and the emerging new universe for design, you and I both know the world is full of skeptics. In closing, what can we say to readers who might be asking themselves what all of this has to do with what they do on a day to day basis as designers today?

M.Basadur: One important process skill that I like to share with others is the ability to adapt these ideas from one area to another. If keeping things simple is the most important process skill, perhaps the second most important is the ability to adapt. The worst way to learn is to confront every new idea with the words " I'm different, that won't work for me." The best way to learn is to say, "I'm different but so is everybody else. How might I adapt this information so it will work for me? Adaptation is the secret of learning.

Copyright © 2003 NextDesign Leadership Institute. All Rights Reserved.
NextD Journal text may be quoted and printed freely for non-commercial purposes with proper acknowledgment. If you wish to reproduce or transmit any of this text for commercial use, please send a copyright permission request to journal@nextd.org