The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in business, economics, philosophy, sociology, and related subjects.
Ideaflow: Why Creative Businesses Win is by Professor Jeremy Utley is Director of Executive Education at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (known as the “d.school”) in Palo Alto, California, and Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering; and Professor Perry Kelbahn, a co-founding member of Stanford’s d.school faculty.
The TU Library collection includes other books about different aspects of creative thinking.
As the publisher’s description page explains,
Ideaflow: the number of ideas you or your team can generate in a set amount of time
We all want great ideas, but few actually understand how they’re born. Innovation doesn’t come from a sprint or a hackathon–it’s a result of maximizing ideaflow.
Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn of Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the “d.school”) offer a proven strategy for coming up with great ideas by yourself or with your team, and quickly determining which are worthy. Drawing upon their combined decades of experience leading Stanford’s premier Launchpad accelerator and advising some of the world’s most innovative organizations, like Microsoft, Michelin, Keller Williams Realty, and Hyatt, they’ll teach you how to:
- Overcome dangerous thinking traps
- Find inspiration in unexpected places
- Trick your own brain to be more creative
- Design and deploy affordable experiments
- Fill your innovation pipeline
- Unleash your own creative potential, as well as the potential of others
Perhaps you have experienced low ideaflow. Have you been in that quiet conference room, with a half-filled whiteboard, and an unmet business target?. With the proven system in this book, entrepreneurs, managers, and leaders will learn how to tap into surprising and valuable ideas on demand and fill the creative pipeline with breakthrough ideas.
As the authors explain in an online interview,
Firstly, business problems are idea problems because like most other problems we face, they do not have one answer. If you’re doing math, (with advanced math it’s no longer true that problems only have one right answer) unless you are doing that, most of the time there is a single answer to a problem.
The reality is, for any of the problems we face, there are a thousand possible answers and yet when one thinks about problems in need of a solution. We as humans approach it a particular way and there is a lot of bias at play which may be conscious or subconscious. […]
When we say that a business problem is an idea problem, the first thing is: generate lots of solutions first and ideas, recognising that contrary to expectation, the quality of your ideas does not devalue over time, it has the chance to improve significantly particularly if you have tools and mindsets at your disposal. If you treat a business problem as an idea problem, then you start to realise your own creativity doesn’t degrade nearly as quickly and the first ideas thought of are and are not nearly as great as the ultimate solution you ended up implementing. […]
There are so many problems that are facing us all the time and it’s all linked and related. The tendency is to avoid the need for more options because anything that’s unfamiliar, as human beings we tend to flee uncertainty. We naturally go towards what we already know because we know how to deal with something we have done before. This often results in postponing or delaying in dealing with the actual issue. This gets back to Perry’s earlier comment about continuous disruption. We delay things that we don’t know how to resolve or don’t have clean answers for.
How do we know which problem to work on? Firstly, start with any of the problems, because the tendency is to say, until we know the perfect problem to work on, we’re not going to do anything. This pattern is seen all the time with people at Stanford. They leave and they go ‘I can’t wait to use these methods whenever I get the perfect project to use them’. This habit is related to disruption.
We believe innovation should be a continuous activity. It should be a capability that you are developing and attending to regularly. It requires a kind of fodder of new problems all the time in order to be refining and developing and when people start to realise it’s actually not about a meeting on the calendar, but more about developing that consistent attention to generating options and a continual focus to new problems to be solved.
You need problems to put into that daily practice and there is never a shortage of problems! By avoiding that unread email because you don’t know how to deal with it, all of a sudden you cope by foregrounding practice rather than foregrounding an event, by foregrounding capability development. People realise they now they have somewhere to place all of these questions that they’ve been deferring, all these challenges that they’ve been ignoring. […]
To me the permission to play, to be allowed to have fun is about psychological safety and part of psychological safety is permission to have fun.
You know you are in trouble when people laugh or smile, they look over their shoulder because they hope someone’s not hurting. That’s like the death knell for creativity. But there’s also just even more, I don’t know if it’s more fundamentally or not, I don’t know where it ranks in the hierarchy, but there’s something about permission to not be brilliant, permission to not be the creative one.
We focus a lot on the language and tools of improvisation in our work and one of the things that really struck us a few years ago, a world-renowned improviser named Dan Klein teaches in our programme, and he gave our students a very simple instruction. He said don’t be creative, be obvious. This was an amazing gift because when you realise if the three of us are brainstorming, if the mode is one of us is going to win the brainstorm because we have the best idea, like forget it, we’re toast.
However, if the mental model is we collectively win, if we imagine something that none of us have ever thought about before, then that’s it. It just sets is it about winning? Is it a tennis match? Is there a collective that transcends individual egos, individual ownership, all that stuff. This notion is a simplicity of saying don’t be creative, be obvious, because sometimes if we’re just brainstorming this conversation, by the way, I think a good example of being obvious, none of us are trying to think of like the really blinding, brilliant thing but a good conversation with contributory ideas and exchanges.
Here is an excerpt from the book.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)