Foreword
The capacity to originate has become the most sought after talent of our time. There is growing consensus that human creativity has replaced scale as the defining feature of the 21st century Corporation. This shift raises new challenges and opportunities. Recall how the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement built reliable and repeatable systems for ever greater productivity. Today, we need the same kind of systematic capability for driving creativity. Organizations that learn how to manage for creativity will have a crucial competitive advantage. But unlike the transparent process of TQM, the thought processes involved in producing breakthrough innovations are hidden, and even mysterious -- not just to the awestruck admirers, but often to the innovators themselves.
This lack of transparency has lead to the common belief that creativity, whatever it is, is something special. But is it? Is it really a rare gift of a select few (DaVinci, Mozart), or is it an egalitarian skill we all possess to some degree, like athletics, that can be improved with practice? These are critical business questions. Their answers determine whether we as managers can substantially improve the creative process that drives Innovation.
If game-changing ideas arise mainly through inspired, unpredictable flashes of a maverick genius, then the role of the manager is very limited. Your job is reduced to cheerleader. Round up all the gifted people and then get out of their while they work their magic. If, on the other hand, creativity turns out to be a trainable skill, then the manager’s role is significant.
Nicknamed “The Fuzzy Front- End”, Industry has tended to treat creativity as more Alchemy than Chemistry – a seemingly magical process that has the power to turn lead into gold, a small idea into a gigantic discontinuity. The alchemists were attempting to investigate nature before basic scientific tools and practices were available, relying instead on traditions, basic observations, and mysticism to fill in the gaps. However, when new technology allowed scientists to see more deeply into the core of molecules, Alchemy began to fall apart. Thanks in no small part to the work of Darrell Mann, we are at this point in the study of creativity.
In Hands-On Systematic Innovation, Darrell Mann provides compelling evidence that creativity can be a predictable and controllable process. Despite the fact that many innovators quip their Big Idea “just seemed to pop into my head”, Mann shows us that such originality simply cannot be produced out of thin air. This means that, paradoxically, even the most radical new concept must, by definition, be firmly rooted in “old knowledge”.
With the benefit of hindsight, all “revolutionary” innovations can be described in terms of an evolutionary extension of some existing technology -- “somebody, some where, has already solved your problem.” This claim holds true for everything from the jet engine to the jet ski.
In the following pages, Mann gives example after example that convincingly demonstrates the emergence and implementation of innovation is neither mysterious, random, nor haphazard. The thesis for Hands-On Systematic Innovation is grounded in this insight. It is jammed full with the knowledge and tools necessary to make the creative process genuinely systematic.
February - 2007
Craig B. Wynett
Chief Creative Officer
The Procter & Gamble Company
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