Creative People Must Be Stopped (6 page)

Insufficient Vocabularies

Using the language that best suits our ideas won't get us far if our “vocabulary” in that language is too impoverished to express our ideas accurately. Ironically, while the store of business ideas is becoming richer and more creative by the day, many people's vocabularies are getting thinner as they overuse buzzwords, clichés, and business-speak terms. Talking about the
bottom line
, the
net net
, the
expected synergies
, and being
leveraged
may make us feel as though we're part of the club, but often these kinds of expressions are used poorly in vague ways that fail to express clear, definite ideas.

A similar point applies to using technical language outside the context in which it has a precisely defined meaning. Terms like
profit margin, value
, and
return on investment
have specific, precise definitions and uses in the field of accounting, but in more general use their meaning tends to be watered down and generalized. To be sure, expanding our technical vocabularies can increase our power to express ideas precisely—but only if we use the terms to articulate specific meanings. Otherwise, even in our internal monologues, it's easy for this kind of shorthand to obscure the vagueness of the underlying idea. Here's an easy test: Can we restate our point concretely and specifically, without using the “technical” terms?

Although you may be able to express simple ideas through storytelling, playacting, or taking snapshots, communicating more masterfully through these ways takes work you are not always willing to do. For example, if you've ever taken a picture of a famous landmark, you may have noticed that your pictures do not look quite as compelling as those you see in travel books, on Web sites, or on postcards. It is not a matter of the equipment; many classic photographs were taken with equipment far inferior to today's digital wizardry. Instead it is a matter of those photographers' being articulate in their art. They don't settle for the clichéd photo you will get by shooting standing in front of the tourist shop. Rather, they look at the scene from all angles, at all times of day, and in all types of light, all the while taking pictures, in an effort to find the best way to express what they have learned from all this looking and seeing.

Failures of Communication

The goal of expression is to represent our ideas accurately to ourselves and to others. Even though you may be articulate in expressing your ideas, there is a potential for them to be misinterpreted on the receiving side. For example, you may use different terms than the listener would to express the same concepts, use the same terms to express different concepts, or possibly even have no overlap in terms or concepts. The constraint takes different forms depending on which communication error takes place.

Correspondence
is caused when different words are used for the same basic concept. You may have observed this “violent agreement” as two people failed to realize they were saying the same thing.
Conflict
results when the same words describe different concepts. This often occurs when communicators use technical terms in imprecise ways, especially across different areas of expertise. The word
efficient
means something very different to an industrial engineer (more output for less input) than it does to a general manager (done more easily). Imprecisely using words like
value, profit margin
, or
bottom line
, to name a few, can reliably create this error.
Contrast
occurs when there is no overlap in words or concepts, which makes communication all but impossible (Shaw and Gaines, 1989).

In your effort to convey your ideas to others, these constraints can pose significant challenges. They can make it impossible to get meaningful feedback that might help you improve your ideas; they make the path toward implementation more difficult as people don't know how to help; and they endanger the adoption of your ideas, because people don't want to adopt what they can't understand.

Overcoming Expression Constraints

Expression need not be a constraint on our ability to work with ideas, by ourselves or with others. By nurturing your innate ability to communicate in different modes, and by putting effort into using those languages articulately and precisely, you can improve your ability to generate and evaluate the ideas and insights that will be needed to make the innovation process a success.

Stay Mindful of Your Favored Ways of Talking (and Thinking)

Many years ago my wife (and best friend) gave me some candid feedback about the clichés I had begun to sprinkle liberally into my conversations: “That's the way the cookie crumbles!” I'd say. “That's the net net.” “It is what it is!” I felt down-home and folksy using these kinds of expressions, but she pointed out that I wasn't really communicating any definite meaning when I used them.

All of us fall into these kinds of communication habits, and the first step to recovery is to notice them. This small act of mindfulness can bring you important insights about the subtle differences between what you are trying to say and what you are actually communicating. Try recording yourself in meetings and conversations and listening carefully afterward for your pet ways of talking. Or try asking a friendly colleague to wave a hand when you use an expression without clear and definite meaning. Reread your own memos and ruthlessly highlight every cliché or vague expression you can find. Better yet, ask someone else to read your memo and hunt down all the expressions that aren't doing useful work.

Once you begin noticing your verbal shorthand, with a little practice you can consciously reach a little deeper for the precise ideas you are trying to convey. When you hear yourself say “Think outside the box!” did you mean “With our established reputation and customer base, what we're looking for is a slightly more novel version of this product than our competitors offer” or “Unless we come up with something truly radical, we have no chance to compete with the gorillas in this market”? Were you even clear in your own mind about which of these you were trying to say?

Get Out the Crayons

Drawing and other visual techniques can open up a wide range of expressive possibilities. Many of us, though, believe we simply can't draw and don't have either the talent or the time to learn how. But the goal here isn't to become a master artist. There are many forms of visual communication that we already know or that are easy to pick up.

If you ever get a chance to peek inside the notebook that most designers and architects use to record their personal thoughts and problem-solving records, chances are you won't see Michelangelo-like productions suitable for framing. You'll see stick figures and crooked lines along with bad perspective and all sorts of other errors you might make yourself. The difference is that designers and architects aren't embarrassed by these “flaws”; they know they were “just thinking” when they made those sketches. Their focus was on visually articulating an idea just well enough to be able to play with it, test it, combine it with other ideas, and share it with others. In fact, the more time we spend making really good drawings of an idea, the more likely we are to become attached to that particular expression of the concept, and the less willing we'll be to let it go.

The book
Rapid Viz
, by Kurt Hanks and Larry Belliston (2006), offers a concise lesson in creating the kind of quick, lean, throwaway “thought experiment” sketches that I'm advocating. Their method involves developing a personalized vocabulary consisting of the visual symbols you are likely to use the most. After a little practice, you'll be able to effortlessly do sketches that include persons, chairs, products, arrows, lettering, and other symbols that help get your idea across. There are also a number of programs available online and as packaged software that offer ways of drawing and mapping relationships among ideas using a computer. Although your new drawing abilities will seem impressive to some, what will be even more impressive is your improved ability to articulate your ideas.

Sell Your Ideas

Many would-be innovators make an assumption that causes them no end of frustration as it torpedoes their efforts and leads straight to rejection of their ideas. The assumption is that their task is done when they have come up with an innovation they are sure will work, and that the people around them are somehow obligated to accept it as soon as it is presented to them. The reality is that the work of innovation isn't done until you've
sold
the idea to others.

By selling, I don't mean making a “hard sell.” Consider that at one time you needed to be sold on the idea, too. When you first came up with it, it might have been well down the list of possibilities you were considering. But eventually it grew on you, and you came to see its advantages over other solutions. Now take a step back and look at the idea from the perspective of other people. If you can articulate the idea in a way that makes its merits clear, others can sell themselves on it, too.

Sweat the Presentation

Edward Tufte, rock-star statistician and author of
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
, put it best: “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.” In his article “PowerPoint Is Evil,” he rightly argues that “slideware” tools like PowerPoint have a peculiar built-in logic that tends to favor making slides easy to produce, rather than making them communicate better (Tufte, 2003). For example, think about the last time you put together a slideware presentation and found yourself editing sentences to get them short enough to fit a bulleted list. You may also remember struggling to get a photo to fit on a slide with text, make a table of information display at a readable size, or, god forbid, get a video to play reliably. This also applies to spreadsheet programs and clipart the same way it applies to all languages: the tool favors expression of one kind over others.

How do you fight this? Simple: first think about what you want to say and then think about the best way to say it. When choosing the best way, pay attention to the following three considerations. First, consider the best way of expressing the idea on its own terms. If your idea is based on an insight about large amounts of categorical data, then a chart, table, or spreadsheet is probably your best bet. If your ideas are about a process, then a process flow chart, storyboard, or timeline might be better suited. If your idea involves artifacts in the physical world, then a physical prototype would make sense.

The second consideration is to decide what kind of interaction your material is meant to support. For instance, if you are intending to provide input for a free-ranging discussion or a kick-off brainstorm, maybe video, photos, and terse headlines of text are enough to inform and excite the group; you probably don't want the details of a spreadsheet or the formal structure of a bulleted list. To present the results of your analysis with the goal of getting a decision made, you will want to put all the detailed data, analyses, and supporting information in a handout, allowing people to parse the information at a rate and in an order that works best for them. In that case, use the slideware to help manage time and to provide landmarks for navigating the information you've provided. Are you facilitating an interactive collaboration that requires you to document the insights? Maybe preprint a set of easel pad sheets, tape them to the whiteboard, and provide markers for everyone present.

I am not at all naïve about the difficulty of deciding how to weight these considerations, nor about the significant amount of work it takes to learn a new form of expression. It is a tremendous amount of work. But I see it as a simple trade-off: you can do the work up front to try to ensure clear communication and speed the process of the group during the meeting, or you can try to get everyone else to do the work in the meeting itself, a process sure to take longer, result in errors, be more frustrating, and leave no time for doing the work that prompted the meeting in the first place.

Putting the Framework to Work: Individual Constraints

To aid you in assessing the constraints at this level, use the following diagnostic survey. It is intended to help you assess the extent to which the constraints described in this chapter may be unintentional hindrances to innovation in your organization.