Creative Reframing. Dr. House at your Bed.

Stop before you go about solving a problem! Your missing a great chance to disrupt, think out-of-the-box, re-invent business.

As an engineer, and I would say also as a manager, we are trained and take great pride in being very fast at assessing a problem and then properly applying a (known!) solution to the problem. In some cases this is exactly the right thing to do.

Design Thinking goes through cycles of divergent thinking to create solutions – and convergent thinking to make solutions. Here’s how to diverge.

Open creative spaces

But and especially, if you’ve been to experience your customers (see my earlier post on it) and now you’ve worked up your impressions with some pragmatic visualizations and sticky storytelling (see my other post on this). Now you want to open up creative spaces to be innovative!

There’s many great examples out there that started with some guys taking a step back, looking at their “world” from different perspectives and go a bit nuts.
Here’s a beautiful piece that I got from Andreas.

Fantastic, isn’t it?

It’s primarily a semantic exercise

Allow yourself a moment to do some Creative Reframing.
In my experience this is one of the methods that has the biggest emotional span: from participants that totally hate it to others that love it, both because of the tension and space it creates.

It really is a semantic exercise.

It’s about completing two questions.

1. What if ….?

2. How might we ….?

OK? Simple?

Again, don’t answer the questions – complete them.

An example

1. What if we couldn’t hire anyone, because no-one was interested to come work in our call centers?

2. How might we still be the industry leader in terms of personalized customer service?

Another one

1. What if our customers were to dive in cold waters?

2. How might we make an underwater camera that can be operated with neoprene gloves?

Now, this can lead to quite some interesting results.

When I bought the above camera, it took my kids (then not older than 8 years old) about 3 minutes to figure out how to turn it on, record and play what they just recorded. Without consulting a manual.

Have you ever tried to get going with a HD video camera that is not waterproof? Too many buttons, too many functions…

So, you may consciously want to use restricting “What if”-questions to get focus in your topics.

“What, if I was blind”, “… had no hands free”, “… couldn’t read”.

Or, be a VIP like Roger Federer.

Or, go bananas with “What, if …” questions like ” … the night was light.”, ” … people wouldn’t work if they were paid.”, ” …

Solar Impulse (April 9th, 2014 is the big day!!)

I am not claiming that Bertrand Piccard was exactly doing Creative Reframing as I describe it here. But from the way he told his story, it could have been something like this: “On these last agonizing hours in ‘Breitling Orbiter 3’, with less than 40 kg of fuel left, not knowing whether I’d be able to land and finally complete the round-the-world in a hot-air balloon, I swore to never again be dependent on organic fuel.”

The Creative Reframing for Solar Impulse could have been:

1. What if I had no organic fuel on board?

2. How might we do a complete round-the-world-trip with a flying vehicle?

The Training Video

Again, here’s the training video with Nick and me explaining the basics (again in Swiss German with French subtitles).

So, Creative Reframing is a comparably short (it can be as short as 60 minutes), but an absolute key step in your innovation process – especially as a team. It’s like unfolding an unpainted canvas for your ideas. Skip this step and your most likely to be bound to problem-solving, only. Allow yourself and your team to create that creative space.

I can’t wait to write about how to paint that canvas when we come to Pitching and Watering Holes…. (I know, I keep writing that. But I am sticking to my backlog.)

Dr. House (played by Hugh Laurie) is a protagonist that gets the unusual, not so obvious medical cases (problems) to solve. All he and his team do is “think out of the box”, ask “What if…” questions. And, I find his way very entertaining. What an ass!

Here’s the “Top 10 reasons to love Dr. House” on youtube. Finally a video clip in my blog that’s in English! Have fun.

15 Meanings. Who are You?

Visualization and Storytelling. A Pig does the Trick.