But Out!

Greetings.

I want to start today with some bad news. This will be the last appearance of Cicero Speaks this year. But I will be back in the first week in January and will be there for you through 2009. I am sure you will cope with my absence. You will have your friends and family to see you through as well as repeats of the Sound of Music and The Great Escape. All equally entertaining if not so informative or enlightening.

And how did you get on during Napkin Week? I did well. I picked up two napkins and a pair of gloves dropped by a passer by. I registered as a bone marrow donor and I began to mentor a troubled teenager to help keep him from trouble by acting as a male role model to him. Can you imagine me a male role model?

So ‘what did you do today to make yourself feel proud’? What napkins, serviettes or tissues did you pick up?

Today I want to introduce you to two words that are going to change your life and transform your business. Two words that will help make our teams and us more creative, more innovative and more positive, and in consequence help revolutionise our businesses. I know that’s a big claim but read on for my secret formula.

In my book the two most damaging words to creativity in any business, any team, are ‘yes but’. These are of course closely followed by the most damaging three words-health and safety. But back to my point.

I bet you hear ‘yes but’ all day long unless you are very lucky and work in the most creative team in the history of mankind though I am equally sure that as a sensible Cicero Speaks follower, disciple and apostle, this will not be the kind of language that you yourself would use.

Anyway if this is the language used in your team and by those around you, you will know that this means that ideas and thoughts generated are not fully explored or built on but killed off with muted enthusiasm and negative criticism.

I think it was Anita Roddick who said (and when I use this phrase you can be sure I am 100% certain that it was her who said it) that ‘if new ideas are constantly turned down, it turns people off, they stop generating ideas, no matter how much you pay them’. As a marketing leader it is my job to make sure this does not happen. I want teams to be more creative. And I want them to work together to improvise, to come up with new ideas, to wonder ‘what if’.

And in successfully creative teams great and productive improvisation depends entirely on each team member being willing to accept each other’s ideas and build on them. ‘Accept and build’ is the improviser’s mantra. In practice this means saying ‘yes’ to ideas and then trying to enhance or add value to them.

And all we have to do is to change one word in the language of our business to achieve this and to transform our workspace. And this is my great secret to creating great creativity and innovation in our teams-move from ‘yes but’ to ‘yes and’. Simple but deadly and yet so very difficult to do.

But, and please note I chose and used ‘but’ in this instance with great care, if we can learn to use ‘yes’ and ‘and’ in the same sentence together, we will unleash the immense potential for startling new ideas that lies dormant within us all and within all our teams, and will create a great source and a powerful new stimulus of inspiring invention and innovation. For now we have the power to accept an idea for what it is without having to criticise it. We have the opportunity to build on it and see where it goes, where it might take us. And in consequence we can create something quite unexpected.

This approach, my ‘yes and’ improvisation mindset, means we avoid killing off a potentially great idea before it has even left the starting blocks. This approach generates positive exploration. And is only the start of a feasibility exercise to reveal whether an idea is useful or not.

I guarantee that 90% of this wild exploration will be useless, totally impractical and a complete waste of time, but I can also assure you that 10% will take you to places you would never have dreamed of going.

Now at this point I bet the words ‘yes but’ are forming in your head. You want to kill this off. You don’t want to go down the route. But I am busy. But no one else will want to do this. But my boss won’t buy into this. And so on and so forth. Now is the time to tell ‘but’ to but out

And consider this. The Dyson was invented because someone said ‘and we could remove the dust bag from the vacuum’. The clockwork radio was born because Trevor Baylis said ‘and we could build a radio without the need for expensive batteries’. The Walkman which begat the iPod came about because someone at Sony said ‘and we could remove the recording function and speakers from a cassette player’. And while some people might have been saying ‘yes but it is impossible to get my computer in America to speak with this one in Australia’, along came Sir Tim Berners Lee and said ‘yes and we could build the world wide web to link these computers’, and in the batting of an eye, internet gaming, dating and porn arrived on the scene and transformed our lives forever.

So go on, give it a try. What have you got to lose? And remember, no ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’. Just plenty of ‘yes ands’.

Now before I go off for my turkey and Christmas pud I would like to leave you with one final thought for you to mull over during the festive break and help me solve my Christmas conundrum.
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We buy our petrol these days in litres and yet car performance is measured in miles per gallon. Why? I am pretty sure that across this land there must be swathes of boy, and even girl, racers, buying their first souped up rust bucket with go faster stripes, furry dice and large spoilers, who have not got the first idea of what or even who a gallon is or was. Would it not make sense in this day and age of metric measures for Jeremy Clarkson and his mates to extol the virtues of mpl and not mpg? Am I missing something? Am I too logical for this world?

And with that thought I’m off. See you in 2009.

Felix dies nativitatis. Et este fortunatus.