Staging your home for sale is a big deal nowadays. There are even multiple television shows, like Designed to Sell on Home & Garden Television, that focus on that concept alone.

It’s Not Your Home Anymore

A homeowner who has had difficulty selling his or her house is assisted by a realtor and a designer. The realtor often comments about some aspect of the house, such as it being too cluttered or too dark. I’ve seen some of them get pretty energetic about how awful something is.

What they tend to leave out is that’s it’s not good for selling.

For example, the “cluttered” one that sticks in my mind involved a very well-done display of owl collectibles flanking a fireplace. It was attractive with blank space around each owl and irregular groupings that kept your eyes moving and interested.

The designer put it to the homeowners differently – that the prospective buyers would be looking at the owls and not the fireplace. 

Or maybe the homeowners did something else that suited their lifestyle. They put an office in half of the living room or turned the larger master suite over to their kids.

Then the prospective buyers have trouble processing the space and how it will fit their lives.

It Must Belong to the Buyer

For someone walking in the door who had seen many other houses to fall in love with this particular one, they needed to be able to see and appreciate the features. They needed to feel the value and not be looking at other things.

It’s not about spatial intelligence. Even though both my husband and I can see the potential through someone else’s furniture and decor, I could still tell the difference in the emotional connection I felt when it was simple to imagine versus difficult.

It’s about leaving the decor and furniture choices and room uses open so they can imagine their own life in the space. Or, maybe, the life they’d like to be living. It’s about fulfilling expectations.

So the designer on the show takes over and transforms a few rooms in the house, with a budget of $2000 for materials plus some free labor. Sometimes that labor cost would have been extensive and a wall comes down, for example. Other times the changes are simpler.

Either way the homeowners almost always like the new version better. Some are awe-struck. But what matters is the reactions of the visitors to the open house that are able to see themselves in the house and be inspired by the changes.

Taking it Out of the House

Do you leave space for other people to visualize? 

Whether you’re in business or just trying to get someone to collaborate with you, try asking yourself if you’ve filled up all the rooms of your mental structure with your personal preferences to the exclusion of others. Can the person you’re talking to see a way that he can contribute or she can add her touches?

If most people have trouble emotionally connecting to a dining room that’s being used as an office and really seeing themselves eating there when the space is right in front of them, then how much harder is it to see where they fit in someone else’s abstract idea?

Does this ring a bell for you? Have you had any experiences like this?

You’ve borrowed an idea and extended and baked it into something new.

Eureka!

Maybe.

Because just maybe it’s a BAD idea. And, yes, when it comes to ideas you’re planning to put into action, there are bad ideas.

The fifth step in Murray’s innovation process is to judge your ideas.

Ideas take time. They take work. And judgment is the thing that manages that work. – David Murray

First you listen to your head, stepping back and objectively considering the idea as it relates to your original definition of the problem you were trying to solve. After all, Picasso would likely have been just as upset if he’d created David as Michelangelo would have been if he’d created Guernica.

Find the weaknesses.

Where does the solution not fit the need? What will be the barriers to its success, such as cost, unlikely buy-in from key players, or a dependance on a technological solution that hasn’t been fully tested yet?

Find the strengths.

What is worth keeping about it? What are the best parts? How is it better than the previous solution?

Figure out how you feel about it.

Having done the logical analysis, what does your gut say? This isn’t a question designed to throw away your analysis, but to attempt to enhance it with input from your subconscious.

This is where you begin to find the perfect idea, or as close as we can get anyway, that you can actually implement to address your problem statement.

More on Borrowing Brilliance

This post is the fifth in a series looking in the principles of the book Borrowing Brilliance. You can find the others at:

1. Build a Foundation for Innovation with Problem Definitions
2. Use Existing Ideas to Construct New Ideas
3. Innovate Through Metaphorical Connections
4. Give Your Subconscious a Turn
5. Compare the Solution to the Problem
6. Iterate, Recycle, and Evolve Your Way to Innovation

There is a step in the development of creative ideas that you can’t really plan around. It takes as long as it takes, although you can prime yourself for success. The idea behind this step is familiar to anyone who’s had a flash of insight during that thinking but not thinking time while taking the proverbial shower.

It’s when you allow your subconscious mind to put it all together.

Murray’s metaphorical explanation is that we tend to think in ruts, to slowly create deep mined paths. Only the subconscious is able to make the types of connections that we really need to make to continue with the process of innovation.

Bake the Cake

Or at least that’s the metaphor that came to my mind while writing.

First you provide the input. You deliberately talk to yourself and allow yourself to hold a problem in your mind.

Then you let it incubate or simmer or bake while you do other things and stop thinking about it, even if only for a few minutes.

And finally you pull out a new thought, accepting that it could bring with it a new reality.

For another perspective on this incubation step in the creative process visit Lateral Action’s Why Thinking is Overrated – and make sure to read the comments too.

More on Borrowing Brilliance

The chapter in Borrowing Brilliance describing this principle is lyrical and worth reading almost for that purpose alone. This post is the fourth in a series looking in the principles of the book. You can find the others at:

1. Build a Foundation for Innovation with Problem Definitions
2. Use Existing Ideas to Construct New Ideas
3. Innovate Through Metaphorical Connections
4. Give Your Subconscious a Turn
5. Compare the Solution to the Problem
6. Iterate, Recycle, and Evolve Your Way to Innovation

The Power of the Glance

We are hard-wired to make certain judgments instantaneously, on the barest minimum of knowledge. These snap decisions based n first impressions happen because the brain pulls everything out of our subconscious and processes it faster than we can be aware of it. They can be surprising accurate or they can be thrown off and irrelevant.

Factors that Influence our First Impressions

1. What we were doing immediately before

What we were reading, interacting, or doing right before we need to make a snap judgment influences the result of it. Just reading words that make the brain think “old” can change our behavior and make us move measurably slower. Sometimes this is good, as it can help us adapt to an unknown culture, but sometimes it is a contaminant we would like to avoid, such as when we hope something is true and that hope itself skews our gut feeling.

2. What we’ve been doing all our lives

Garbage in equals garbage out. Our brain can only make judgments based on what we’ve presented to it. This includes all those things around us we didn’t really mean to include, like media stereotypes of race or gender. Long term exposure to experiences that support the snap decisions we want to make and the first impressions we want to feel can shift what actually happens.

3. What we’re prepared for

This is something of a subset of the previous factor. We can’t always judge what is weird to us. The sense of the unfamiliar swamps the ability to respond and leaves a negative impression. Sometimes this can change over time. On the flip side, this is also the reason why readiness drills and constant practice enable us to react properly in an emergency.

4. What we’re really good at

Input is a matter of depth as well as width. The development of expertise in a given area changes our first impressions by giving them more complexity. We become able to discuss them in a way that the untrained can’t. It can heighten the intensity of the gut feeling we develop in relation to our field of study.

5. What information is included

If we don’t want our first impression to include information that we, in a planning phase, decided was unimportant, then we need to make sure that it’s blanked from our perceptions. If the brain perceives it, then it will include it in the subconscious decision making process, whether we want it too or not. This is why orchestras audition musicians behind screens, so that it is impossible to take the candidates appearance into account.

How We Can Work With our First Impressions

We can deliberately control our short-term environment when we know we’re going into a situation where we know that emotional, instantaneous response will matter and influence our future decision making. For example, we can choose to think about different ways to collaborate before going into a complex meeting instead of ways to defend ourselves against attack. Then we might be more likely to see the cues for one action than the other.

We can make a deliberate effort to decide which assumptions we will ignore, like a car salesman who decided to believe that clothing doesn’t indicate whether someone is capable of buying a car. Our first impressions may still swing wildly, but we have a mental framework with which to step over them and move on towards our goals.

We can make a choice to use them. Improvisation is dependent on the ability to move with the flow of action around you, whether it’s in the comedy club or in the field of battle. Sometimes we need to avoid introspection and allow our first impressions and snap decisions to take the lead.

We can understand them better. This post only touches the surface. It was inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.

Review: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

I came to Blink with a set of preconceptions. Somehow I’d gotten the idea that it was going to be about how and why we should rely on our first impressions because they are based on our truest knowledge.

But that wasn’t it at all.

Blink is about how we DO create instant judgments based on first impressiosn, whether we want to or not. It compiles case studies of different situations and how this inherent tendency is sometimes useful and sometimes destructive.

Like the other Malcolm Gladwell books I’ve read, Blink is highly story based, often referring to scientific studies, but not in a rigorous way. It is fun to read and raises questions worth thinking about, especially when you’re trying to take different perspectives into account to create a new whole.

Borrowing an idea from from another field is not enough. To develop an innovation you need to deliberately connect your problem with the borrowed idea.

I rewrote this post at least three times because it seemed such an obvious next step that I couldn’t believe it was all this section was about. Yet sometimes we miss the obvious when we’re faced with an actual situation instead of a theoretical one.

This is also going to be the least time-consuming step of David Murray’s six steps towards business innovation, although he spends about the same number of pages telling you stories so you’ll really get the feel for how he means it.

The Power of Metaphor

A rose is like a kiss. A heart is like an engine. A company, or some of them anyway, is like a family. All of these are simple and familiar metaphors.

In this step towards innovation you say my problem is similar to this idea I borrowed and its solution. You connect the two.

Then you stretch the metaphor by examining each part of the connection. Essentially you are applying the borrowed idea to your problem as far as it will go.

And then you stop. Once the connections stop making sense, you stop making them and accept the structure you have built is done for now.

This might come naturally, as our brains tend to think metaphorically in the first place. We tend to describe the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. But when you have a larger issue in mind it may be worth your time to slow down for a moment and make sure you’re getting the best results from the process.

More on Borrowing Brilliance

This is the third of a series of posts interpreting and summarizing the book Borrowing Brilliance by David Kord Murray. Read the rest:

1. Build a Foundation for Innovation with Problem Definitions
2. Use Existing Ideas to Construct New Ideas
3. Innovate Through Metaphorical Connections
4. Give Your Subconscious a Turn
5. Compare the Solution to the Problem
6. Iterate, Recycle, and Evolve Your Way to Innovation

Nurturing an attitude of personal creativity improves your ability to understand and affect systems and to develop innovative solutions. It’s not tied to the arts but is about trying to think differently than an automatic approach to the world based on what you already know.

Develop an Insight Outlook

On a daily basis you remind yourself to do a few simple things that eventually become automatic. These might include:

• ask questions that can’t be answered with “yes” or “no”
• reach out to learn what other people think
• watch and observe for a minute instead of just walking by
• consider how the acceptable could have been improved
• reflect back over the last five minutes instead of charging forward.

Build a Tool Box of Problem Solving Techniques

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with using creativity anymore than you do for cooking. There may not be as many recipe books, but there are a collection of proven techniques you can turn to if you’re at a loss. Even picking up a handful of them can make a difference when applied deliberately.

One that I like is SCAMPER, a mnemonic of seven different things to do to your basic boring idea.

• S – Substitute
• C – Combine
• A – Adapt or Adjust
• M – Modify or Minify
• P – Put to another use
• E – Eliminate
• R – Rearrange or Reverse

Like any other tool it doesn’t do your thinking for you, but it gives you an area for development other than a blank page or computer screen.

Capture Your Ideas

We’ve all had the experience of coming up with something that sounded great – even if it was just for what we should give Mom for Christmas – combined with the total frustration of realizing that the idea has permanently slipped away from you.

Getting in the habit of writing or recording an idea that comes to mind will increase the liklihood that you’ll be able to identify and use the good ones.

Personally, I keep a notebook, but I’m highly tempted to try Jott – essentially voice mail you call from your cell that sends you a transcribed email when you’re done speaking – for those penless moments.

Use Your Eyes to Help Your Mind

Make a deliberate effort to include visual thinking techniques when you are problem solving. By this I mean don’t just talk about the situation or write lists down.

Use the width and breadth of the paper and whiteboard. Draw squiggles if they represent the idea better or along with a word. Connect pieces that seemed very far apart with lines.

Turning an abstraction into something that we can physically see is process that crosses disciplines. It pops up everywhere from graphs of mathematical data to causal loops diagrams in systems thinking and flow charts in quality management.

Our brains often think in pictures and many of those images are housed in the free-ranging right brain. When you bring that aspect into a problem solving or idea creation session you are encouraging your left and right brains to talk to each other.

Creativity Hacks

These four tips are distilled from my reading of the new ebook by Chuck Frey and represent its four sections. Creativity Hacks focuses on how to improve your personal creativty as a tool for innovating. It contains nearly a hundred pages of information and is styled horizontally for easy on-screen reading and referral.

Chuck is the primary contributor to Innovation Tools and an expert in using mind-mapping software. I’ve been following him on Twitter for some time and appreciate his insights.

If reading about creativity is new to you, then his ebook will be a good place to start, especially since the bonuses include reviews of books and tools to turn to expand your studies, if you wish. Of course, there’s always the budget-friendly option of turning to the local library or online resources if you’re not ready to purchase yet.

If you’ve read extensively about creativity then you’ll not find anything new here, but it’s a good reminder of what a practitioner and student of creativity has found personally important and relevant after nearly two decades of trying things out in his career and endeavors.

I especially appreciated the list of advantages and disadvantages of different idea capture techniques in Section 3 and the inclusion of photography and scrapbooking as visual thinking methods in Section 4.

I am signed up for the affiliate program, so if you purchase a copy of Creativity Hacks after clicking on one of my links, then I will receive a commission. I purchased my own copy for the full price before the affiliate program went live because I didn’t want to wait for it and consider the money well spent.

Three Steps for Effective Borrowing

Dave Murray says to look in each of these places:

1. The Opposite Place

     – It can inspire a different way of viewing your world

2. A Similar Place

     – This helps you to understand the current reality. A similar place can be as simple as a competitor that you might already be watching. But the point is to view it both through your usual lens and the opposite lens and then not to stop here, but to keep going. It’s almost a warm-up exercise.

3. A Different Place

     – This is where you’ll find the most impactful material for building new ideas. The different place could be within your own observations, from the experience of others, or from actually going somewhere off of your usual path.

The first step of problem definition and visiting the other places help prepare you to make the most of the different places. This is the step that made me think of The Medici Effect, which I’ll write about later.

How Can Borrowing Build Originality?

If the basic concept seems shaky to you, the best arguments for it lie within the stories that Murray uses in his book, Borrowing Brilliance. That’s where it comes to life.

One you’re probably heard before is that of the assembly line. Henry Ford reportedly borrowed the idea for this manufacturing innovation from a meat packing plant. Applying it to building a crafted and precise machine just wasn’t obvious to other people.

There’s a simple continuum that Murray shows to illustrate his point.

• If you borrow from the same domain – you’re a thief.
• If you borrow from a similar domain – you’re a smart guy.
• If you borrow from a different domain – you’re a creative genius.

Creative Genius Position Open

I must admit that one of the attractions of this theory is that it puts the ability to at least briefly carry the title of creative genius in each of our hands. We don’t have to worry about coming up with an original idea, just creating a farflung combination that hasn’t been applied in that particular way before.

What do you take away from it?

More on Borrowing Brilliance

This is the second of a series of posts interpreting and summarizing the book Borrowing Brilliance by David Kord Murray. Read the rest:

1. Build a Foundation for Innovation with Problem Definitions
2. Use Existing Ideas to Construct New Ideas
3. Innovate Through Metaphorical Connections
4. Give Your Subconcious a Turn
5. Compare the Solution to the Problem
6. Iterate, Recycle, and Evolve Your Way to Innovation

When you ask the wrong question the answer you get may be correct, but still not be what you need. Therefore, the first step in Dave Murray’s innovation process is to define the problem.

Locate the Problem

If the problem has been assigned to you, then all you need to do is explore its boundaries. But sometimes you’re looking for a problem. Both of these needs start in the same place – with observation.

Observation is the act of studying the production and destruction of patterns. -David Kord Murray

What happens? How is this different or the same? Where does the expected and the actual stop agreeing with each other?

Actually asking questions about what you see to come up with your own problems may be natural for you, or difficult. I find it the latter and prefer to work from an assignment of some variety because it helps me focus my observations. I’ve found asking others affected by the same environment what they are dissatisfied with or what troubles them to be a great way to provide that first spark.

And then you keep asking why? until you’ve found the root cause. Often you’ll need to learn new things for this step, but you’ll also be using them as you expand your definition.

Three-dimensional Definition

You can’t build a solution on a single isolated problem. You’ve got to build on the entire matrix of problems: the high-level ones and low-level ones. – David Kord Murray

By this he means, to find out two things:

• What problem was solved that led to the current situation?

Most designs and new things are put in place because they solve somebody’s problem, even if it’s a personal one that isn’t supposed to be part of the situation. It’s possible that instead of solving the isolated problem at hand, you’ll be better off solving the problem one level up.

• What problems do I create when I solve this one?

This one is somewhat harder to answer because you don’t yet know what form your solution will take, but some awareness of the options will help you better process the steps coming up.

These questions are also intended to give you a chance to make sure that your primary question, the one you keep in your mind to drive your forward, is at the right level.

Systems Thinking

Murray doesn’t use the term, but systems thinking should be part of the defining process. Since it gives you a lens through which to determine interconnections and delays, you can better define the problem matrix and where your potential solution might be applying leverage.

This Isn’t Final

You’re going to get a chance to come back and change your definition. When I first read this section I had a momentary flash of “Uh-oh, what if I get this foundation wrong?”

It’s a foundation only in that you need to do it first for the most success, not in the sense of being a permanent support. It can be refined or completely reimagined after you’ve gone through the other steps.

More on Borrowing Brilliance

This is the first of a series of posts interpreting and summarizing the book  Borrowing Brilliance by David Kord Murray. Read the rest:

1. Build a Foundation for Innovation with Problem Definitions
2. Use Existing Ideas to Construct New Ideas
3. Innovate Through Metaphorical Connections
4. Give Your Subconscious a Turn
5. Compare the Solution to the Problem
6. Iterate, Recycle, and Evolve Your Way to Innovation

No matter how well we understand systems we’ll never know everything. We’ll never be able to predict and control the situation completely. Instead we can design, redesign, and change dynamically along with the system.

Donella Meadows considered it a dance and put fourteen of her philosophical tips for learning the steps in the last chapter of her book. You can read an earlier version of the chapter as a public article hosted by Pegasus Communications, which featured it in a recent edition of the Leverage Points newsletter.

One of the more practical ones is to Use Language with Care and Enrich it with Systems Concepts. Because our shared information and mental models are primarily verbal, the words we choose to use to discuss the situation and the system do more than describe it. They shape the perception of it, which changes how we interact with it.

For example, we often discuss “creating jobs” as if it something only corporations do. Which is not going to inspire entrepreneurs to create their own jobs or find a way to grow exponentially more if they hire one person, even part time, to help with certain tasks. These things happen, but perhaps they happen in spite of the way we use language, not encouraged by it.

Meadows suggest two steps and notes that when she originally wrote Thinking in Systems, in 1993, she had to sustainability to her spell checker.

Step 1: Keep language concrete, meaningful, truthful, and clear.

Step 2: Create new words when necessary so that the language can fit our increasing understanding of systems and situations.

The other tips, which are elaborated on in the article and book, include:

• Get the Beat of the System
• Expose Your Mental Models to the Light of Day
• Honor, Respect, and Distribute Information
• Pay Attention to What is Important, Not Just What is Quantifiable
• Make Feedback Policies for Feedback Systems
• Go For the Good of the Whole
• Listen to the Wisdom of the System
• Locate Responsibility within the System
• Stay Humble – Stay a Learner
• Exand Time Horizons
• Defy the Disciplines
• Expand the Boundary of Caring
• Don’t Erode the Goal of Goodness

And my personal favorite, the one I’d like to leave you with, is to Celebrate Complexity, from which I pulled the following lyrical passage.

Only a part of us, a part that has emerged recently, designs buildings as boxes with uncompromising straight lines and flat surfaces. Another part of us recognizes instinctively that nature designs in fractals, with intriguing detail on every scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic. That part of us makes Gothic cathedrals and Persian carpets, symphonies and novels, Mardi Gras costumes and artificial intelligence programs, all with embellishments almost as complex as the ones we find in the world around us. – Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems

This post is the ninth and last in a series that discusses the concepts in Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. Also read my other posts:

1. Book Review: Thinking in Systems
2. What is a System?
3. Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much
4. Delays and Disasters at the Zoo
5. Effective Systems Beyond Our Control
6. Why Systems Surprise Us
7. The Same Story Retold
8. Four Approaches to Changing Systems
9. Dancing with Living Systems

Please let me know if you enjoyed this series. Did you read the book? What did you think of it? Do you know of any books related to thinking towards the whole that you’d like to discuss in depth.

Where do you start to change a complex system? Even if it’s diagrammed out, the situation can be a baffling monolith without obvious entry points.

Donella Meadows suggests 12 different points where leverage can be applied in Chapter 6 of Thinking in Systems. I’ve grouped them into four categories for simplicity. The additional tips and detail she discusses well worth reading the book by themselves – although they’ll make more sense if you start at the beginning.

Either list is only for inspiration. Meadows admits that after decades of thinking about systems it still wasn’t easy finding the actual points in a real system, but this is a summary of the framework she came up with.

Change the details

These are the practical things that are easiest to geta hold on mentally, but they also have the least effect. Any particular number will generally fall in this category. Other basic things include whether you have a buffer and it’s neither too big nor to small, if there’s a bottleneck in a physical process, and in the length of the time you set a delay. For some systems one or more of these will be fixed instead of variable. 

Change the processes within the system

There is more leverage in the information and control portions of the system. One is to put in place, or properly maintain, emergency response mechanisms that actually provide balancing feedback, restraining runaway disasters. Changing the rate of growth, or any place where having more gives you more, can often have an effect. So can communicating more, or different, information about what is going on to the people involved.

Change the identity of the system

The way the system is defined makes a difference as well. What are the rules in place and has anyone tried to rethink them or find hidden ones? Can you increase or decrease how much the system organizes itself instead of being dependant on a controlling hand? How about checking the goal. Is it what you thnk it is?

Change the paradigms

The most powerful points of change involve mind-set. Unfortunately, these can also require the most effort to alter! What paradigm, what shared idea, does the entire system operate within? And once you answer that question, try moving beyond it to a place where no paradigm is correct and you can select which one is most useful at any given time.

Push in the right direction

Did these feel right to you? Then you had already developed some intuition about where to find leverage points. Now is when you need to be extra careful. Apparently many of them are counterintuitive. The direction you think you should push to make a change is the wrong one and will produce the opposite result that you intend.

Do you have a story about trying to change a system? How did it go?

This post is the eighth in a series that discusses the concepts in Thinking in Systems. Also read my other posts:

1. Book Review: Thinking in Systems
2. What is a System?
3. Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much
4. Delays and Disasters at the Zoo
5. Effective Systems Beyond Our Control
6. Why Systems Surprise Us
7. The Same Story Retold
8. Four Approaches to Changing Systems
9. Dancing with Living Systems