There are times when I work primarily in the field of emotional intelligence, often working with executives in developing their social radar (a coin termed by Daniel Goleman), or ability to connect with others. These executives are often highly intelligent and have rightfully earned their senior level positions. They are very knowledgeable and know that learning how to read others and connecting at a deep level is the icing on the cake. They can mandate things to be done by virtue of their hierarchical position in the company, but these executives also know that they can get people commit to action above and beyond their day-to-day responsibilities.  It’s the difference between managing and leading. And well worth the investment of time to learn.

I recently had the privilege of working with an FBI hostage negotiator when facilitating a workshop on empathy. Now, why would this be relevant in emotional intelligence? Particularly as it connects to my work with executives? It’s highly relevant.

In high stress negotiations such as these, the negotiator must learn to connect with the perpetrators. They don’t have to like them, feel sorry for them or agree with them. Empathy is none of those things. They have to reach out and understand what’s truly going on in the perpetrators minds. Whatever emotions they feel, no matter how appropriate or inappropriate those emotions are, the negotiator never invalidates them.

That’s empathy. It requires making a connection with the person first before they can even hope to influence them. Good leaders do that. They are non-judgmental and good listeners. They fully attend to you, even in the briefest of moments.  I call it The Clinton Effect because if you’ve ever met Bill Clinton, you’d know that he could make you feel as if you were the most important person there. He is a master of empathy.

I plan to write more about this wonderful skill in the world of leadership when I return from a business trip to Europe. Stay tuned.

As I listen to the obnoxious sounds of leaf blowers, I am reminded that the U.S. EPA says noise degrades our quality of life by impairing communication and social interaction. It reduces the accuracy of work, and it also creates stressful levels of frustration and aggravation that last even when the noise has stopped. It doesn’t have to be this way.

During one of my green innovation field trips, while learning some of the principles of biomimetics, I walked through a rainforest with engineers who worked for a well-known airplane manufacturer. They were looking for nature’s answers to noise to find new ways of reducing the noise inside an airplane. Their challenge was to find ways to do this while not adding any materials, such as a fiberglass blanket, to absorb sound, and thereby increase weight.

There were lots of examples of creatures that manage noise. Leaf cutter ants, spider s and some birds actively shape the noise they make.

Leaf cutter ants, for example, produce high frequency vibrations through their mandibles that cause leaves to stiffen, enabling them to cut pieces. Spiders sit in their webs waiting to catch insects. The vibrations caused by the insect alerts the spider to its next meal. Both are examples of using the energy of sound, through vibrations, to positive ends. If the engineers could determine where vibrations occur most in the plane, they mused, then maybe they could design a structure to dampen the noise.

The Kingfisher bird has a long beak and can withstand sudden changes of air pressure as it dives into the water to hunt for food. The Japanese, who have one of the most stringent noise standards in the world, used this bird’s beak as a model to design the front car of the Bullet Train to eliminate the sonic boom that occurred upon exiting tunnels.

There are plenty more examples of nature-inspired innovations in just about every area of human need for improvement. But I have to go right now because the noise of a nearby chainsaw is becoming irritating and affecting my concentration. I’ll be back with much more.

For the past five years I had been visiting my mother in a nursing home. I asked one of the nurses why they didn’t have a therapy dog come around as they apparently bring so many benefits to the patients. Therapy dogs are trained to provide affection and comfort to people in places such as nursing and retirement homes, hospitals, schools where children have various learning difficulties, and disaster areas where there is high stress.

It doesn’t matter what kind of breed the dog is because the most important attribute of a therapy dog is its temperament. As long as it is friendly, patient and gentle in all situations, it fits the criteria.. Of course, they must enjoy being petted and handled. Not surprisingly, they bring much joy to the people they visit…. Or do they?

I was shocked to learn from the nurse that a number of dogs in a nearby nursing home had been poisoned, so they advised therapy dog owners to take extreme precautions. Understandably, some owners now keep their dogs away altogether. Apparently, there were a few patients in that home whose religion includes a belief that dogs are dirty. I was shocked and sickened by this. I called a nurse friend at another nursing facility a few towns away, and she corroborated this.

What has this got to do with innovation? Everything, if you’re aware that dogs, like us, are part of nature and that there are many lessons to be learned from them.

Besides the love, extreme loyalty and countless other characteristics they bring to us, we can learn so much from them if we would respect them more. Dogs can smell various types of cancers on patients’ breath with up to 99% accuracy in double-blind trials. They have been known to sniff out skin cancer on their owners months before diagnosis. They can also sniff out the onset of epileptic seizures before they occur. They will then either bark to warn their owners or others, or lie down next to the person to prevent harm, and even remove dangerous objects from the vicinity to keep them safe.
Dogs assist the physically and emotionally disabled in ways that are too numerous to list here.

Years ago I was out walking my dog in the evening. Chester was a Shepherd Retriever mix I had gotten from a shelter and we were walking by a row of parked cars on a well-lit street. Suddenly, a middle-aged man jumped out from between two parked cars with a clear intention of attacking me. He did not see Chester because the cars blocked his visibility, but Chester leapt up with teeth bared, ready to protect me at all costs. My attacker fled and I was safe, thanks to my loyal companion. This is not an unusual story. History is replete with such episodes where dogs have saved lives, sometimes at their own peril.

So, as I write this I realize that my emotions sway my blogging about the connection between dogs and innovation, and the lessons we can learn from their natural genius. But I can’t help it. I am a dog lover. I will not allow any religion or culture to dictate such erroneous beliefs for me. The denigration of animals, especially, but not limited to dogs, is egregious, shameful and wrong.

How does emotional intelligence affect the quality of our thinking? What are the unique thinking skills that create outside-the-box ideas? How is the exciting new science of “biomimicry” a rich source of eco-sustainable innovation? The answers to these questions are essential reading for business people, parents, community leaders and ordinary people who want to expand their horizons. In tough times, when there isn’t a lot of money to go around, it is more important than ever to look for low cost, high value ways of making yourself and your business superior. And The Mind of an Innovator will get you started.

The Mind of An Innovator: A Guide to Seeing Possibilities Where None Existed Before
Available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle edition

The Mind of An Innovator: View the YouTube video:

It was certainly not a task for the faint of heart. She did this regularly over the course of a few weeks, waiting only for young men unaccompanied by women. She approached 85 men in all, telling them that she was doing research in beautiful places. She asked them a series of questions, then gave them her phone number and told them they could call if they had any follow-up questions.

If her purpose was simply to meet men, it certainly was a creative and persistent way to go about it. But that wasn’t her goal; the work was part of an experiment to study attraction between the sexes. The other part of the study was a similar scenario repeated upriver by the same woman, but this time on a wide, sturdy bridge only 10 feet above a small rivulet.

What the experiment measured was the men’s perceptions of the woman’s attractiveness. Of the men who crossed the high, frightening bridge, about 50 percent made a follow-up call to her; of those crossing the lower one, only 12 percent did.

Scientists have known for years that attraction is likely to happen when people are aroused,[1] be it through laughter, anxiety or fear. Fear had gotten the attention of these men and alerted their brains’ emotional centers. The men then attributed that arousal to the woman’s presence, not to the real cause: fear.

People misattribute their feelings all the time, for a host of reasons. Unless we deem something as significant, we often just don’t pay much attention to it. This is actually an example of how efficiently the brain works. It would be too taxing to pay attention to everything all the time, so we focus on the important things.

Emotions take hold of us and cause us to see the world differently. We promise to lose weight, but give in to the temptation of that chocolate dessert. We vow to save money, but that new car or outfit becomes irresistible. We promise to clean the basement, yet somehow there is always something else that we end up doing. Call it procrastination, getting sidetracked, or the need for immediate gratification, but whatever it is, we don’t think too much about it.

Seldom do we think about how we think, or why we feel as we do. But being aware of both will help us understand what drives our behavior. When it comes to innovation, it is critically important to know those drivers, because that is how we develop a mindset primed for creative thinking. By simply changing your mood to a more positive one, you can broaden your view to see more possibilities and find ideas that are qualitatively richer and greater in number, even without using any thinking techniques to go further.

A serious mood will sharpen your focus to apply your analytical skills. This points is little understood, but crucially important: your mood crosses over to your thoughts so that what you feel determines how much you actually see, and one of the best ways to improve your creative thinking is to see as much as possible. This foundation must be in place before you can fully employ the creative skills necessary for thinking outside the box.

There are many paths to innovation, and this book will uncover numerous ones that are highly effective. My purpose in writing this book is to show you that creative thinking is not the sole domain of visionaries or those folks who simply march to the beat of a different drum. Creative thinking is a set of skills that can be learned and developed, and that go hand in hand with an attitude of curiosity. We are born with a curiosity that propels us to constantly ask  “why?” as we interact with our environment. We start out seeing the world with fresh eyes, but as time passes, our increasing knowledge quells our inborn curiosity, and we begin to learn our limitations.

We learn the skill of logic, which is both our friend and our nemesis. It is our friend because it helps us make decisions, and yet it is our nemesis because it prematurely filters our thinking. Seeds of ideas exist everywhere, but to recognize them we need to ignore the ability to recognize them requires holding back the judgment of spoken by common sense. They are only seeds because they are not fully functioning ideas. They need growth, refinement, and development.

This is perhaps one of the most under-estimated, misunderstood concepts of creative thinking, particularly in the corporate world today. Seeds of ideas are not differentiated from whole ideas. When seeds and whole ideas are lumped together, some end up being quickly dismissed because they do not pass the criteria of logic and reason. We rush too hastily to judgment.

The essence of creative thinking is holding your mind open long enough to entertain those possibilities of thinking you normally would not. These are the seeds of ideas that are not logical, cost-effective or strategically aligned.

Imagine the spectrum of creative thinking as a line. At the left side is an idea that is mundane, but logical and doable. By continually making improvements you can develop it into something better.

Moving along the continuum, for example, you can increase the number of flavors to a cereal, add new shapes to a product’s packaging, and build efficiency by streamlining processes. These are examples of the continuous improvement initiative spawned by Dr. W. Edwards Deming, known as the father of the Japanese post-war industrial revival. He helped Japanese manufacturers shift from making cheap imitations to making innovative, high-quality products at the end of World War II by making continual improvements.

Japan, of course, is now regarded as a world leader in quality goods. That is a necessary part of remaining competitive. But it’s not the end of the story: Japan’s competitors also developed high-quality goods. And your competitors, too, are developing quality; top quality is now commoditized and is now the entry ticket to the competitive playing field. Quality is expected.

The question, then, is how do you differentiate yourselves from your competitors to gain a sustainable competitive advantage? In a word: creativity.

This is where the other side of the creativity spectrum comes into focus. Instead of starting small inside and building out, we start outside and come back in. We start with the illogical, unfinished ideas outside the box of reason, and mine them for seeds of ideas.

Be aware that it’s not easy. Judgment sits in wait, ready to pounce like a lion on its prey. Entertaining illogical thoughts puts us into a zone of discomfort that builds tension as we try to make sense of those thoughts. It’s usually a relief when we are snapped back to reason.

But this book will give you techniques to overcome that discomfort and erase the tension, thereby allowing you to think freely and creatively.

In Part One, chapters 1 through 3, you will get underneath your thinking to me more aware of what caused you to think in the ways that you do. We will examine the obstacles to thinking creatively, and also the ways your emotions affect your thinking. We will look at some of the subtle factors that cause you to make decisions that you are not even aware of; once you understand this, you won’t ever be fooled by them again. All of these set you up to more fully appreciate chapter 4 where the concept of boundary becomes vastly porous.

In chapters 5 and 6 we continue with our heightened observations, but now we cast our sights toward a little-known emerging body of knowledge, inspired by nature, where examples of innovation literally surround us, inviting imitation and replication. This discovery shows us how we have been seeing for a long time, but not really noticing the enormous lessons before us.

In Part Two, chapters 7 through 14, we focus on active thinking techniques, exploring a host of different tools that will challenge your current thinking style. These creative thinking strategies have led others to  “game-changing” innovations, and will open up for you your ability to recognize seeds of ideas where you never saw them before.

In Part Three, chapters 15 through 21, you will be inspired by some innovators who have significantly changed our world for the better, despite facing incredible obstacles. Their stories remind us that no matter what the nature of an innovation is, complex or simple, we all have the capacity to innovate. By reading this book and absorbing its ideas, you will have the tools to innovate.

The innovator sees the same world you do, but sees more. This book will foster the deep curiosity that fades when we leave childhood, so that the taken-for-granted will not be taken for granted any longer.

Throughout this book you will engage in thought experiments that will expand the current limits of your thinking. In essence, this book will change the way you think. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.” After you read this, you will not see the world in the same way that you did before, and there will be no turning back. But as you experience the journey of increasing mental freedom, you won’t want to.

[1] Schachter, S. & Singer, J. E. “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State.” 
Psychological Review, 69(5) (1962); 379-399

I hope you enjoyed it and that it whetted your appetite to read more.  Thanks for reading!

We are all so much more creative than we realize. In a perfect world, we could relax and reflect upon our thoughts, and then take time to explore those possibilities of thinking at a leisurely pace. We often do our best thinking when we’re unintentionally pondering things without regard for time limits.  But since most of us just don’t have that luxury, we must find ways to harness the creative thinking potential we have and deliberately apply ourselves to thinking in a skill-based way.  Some of the gurus in the world of creative thinking, such as de Bono and Michalko, have done just that.  And now I have added to these skill sets by expanding this knowledge domain to include such things as emotional intelligence, the eco-science of green innovation and much more.

I will shortly post an editorial calendar that includes numerous skills to thing outside-the-box, foster a culture of innovation throughout your company, and share with you techniques in political savvy to ensure that your innovations are championed and moved past the inherent roadblocks in your company.

Stay tuned! I will be back within a couple of weeks.

July 15: Green Innovation: Mother Nature Shows Us How

July 30: Nature’s Answers to Self-Cleaning

August 15: Nature’s Answers to Packaging

August 30: Biomimicry at the Global Level

When it comes to learning a new skill, it now seems a luxury to get a day or two away from the office. That’s why I teamed up with Learning Bursts, a company that has found a way to enable skill acquisition while multi-tasking.  In essence, they provide ‘bursts’ of learning through auditory podcasts that fit into even the busiest lifestyle.

Learning Bursts are short, targeted segments of training that deliver valuable knowledge at the time you want it, when you want it.  Each burst consists of an 8-10 minute audio segment and several pages of supporting material in a workbook format.  This makes it an ideal mobile learning approach.

It isn’t a one-way communication either.  In fact, it is interactive, practical and sometimes even fun to do.  After you listen to a short burst podcast of a lively dialogue between Dave and me, you follow up with a comprehensive workbook, apply what you have learned in exercises and quizzes, and then solidify that knowledge in various case simulations and case studies. All on your time schedule.  No problems with interruptions because you take all the time you want in between the bursts. It couldn’t be easier.

There are a series of ten podcasts:

The Essence of Creative Thinking and Innovation

• Getting Started
• What is Creativity and Innovation?
• Some Natural Roadblocks to Creativity

An Overlooked Source of Innovation

• Nature’s Inspiration for Innovation (Part A)
• Nature’s Inspiration for Innovation (Part B)

The Thinking Skills Approach to Innovation

• Metaphors
• Random Connections – The Power of Random Words
• Random Connections – The Power of Random Pictures
• Random Connections – The Power of Random Objects
• Destabilization – Experiencing the Discomfort
• Attribute Listing – Not Overlooking the Obvious

If you think this may help you in learning more about creativity and innovation without having to attend a full program offsite, try out a free podcast. Just click on  http://www.learningbursts.com/our-courses and see how you like it.  Enjoy!

There’s scientific evidence to back up the value of humor in brainstorming.

Alice Isen, a Professor of Psychology and a Professor of Marketing at New York’s Cornell University, has proven that the introduction of humor into a brainstorming session can lead to significantly better, more productive results.  Dr. Isen’s research demonstrated that showing session participants happy and humorous films before giving them complex thinking tasks repeatedly produced far more novel solutions than those from the groups shown more depressing fare.  Apparently, an upbeat mood leads to more expansive thinking which opens up one’s propensity to entertain more possibilities of thinking.  A somber mood, in contrast, leads to more thorough, analytical thinking.

So how does a brainstorming leader encourage humor?  It’s not that difficult.  Start with some jokes, show funny videos, or ask the participants to share their favorite pet peeve.  How you do it is less important than just doing it.  As Donald O’Connor warbled in the film classic, “Singing in the Rain”, all you have to do is “Make ‘em Laugh”.   Then when you get onto the subject you’re brainstorming about, continue with the lightheartedness, and make jokes about it.  Everything said is the seed of an idea when you apply the right skills.  So lighten up, laugh out loud and see the ideas fly.