In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Jeremy Utley, codirector of executive education at the Stanford d.school, about his new book, Ideaflow: Why Creative Businesses Win (Ebury Edge, October 2022), cowritten by Perry Klebahn. Although focus on innovation in the business world has reached a “fever pitch,” many people still haven’t developed a creative discipline, Utley says, but they can start with a 30-minute calendar block and the willingness to share bad ideas. An edited version of the conversation follows.
Aren’t there too many books on creativity already?
There are a lot of books right now on creativity and innovation. When we started, there was a question of, “should we even bother?”
At Stanford, we had been leading the executive education programs for the past dozen years or so, and we’d seen that innovation, as a topic, had reached a fever pitch in its level of hype, and yet despite its emphasis and mentions in annual reports, our observation was that it remains one of the most underdeveloped or undernourished capabilities in any organization.
For us, the tension of if we should write another book, since there were already a lot of books out there, was counterbalanced—or overweighted—by a feeling that folks weren’t treating innovation like a capability.
In a lot of organizations, innovation is an event. It’s episodic. It’s a moment in time. There’s a sprint, or a hackathon, or a workshop, and that’s innovation. That’s what a lot of people think of when they think of innovation. What we believe is that it’s not an event, it’s a practice, and if you aren’t practicing regularly, you aren’t an innovator—just like if you aren’t doing your scales, you aren’t a pianist, or if you aren’t doing laps in the pool, you aren’t a swimmer.
Unfortunately, we reached an era in this innovation economy where folks do a sprint or a workshop, and they go, “I’m an innovator.” They update their LinkedIn and put on a badge, and then they assume they’re all good, without any further development of their skills. What we’ve tried to do is shift the narrative from a “done” mentality to a “begun” mentality.
No one would ever go to one swim lesson and then say that the next step is the middle of the ocean or go to one piano lesson and then say the next step is Carnegie Hall—no, they would keep practicing. Yet, for whatever reason, when it comes to innovation, sometimes people take a workshop or attend a sprint and then think the next step is enterprise-wide innovation.
Unfortunately, we reached an era in this innovation economy where folks do a sprint or a workshop and they go, ‘I’m an innovator.’ … What we’ve tried to do is shift the narrative from a ‘done’ mentality to a ‘begun’ mentality.
What we felt was lacking [from existing books] was some of the routine behaviors and mindsets that drive a robust and healthy creative practice. For us, Ideaflow is meant to address some of these misconceptions, dispel some of the myths around innovation, and bring it to the level of daily practice in the context of business.
Creative practitioners in other fields like the arts or entertainment recognize the need for a creative discipline, but for a businessperson, if you were to ask them, “How do you build your creative muscles? How do you build your innovation capacity?” Most of the time you get a blank stare.
We felt like that was a fundamental problem that needed to be addressed. Our goal with Ideaflow is that when the folks who read it consider this question of “how do I practice?” or “how do I stay sharp?,” they will have lots of answers that they can incorporate into their daily life.
We felt that it was time for innovation to get approached from a fundamental capability perspective where folks know how to routinely engage the practice so that they can really shine when it matters.
It’s not that we despise a sprint or look down on a workshop—not at all. We leverage sprints and workshops ourselves, but when you show up to this sprint, are you warm? Have you stretched? Have you trained? The goal is that when you show up to the sprint, you can really get into the work.
Right now, what we see is people showing up to the sprint with Cheetos stains on their blazers, so to speak. They’ve been sitting on the couch. They haven’t done any exercise. That’s not how we approach any other capability.
We felt that it was time for innovation to get approached from a fundamental capability perspective, where folks know how to routinely engage the practice so that they can really shine when it matters.
What does it mean to ‘put the lightning rod down and start making lightning’?
There’s tons of fascinating research going primarily by Dr. Dean Keith Simonton, who recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award from Mensa. Simply stated, what Dr. Simonton found is that to get a good idea, you need a lot of ideas.
Linus Pauling actually said that—he’s the only individual in history to win two individual [unshared] Nobel Prizes. When Linus Pauling was asked, “How do you come up with a good idea like your breakthroughs that won you the Nobel Prize?” His response was, “To have a good idea, you need to have a lot of ideas.” And our observation is that folks dramatically underestimate the definition of “a lot.”
According to research conducted by our colleague at Stanford, Professor Bob Sutton, something like 2,000 ideas are required to get a commercially viable idea. When we ask business leaders in organizations, their answer is more like 20. Folks are not just one, but two orders of magnitude off when it comes to the question of, “How many ideas do you need to have a good idea?”
To get good material, you need a lot more volume than most people recognize. This is perfectly illustrative of our tendency to think [of innovation] in terms of an event rather than a practice. At an event, my job is to come up with one good idea. In a practice, I’m routinely generating ideas as a part of my life.
My favorite example of this is from Jony Ive in [Apple’s] memorial tribute to Steve Jobs. He said, “We ate lunch almost every day, and Steve would often say to me, ‘Hey, Jony, want to hear a dopey idea?’” He said they were really dopey, and some of them truly terrible, but every once in a while, Steve said something that took the air out of the room and made them sit there in silence.
Something like 2,000 ideas are required to get a commercially viable idea. When we ask business leaders in organizations, their answer is more like 20.
To me, the reason that that’s so special is that when we think about Steve Jobs, we don’t think about truly terrible ideas. We don’t think about dopey ideas. We think about consumer delight, product category, and redefining products.
What we’ve observed is that if you want to get to delight, you have to be willing to have and share dopey ideas. Dopey is the price of delight, and very few people seem to appreciate the significance of that.
Why is failing and rewarding failures key to successful Ideaflow?
It’s critical to reward failures and to allow for failure, at the very least, because the reality is that innovation is a risky endeavor. If you’re always succeeding, you’re almost certainly playing it too safe.
Astro Teller, who’s the captain of Moonshots at Google’s Moonshot Factory, called Google X, says the same thing: failure is the seed of breakthrough innovation. What he’s trying to get teams to do is to fail more quickly and kill ideas more quickly. If you don’t like that word, kill, think about it as pivoting.
Failure sucks but instructs. The question is: is your ego so shattered that you can’t learn from a failure, or are your expectations properly set so that you can learn quickly from it?
Moving quickly through ideas is a critical part of early-stage innovation. You have to be able to pivot, you have to be able to reorient, and that necessarily looks like failure. If people are afraid of failure or think that failure is a career-limiting move, then you’re in trouble. If you want to reward innovation, you have to be prepared to reward failure.
If you reframe failure as learning, then that becomes more palatable. The learnings get harvested. The learnings can be repurposed. The learnings can be composted, as we say in our accelerator at Stanford.
Failure sucks but instructs. The question is: is your ego so shattered that you can’t learn from a failure, or are your expectations properly set so that you can learn quickly from it?
What does it mean to ‘make a habit of exposing yourself to unexpected inputs’?
When we think about creativity or innovation, we often think about output. However, innovators know that creativity is fed by input, and if you aren’t seeking new input, then there’s nothing new for the equation or algorithm to be processing.
There are some simple things that leaders can do to stimulate fresh inputs. In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos had two days per week when he refused to schedule any meetings just so he could be available for serendipitous discovery.
The calendar is often one of the greatest vehicles that we can leverage, or one of the greatest weapons a leader can wield to seek unexpected input. Most of the time, the calendar is the reason why someone can’t do something.
For example, we were working with the senior leadership team of a large tech company, and we were helping them think about experimentation in the workplace. One of their technology leaders is a woman based in Ireland, and when we got to her, we asked her to tell us about her experiment.
None of the problems we face have only one right answer. If you put effort into one idea, you should put effort into alternatives—into variation—because the truth is that you learn a lot more relatively than you do in sequence.
She said, “I wasn’t able to run an experiment, unfortunately.” Our level of experiment is at an exceedingly low threshold—it takes 20 minutes and is very simple stuff—so I said, “Why couldn’t you run an experiment? You had two weeks.” She said, “It’s Wednesday. I’m on meeting number 32 for the week. When would you run an experiment?”
I realized in that moment that she legitimately didn’t have space to do anything new. I said, “Okay, you can’t do an experiment now. Look at next week. Do you have any time on your calendar?” She did not. “Look at the next week. Do you have any time on your calendar?”
She had half an hour, so I said to block that half an hour now and enter into the subject line of the calendar invite, “blank action.” What we realized in that moment is that you can create space for experimentation and exploration if you think about wielding your calendar differently. What I would ask leaders is, are you creating space for folks’ work to look different?
One simple thing that a manager can do is something that legendary Professor Bob McKim did at Stanford: if a student asked him what he thought of an idea, he would say, “Show me three.”
He was helping the student realize that none of the problems we face have only one right answer. If you put effort into one idea, you should put effort into alternatives—into variation—because the truth is that you learn a lot more relatively than you do in sequence.
Watch the full interview
