Business Insights

Why do you need both fools and experts on your creative problem solving team?
What are their strengths and roles that help you solve problems?

In this video George Torok explains the answers to those questions.





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You need both fools and experts on your creative problem solving team. They bring different and essential strengths to your team.

But they are needed for different purposes. You will get the most from them if you understand their strengths and use them accordingly.


Fools on your creative problem solving team

Fools are good at asking questions

Fools help you discover options

Fools are best at stepping into new paradigms

Fools are fond of breaking rules

Fools are helpful in defining strategy

Fools are effective

Fools are best at divergent thinking

Fools help you zoom out to see the big picture



Experts on your creative problem solving team

Experts are best at answering questions

Experts help you focus

Experts are best at maintaining the status quo

Experts are fond of following procedures

Experts are dependable with tactics

Experts are efficient

Experts are best at convergent thinking
Experts help you zoom in on the details


When you form your creative problem solving teams, be sure to include both fools and experts. Both groups play critical parts in the creative problem solving process. It’s not about being right or wrong. It’s about finding and implementing the best solutions to the challenges you face.


George Torok

Creative Facilitator

Creative Problem Solving seminars

Innovate: Five Steps to Get Better Results with Reduced Resources
In this entertaining and practical program you will discover:

• The 5 key principles on which to base your Innovation process
• A 7-piece tool kit to generate dozens of new ideas in minutes
• How to recognize the two types of problems and handle them appropriately
• How to know which question to ask and when (yes there are dumb questions)

Attend this practical workshop at the APICS Grand Valley Innovation Showcase on Saturday Feb 19, 2011 in Cambridge, Ontario.

If you are a member of APICS or work in operations management then this Innovation Showcase is an easy opportunity to boost your business smarts and career success.


"Innovate: How to Get Better Results with Reduced Resources" is a practical and systematic approach to getting things done, overcoming business challenges and reducing the stress in your life.

This is the first time that this game-changing program will be open to the public. George Torok normally delivers this program exclusively to private clients who want to transform the culture and operations of their organization.

In a rare opportunity for you, George Torok has agreed to work with Cambridge Solutions to offer this program to the members and guests of APICS Ontario Grand Valley.

Don't miss out.

Register here for Innovation Showcase

Learn more about Creativity Catalyst, George Torok.


Check out the rest of the workshops at the Innovation Showcase

This was a letter that I wrote to Lynne Everatt, columnist for the Globe & Mail. Her column described the antics of a Creativity Consultant who seemed to force people into following his orders.
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I read your column, “How Far will we follow the consultant?” (Mar 24) with both amusement and concern.

I was amused at the antics that your groups were “encouraged” to perform in the pursuit of creativity.

I was amused and impressed by Norm – the one who defied the instructions of the consultant – because I have done the same. If consultants expect to challenge the group they must expect to be challenged. This creativity consultant should have found a more creative tool to encourage participation other than threatening to tell the boss.

But what concerns me the most is the perception of Creativity than might have been left with your letter-writer and the other participants in this program. As both a student and leader of creativity it is clear to me that several prime directives of creativity were ignored by Bart the creatively consultant.

Even though creativity is the science of breaking rules – there are rules – or at least guidelines for creativity. It is a science – more than an art. It is only art to the uninformed.

One of the first rules of creativity is to provide a risk-free environment. If you want people to be more creative you must make them feel safe. Employees in a corporate environment will not be creative if they are punished for their creative excess or not participating.

If you are told that your idea was too crazy (or stupid) – you will be inclined not to play again. All it takes is a glance or rolling of the eyes to kill a creative thinker.

One of the greatest threats to creative thinking in a group is the non-acceptance of the group. The group leader determines and guides how the group might react. If you want people to be more creative – don’t punish them. If you want people to be more creative – value every idea and opinion.

To encourage creativity in a group you must allow individuals to choose not to play at any point. They need the option of calling a time out. This is a simple technique that reduces stress by giving a sense of control to the participants.

Robert Alan Black, creativity guru, called this, “Gone fishing.” At any time in his creative session a participant could announce, “Gone fishing”. The rest of the group would understand and that individual felt safe and still part of the group. That individual would also be more inclined to jump in later with creative ideas as they hatched.

Let’s be real. If you are told to jump around the room and you don’t want to – you don’t have to. If you are told to hug everyone and you don’t want to – you don’t have to. Although there might be creative aspects or interpretations to these actions they are not the goal of creativity. And creativity is not the goal either. Creativity is a tool that can be sharpened to reach a goal. And when it comes to business creativity should be focused on the bottom line.


Bottom Lines of creativity

Creativity is not about jumping around the room.
Creativity is not about being goofy.
Creativity is a skill set that can be learned.
Creatively is about thinking differently.
Creativity must be nourished.
Creativity is most productive when focused on a desired outcome.
There is a time to be creative and a time to follow procedure.
Management must clarify which is which.
Most creative ideas fail. That is normal. That is okay.
All great change comes from creative ideas.


George Torok is a student, instructor and explorer of creative problem solving.


“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”
Albert Einstein

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George Torok

Creativity Catalyst

Creative Problem Solving

"If you can plug it in, you can control it with your brain."

Is the message from leading edge technology company, Interaxon.

Their website describes a three stage process (Think - Tranlate - Activate) to control machines with your thoughts. And it's not theory but actual real technology.

Just imagine controlling your computer - not by typing or even talking to it - but by thinking.

Of course when machines can hear your inside voice some of us will need to control our thoughts a lot more.

Considering the science that must be involved I was impressed with the simplicity of the language on their website. They demonstrate a good sense of humour and realness. Pretty cool for high tech.

Here is the Interaxon website and blog.

http://www.interaxon.ca/

http://www.interaxon.ca/blog

PS: Be very careful what you think when you get there.


George Torok

Host of Business in Motion

Interview with Ray Simmons, President of CableTest Systems Inc.

CableTest Systems tests the wiring systems of military jets, high speed trains and the Space Shuttle (the exterior fuel tank has 8,000 connenctions). They provide a complex version of an electritian’s multi meter.

Ray Simmons has been the president and owner of CableTest Systems for the past nine years. Previously he was President of CRS Robotics. After a two year “retirement” he got edgy and longed to get back into business so he bought CableTest Systems.

Insights from this interview with Ray Simmons:

“Going public with CRS … was not me. That’s why I retired.”

“Retirement was quite challenging. I felt like I was disconnected.”

“55% of our business last year was in Europe. Asia is our next frontier. We like India.”

“Regrets? Two…”

“I think that in a technologly company a president that is totally focussed on technology is dangerous.”

“We’re on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.”

Listen to interview with Ray Simmons on Business in Motion.

Interview with Jan Nichols, President of Bay Gardens Funeral Home in Burlington and Hamilton, Ontario.

Listen to podcast

This is not your standard funeral home. It’s exciting. It has high ceilings, a waterfall and videos screens.

Insights from this interview:

“The most successful opening of a funeral home in North America. Most are lucky to get 100 people to attend. We had over 800!”

“Rooms are named after waterfalls, plants or ponds instead of being called Salon A and Salon B.”

“People want food at a funeral – but not in the same room as the body or in the basement.”

“Reaching out to non-profit organizations and giving them free access to meeting rooms.”

Listen to this podcast of the 30 minute interview with Jan Nichols here.

More podcasts from Business in Motion

Where would you expect innovation in health care to be leading the market? Read this article to learn where. You might be suprised.

George Torok

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McKinsey Quarterly as published on Forbes.com

The Emerging Market In Health Care Innovation
Tilman Ehrbeck, Nicolaus Henke and Thomas Kibasi

Emerging innovations in the delivery of health care, particularly in developing countries, offer insights on how to tackle its rising cost, estimated at $7 trillion a year globally. Health care is consuming an escalating share of income in developed and developing nations alike. Yet innovators have found ways to deliver care effectively at significantly lower cost while improving access and increasing quality. They are uncovering patterns for raising productivity, and leaders across health sectors--public, private and social--should take heed. With the recent passage of health reform legislation in the U.S., for instance, tackling costs is imperative there, but it is also an important goal in every other part of the world.

New approaches to the delivery of care abound. In Mexico, for example, a telephone-based health care advice and triage service is available to more than one million subscribers and their families for $5 a month, paid through phone bills. In India, an entrepreneur has proved that high-quality, no-frills maternity care can be provided for one-fifth of the price charged by the country's other private providers. In New York City the remote monitoring of chronically ill elderly patients has reduced their rate of hospital admissions by about 40%.

Unfortunately, health care can be an isolated and local activity: Innovations are not widely known across different systems or beyond sector boundaries. Merely identifying and promoting innovations isn't enough, however--leaders need to understand whether, and how, the lessons of innovators can be replicated elsewhere. To this end, McKinsey conducted research in partnership with the World Economic Forum to study the most promising novel forms of health care delivery and, in particular, to understand how these innovations changed its economics.

Many of the most compelling innovations we studied come not from resource-rich developed countries but from emerging markets. Two factors help explain why. First, necessity breeds innovation; in the absence of adequate health care, existing providers and entrepreneurs must improvise and innovate. Second, because of weaknesses in the infrastructure, institutions and resources of emerging markets, entrepreneurs face fewer constraints (this is one upside of the lack of meaningful oversight, which obviously also has many drawbacks). They can bypass Western models and forge new solutions.

The nearly 30 successful innovations we looked at pursued a handful of strategies to change the economics of health care delivery in a fundamental way. In other words, they were not successful by chance. By understanding the opportunities these innovators seized, leaders throughout the health care system can identify opportunities for their own organizations.

A broad scan of innovations across the field, as well as an in-depth analysis of the business models behind 30 of them, showed us that successful ones use at least several if not all of the strategies described below.

Read the rest of this article at Forbes.com


George Torok

Creative Facilitation

Creative Problem Solving

Innovation is never enough by itself. This article in Forbes - How GM Destroyed Its Saturn Success, by David Hanna - explains what went wrong at Saturn.

"A lesson in how to win at innovation in even the most traditional company--and then how to crush that innovation."
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I remember talking with an official from Saturn in the nineties. I was excited about what they were doing then and quite optimistic about their future. The biggest innovation that I saw was the partnership between labor and management.

From my dealing with GM in the eighties as material manager for a just-in-time supplier, I witnessed first hand how both management and labor at GM were messed up.

There were many bad management decisions from GM. That included poor planning and the resultant knee jerk decisions to put band aids on problems.

GM visited our plant often and I visited their operations several times. During one of my visits to a GM plant a GM engineer was explaining a packaging idea for the parts that we supplied to them.

The engineer wanted to show me what they were using for another product. So we approached a production line that was machining small parts for transmissions. He pointed out the plastic trays that they used to hold the finished parts and prevent them from being damaged. Each plastic tray was similar to an over-sized egg cartoon holding about 20 finished parts.

The trays in front of us were full of parts so the engineer asked the production worker, "Do you have an empty tray that we could have?"

The production worker looked at the engineer, then calmly picked up a tray full of finished parts, dumped the parts in a scrap bin and gave the tray to the engineer.

The engineer and I looked at each other in shock, shook our heads and returned to his office.

My first three cars were GM. I've never even considered buying GM since.


George Torok

Business Speaker

Radio show guest: Bay Gardens

My radio show guest today was Jan Nichols, President of Bay Gardens Funeral Home. I first invited Jan to join me on Business in Motion three years ago when he opened a new funeral home in Burlington, Ontario. I was intrigued by the playful open-house invitations. Listeners of my radio show learned that Bay Gardens was a pioneer – not a copycat. Three years later and they are opening another new funeral home in Hamilton. That suggests that what they did is working. Successful entrepreneurs learn from the successful buisnesses around them - expecially from other industries.

There were a lot of powerful lessons and tidbits for entrepreneurs in this interview:

When entering a new market don’t follow the leaders, instead discover what the customers really want and deliver that. And it’s not that hard to “discover”. You only need to ask and listen.
When entering a competitive saturate market you must be different - very different.


Big surprise – people like to eat – even – especially at funerals. So Bay Gardens planned and built proper kitchen facilities into their new funeral homes. As you can imagine there are some real and perceived health issues about serving food in a funeral home. At Bay Gardens you won't find the – move the body out of the room and let’s eat now.

The funeral business has been a stodgy business steeped in taboos and silence. Even though we all will die – we don’t want to talk about the details. Silly but true.

The best way to build a business in a competitive market is by building relationships.

Little details are important.

Listen to your customers.

Listen to your staff.

Train your staff and give them the permission to do what you preach.

Ask for the business.

Train your staff to ask for the business.

Do things that your competition hasn't or won't do.

Be bold and don't apologize for it.

Be willing to annoy the competition.


As you can guess, it was another wonderfully instructive interview on Business in Motion. Thank you Jan Nichols, President of Bay Gardens.



George Torok

Host of Business in Motion

Hamilton Business Speaker

Canadian Business Speaker