A Personal Experience of Lateral Thinking

I missed the news earlier this week of the death of Ed de Bono. De Bono was the father of lateral thinking, a framework for creative thinking. Wikipedia has a decent outline of his ideas and influence. 

De Bono was one of the authors that most influenced my consulting career. I adopted many of his tools, most of them quite simple, in analyzing business problems and coming up with creative solutions. The tools are especially useful in facilitating groups. I only regret that I have not applied his methods more consistently in client engagements and even in my personal life. 

One of my favorite tools is the random word stimulation, which is great for brainstorming sessions. Simply put, when you are trying to come up with ideas that are "outside the box," you generate a random word (e.g., pick it out of a dictionary) and use that word as a jumping off point to come up with new ideas. The key, as always with brainstorming, is not to look for ideas that make sense, just generate as many as you can.  When you run out of ideas, do another random word, and another. As with any kind of brainstorming, no judgment of the ideas is allowed.  Save that for a later step. 

In explaining this method, I like to point to one experience from a consulting engagement many years ago. My late business partner, Dan Husiak, was leading a client engagement to develop a new business strategy for a division of what was, at the time, one of the largest health plan providers in the U.S.  We had scheduled a brainstorming session the next day, and Dan assigned me to facilitate the session. The objective was to come up with some new out-of-the-box ideas for new products or lines of business. 

I suggested we use random word stimulation and explained how to do it.  Dan didn't like it. 

Dan: You mean you just pull out some random word, like "Pluto?" 

Me: Okay, good example. Do you mean Pluto the planet, or Pluto the cartoon character? 

Dan:  I don't know, just "Pluto." 

Me: Okay, let's think about this. Pluto the planet. It's small, it's far out. We need far-out ideas. Not much there. Now, Pluto the dog. He's a dog. He's an animal. He's a pet.  Hey, we can offer health insurance for pets! 

That was enough to let Dan give me permission to try it the next day. 

The brainstorming session was a success. In fact, at the beginning of the session, I used the "Pluto" story as an example of how to use random word stimulation. After a couple of hours, the client project team had come up with a number of promising new ideas--enough for us to start evaluating them the next day.  

The best part of this story is that at the end of the session, the top executive for the firm's Medicare HMO product line came up to me and said, "I want to talk to you about that pet insurance idea. You know our seniors love their pets, and pet ownership correlates with positive outcomes. We should look into how to offer a pet HMO."  

Keep in mind, this was before health plans for pets were a widespread practice. 

Thinking tools like random word stimulation are not only effective in creative thinking and problem solving. They are also fun. 

Ed de Bono will be greatly missed. But fortunately he left the world with a long list of books, courses, and other publications for learning how to think.  A good place to review them is his website. 

The Benefits of Business Process Framing

In selecting and implementing a new enterprise system, business leaders have learned the importance of evaluating business processes. “Let’s not make this an IT project,” they say. “Let’s really understand our current business and our vision for the future.” Without a doubt, this is right, and we encourage our clients to do exactly that.

However, business leaders often think that this means they should begin with detailed process mapping of their existing processes. “Let’s have someone come in and map all our business processes,” they say.

At first glance, this seems logical. If we want to define our business requirements, what better way than to map our “as-is” processes?

Why is this not a good idea? There are at least three reasons.

Read the rest of this post on the Strativa blog: The Benefits of Business Process Framing

What Is Digital Transformation, and How Do We Get There?

In enterprise technology, digital transformation is a hot topic. But what does it really mean? Overused by vendors and consultants, the phrase has become nearly meaningless.

This needs to change. Digital transformation should be something practical and tangible, something in reach of all organizations—provided business leaders make a sustained effort.

This post provides a simple definition of digital transformation, breaks down the main types of digital transformation, and recommends an approach for developing a digital transformation strategy.

Read this post on the Strativa blog:  What Is Digital Transformation, and How Do We Get There?

Which Comes First, New Systems or New Processes?

Everyone agrees that business process improvement is a key success factor in enterprise system implementation. But, which comes first? Should organizations redesign their business processes before selecting and implementing new systems? Or should they first select a new software vendor and then redesign their processes to match how the new system does things?

This question comes up repeatedly in our vendor evaluation and software selection consulting services. Clients read about failed ERP or CRM projects, for example. They hear the warnings of executives from such companies, telling them to spend more time up front understanding their business processes. They hear about companies that go live but don’t achieve the desired benefits. They vow to do better. They don’t just want to implement a new system. They want to implement best business practices.

These are good reactions. When it comes to enterprise systems, anything that heightens the fear of failure is a good thing. The more business leaders are focused on business processes, the better.

But, how should business leaders deal with their business processes when implementing a new system?

• Should they improve their processes before implementing the new system, so that the new system is not automating broken processes?
• Or, should they choose the new system first, so that they can redesign their business processes using the best business practices that are embodied in the new system?

The answer is a little bit of both: the two should be done in parallel. In fact, doing all of one before the other—whether process first, or system first—will result in failure.

Read the full post on the Strativa website:
Which Comes First, New Business Processes and New Systems?