Publishers Should Open Creativity Faucets

By: Steve Outing In my last column, I tossed out a bunch of creative
ideas for the online media industry to consider. Most of the
suggestions came from individuals within the industry.

As that column demonstrated, there are lots of smart people in
online media who are working hard to come up with solutions to
the industry's vexing revenue problem -- that is, since venture
capital has dried up and online ad revenues have plummeted, how
do Internet media companies (and divisions of traditional media
companies) 1) survive and 2) become profitable?

But at a time when creative thinking is most needed, I question
whether the industry is going in the right direction. We need
more creativity and innovation, but we're getting less as the
industry retrenches and budgets are cut.

Opportunities for fostering creativity are being squandered. For
instance, last week's Connections new media conference (produced
by the Newspaper Association of America), which focused on
interactive revenue strategies, attracted only a couple hundred
attendees. The event was a shadow of its past. Conferences like
Connections are the ground where the news industry's key
personnel learn from each other and share inspiration. Yet
conference attendance is among the first items to get cut from
budgets when times get tough. Uh-uh. That's the wrong approach.

Elsewhere, times of recession (or whatever lesser term you want
to call the current downturn) are often when companies crank up
the creativity. Roger von Oech, a business creativity
consultant and seminar leader, and author of the classic
creativity books "A Whack on the Side of the Head" and "A Kick in
the Seat of the Pants," says he's been in the creativity business
since the late 1970s, and recessionary periods are when he gets a
boost in clients. The reaction at many corporations to downturns
is to get managers and employees to "think different" as a way to
adapt to economic change.

Ask the gurus

I asked von Oech and several other business creativity gurus to
give the online media industry some advice about how to think
about solutions to the revenue model dilemma. The common wisdom
suggests that profitable online media business models can be
found -- we just haven't discovered them yet. Perhaps the answers
can be found by looking to smart individuals outside of the media
industry.

Creativity seminar leader Lenny Dave,
who regularly works with corporate clients, says that too many
organizations don't foster creativity among their personnel. A
period of economic downturn is exactly when a company needs to
tap the creative thought of all of its employees.

Dave says that everyone has the capacity to be creative, though
in a typical company only the small minority of employees with
confidence in their creative skills will express their ideas
publicly. The rest tend to keep quiet because:


They develop the germ of a good idea, get frustrated as
they try to flesh it out, then give up. They are afraid of
the idea being criticized when presented in a board meeting, and
they'll feel embarrassed.
They self-censor their ideas, because they're not confident
that the ideas can withstand scrutiny.


What's needed -- especially now -- is for the CEOs of companies
to create an atmosphere that encourages employees to come forward
with creative ideas. The environment must be such that if an
employee or manager presents an idea that is 80% positive, but
still has 20% of problems, the reaction is: Great, here's an idea
that shows some promise. Let's get the rest of the company's
minds at work on solving the 20% that's not solid. Human nature,
Dave says, seems to be that people will shoot down 80/20 ideas by
focusing on the 20% of the solution that's got problems. That
"let me play devil's advocate" approach stifles the expression of
creativity except among those who are exceptionally confident in
their creative abilities and are able to handle criticism well.

Look to past greatness

Michael Michalko,
a creativity guru and author of the books
"Thinkertoys" and "Cracking Creativity," the latter a look at how
history's creative geniuses worked, suggests that companies might
give their innovators idea "quotas." The great inventor Thomas
Edison, to provide an example, gave himself a schedule of
developing one minor invention every 10 days, and one major
invention every six months.

Indeed, many of the most creative individuals of the past were
high producers. Edison had a record number of patents to his
name; Van Gogh painted 800 works in a 10-year period; Einstein
published hundreds of papers.

The idea, says Michalko, is that the human imagination works like
a faucet. When you first turn it on, it spurts a bit and the
water may be cloudy. But as it runs longer, the water becomes
clearer and runs faster. So it goes with creative ideas; the more
you unleash them, the faster and easier they come. Consider,
then, giving those people who you assign to tackle problems
requiring creative solutions a quota for presenting new ideas.
(They don't have to all be perfect.)

A problem that afflicts many of us is that we have been educated
to find THE answer to any dilemma presented to us. But truly
creative thinkers look at and think of many ideas -- turning the
faucet on high -- then later analyze which is the best solution,
says Michalko. They don't think of one solution and then stop. So
encourage employees and managers to present lots of ideas, not
just ones they go to the trouble of fleshing out.

Look outside yourself

Particularly in difficult economic times, it may make sense to
bring in outside creativity consultants to rev up your staff and
encourage the flow of ideas. Von Oech was one of the fathers of
modern business creativity when he began writing, consulting, and
speaking in the 1970s, but today there are hundreds of
individuals who tout themselves as creativity facilitators and
gurus.

Joyce Wycoff, who founded the Innovation Network,
a band of creativity/innovation experts who offer consulting services
and assist innovation experts within corporations, says that
consultants can often help in providing impetus for changing an
organization's approach to creativity and innovation. But to
truly change a non-creative organization into a creative one,
look to your hiring practices.

"Diversity is critical to creativity," she says, so start hiring
different types of people to prime the creativity pump. Media
companies faced with intractable problems like figuring out how
to make Internet publishing profitable should consider looking
outside the normal experience zone for some new hires. Consider
hiring some innovation experts, who come from worlds outside of
media.

A related, and less costly, method is to have people in different
departments swap jobs temporarily, suggests Michalko. Department
heads can probably learn a lot by tapping into the perspective
and ideas of outsiders brought in for a short stint.

Wycoff says the new media industry probably suffers in part from
its immaturity. Mature companies like Pillsbury, for example,
have established procedures and programs for when creativity is
required. When that company wants to come up with new products,
its staff does things like watch people eat and fix breakfast to
try to pick up ideas for making their lives easier. Most new
media companies haven't been around long enough to develop such
processes.

Now that interactive media is becoming a more mature industry --
and the business isn't as much fun as it used to be, and its
practitioners must be more serious about identifying and
satisfying customer needs -- the focus must be more on gaining
the wisdom about what customers want/need and applying creativity
to the findings.

Crazy connections

A staple technique for creativity experts is to tackle problems
by looking at unrelated things and trying to find connections.
The great thinkers going back as far as Leonardo da Vinci used
this method, according to Michalko. The idea is that you take
your industry's problem, then select random words, pictures, etc.
and think of how they can be connected. The key to doing this
classic exercise is to select randomly, say, pictures from a
magazine.

In his seminars, Dave often gets participants to think about some
aspect of their industry, then try to compare it to an animal, or
a board game, etc. The object is to spur creative thought about
your industry, to get the brain working in a different way.
Connections occur that normally wouldn't when thinking about your
industry, and new solutions can emerge.

A variation of this technique is to take an unrelated industry
and juxtapose it next to yours. How is online publishing like
tree trimming? Or a ski resort? Or pharmaceuticals? The idea may
seem nonsensical, but it forces out ideas that you may be blind
to because of the tunnel vision of your own industry.

Is online media a creative industry? Many of us who went into
this field did so because of the opportunity to create something
new. A lot of creativity has gone into bringing the industry to
its current state.

But the summer of 2001 finds online media in a place where a
higher level of creativity is required -- if the industry is to
reach its potential. Let's all turn the faucet wide open.

Other recent columns

In case you missed recent Stop The Presses!, here are links to the last few columns:
o A Whack On the Head For Online Media, Wednesday, July 11
o Audiences Aren't Deserting the Web, Wednesday, June 27
o Newspapers, Syndicate To Sell E-newsletters, Wednesday, June 13
o Archive of columns


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Got a tip? Let me know about it If you have a newsworthy item
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note.

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This column is written by Steve
Outing for Editor & Publisher Online. Tips, letters and feedback
can be sent to Steve at steve@planetarynews.com


Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.