Tenured staff are limited by hindsight, so look to new people to get new ideas.
When you’re looking for new answers to new questions, it is knowledge itself that blocks progress. It is knowledge that creates real ignorance, just as wealth creates poverty. Every time a new discovery is made, enormous new areas of ignorance are opened up.13
— Marshall McLuhan (1970)
Seniority and responsibility often correlate in the workplace, government, and academia. But did you know seniority and problem-solving ability are also closely related? Years of experience come with both wisdom and limitations.
As people become more senior in their careers or their fields, they are entrusted with more and more innovation responsibilities. It is often up to those with the most experience to solve the biggest problems. But a person’s years of experience do not necessarily make her the most creative. If that person is used to doing things a certain way and sees no need to change a formula, she isn’t likely to do it.
The restriction on creativity here is our proximity to our own experience. The more you know about a subject or organization, the more your thinking can be constrained.
For example, it took an intern working at Shreddies to come up with a creative campaign that revived the brand in a way that no one more senior could have imagined. It took a group of kids brainstorming ideas on water conservation to develop an entirely new sidewalk system for the city of Amsterdam; one that so impressed civil engineers they decided to start prototyping.
For many years, career advancement in organizations would look like this: start in the mailroom, prove your gumption to the higher-ups, get promoted to assistant, then manager, then director, and finally CEO. Companies celebrate these kind of success stories, and, as a society, we admire them. Everyone loves an underdog whose hard work pays off.
The underdog learns every side of the business on his climb to the top. He becomes the most knowledgeable and experienced team member, and that gives him a lot of influence. Other staff members look to him for mentorship, new ideas, and guidance. When we are faced with a crucial decision or major roadblock, we seek his counsel. When deciding the direction the company should take, we don’t move until we get his input.
We value the wisdom of underdogs-turned-leaders. They know the people who have come and gone, the ins and outs of the company, and the products, promotions, and projects that worked ten years ago, seven years ago, and within the last eighteen months. We trust their knowledge of the past to solve our challenges of the future.
You may not have a former underdog on your company’s leadership team, but you certainly have senior leaders who play the same role within your organization. They steer the organizational ship to the destination that they think offers the best shake for shareholders, staff, and customers. They often define the appetite for risk within a company.
When presented with a new idea or emerging trend, a senior person in a company can be the first to say, “We tried that three years ago and it flopped” or “The CEO will never go for it because our competitors tried it and failed,” or “That’s too much risk; we’ll get mud on our face.” These senior staff might instead focus on one approach that has worked for them for the last five years. Their proximity to their companies’ past failures keeps them looking in one direction for solutions. They may not be able to look beyond their organizations to consider the small ways the customers or business environment has changed. What once might have seemed ludicrous is now a viable option.
People who are very senior in a company can have too narrow a view to solve problems effectively. They can be too close to the work — and to their tried-and-tested ways — to see the big picture or consider tackling a problem from a different angle. Staying within a certain proximity to what’s worked in the past minimizes risk and protects the company’s money and reputation. It also protects the senior staff members’ jobs.
While it makes sense from a stability standpoint to stick to the tried-and-tested approach, it can stall the company’s growth. Leaders know that companies need to evolve to stay relevant, particularly in this era where dynamic start-ups are giving long-established businesses a run for their money. Until we take a step back and accept a certain amount of risk, we’ll never see the alternative routes to grow and evolve.
One amazing example of this paradox at work is the forty-five-degree turn that Post Foods Canada Corporation made with one of its brands.
Shreddies is a wheat breakfast cereal currently manufactured by Post Foods Canada Corporation. Other cereal brands in its product range include Sugar Crisp, Grape Nuts, Raisin Bran, and Shredded Wheat. Shreddies was first produced in 1939 and is available in Canada, New Zealand, and Great Britain.
One of the company’s most successful product marketing ideas in recent years was developed by a twenty-six-year-old intern at Ogilvy, Post Foods’s advertising company. To use a pun, it was an “out of the box” idea centered on the shape of each individual Shreddie inside each cereal box.
The breakfast cereal market is intensely competitive, with large multinational companies like Kellogg’s and General Mills14 prepared to spend millions of dollars on their products and associated marketing campaigns.
After nearly seventy years in the market, Shreddies sales had been mature and declining two percent year-on-year for the previous decade.15 One thing that breakfast cereal manufacturers generally do over time to increase sales is to change their products in some way. But people weren’t dissatisfied with the Shreddies product. In fact, market research indicated that existing users didn’t want Shreddies to change. Many Canadian parents had grown up with it, even though their kids weren’t enthused by it.
That presented a challenge. How do you increase the sales of a well-known product when existing buyers don’t want it to change, and new generations aren’t enticed by it anymore?
That was the question Shreddies presented to Ogilvy. Their brief was simple: get consumers talking about Shreddies again, without changing the product. The Shreddies team wanted a proposal for an innovative advertising campaign. Prior to that, there had been no significant marketing investment in the Shreddies brand for fifteen years.16
Each Shreddie in its cereal box has a square shape. They always have (and probably always will). However, when advertising intern named Hunter Somerville was tasked with coming up with an idea for the back of the Shreddies cereal box, he set out to make people laugh. His idea for an “old” square Shreddie versus “new” diamond-shaped Shreddie challenge was unveiled to the senior Ogilvy team, and people laughed out loud.17
It was intended as a joke. But Ogilvy’s creative director Nancy Vonk saw a spark in the idea. She could see the problem that Shreddies had, and thought this might just be quirky enough to fix it somehow. “Canadians like Shreddies, but they had forgotten all about them,” she recalled. “Our goal was to do whatever it takes to make people think about them again.”18
She asked Somerville to think about it some more and write it up as a potential campaign proposal. He subsequently did, fleshing the idea out to the point where he no longer thought it was just a silly joke. He envisioned consumers having to make a choice: buy the old traditional square Shreddies that they know and love, or try the “new” diamond version. That would get them thinking about the brand and engaging with it, something Shreddies consumers (and others) hadn’t done for a long time.
They subsequently presented the campaign proposal to Post Foods Canada Corporation, and the organization loved it!
The Shreddies product itself didn’t need to change at all for the campaign to be successful; it was simply about how people perceived the product. That would hopefully lead to increased sales. Post Foods even produced a special “mixed” pack of square and diamond-shaped Shreddies for consumers who were undecided, even though they were the same product!
The advertising campaign further encouraged the illusion with the catchphrase, “The same 100 percent whole-grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape.”19 It made tongue-in-cheek claims that the world’s leading designers had come up with the new shape and that it was forty-five percent more delicious.
A multimedia promotional campaign was developed featuring television, print, and web advertising, as well as outdoor billboards, viral videos, a website, and a package redesign. All the elements of the promotional campaign featured a prominent diamond Shreddie. The theme was that the old square-shaped Shreddies were boring and that the new diamond-shaped Shreddies were exciting. The subtheme was that Shreddies are already as good as they can get, and they always have been.
The TV ads were set up to look like hidden-camera focus groups. The actors in the ads were asked to compare both the look and the taste of the square and diamond-shaped Shreddies, and to rate their preferences. The actors naturally gave the diamond shape the tick of approval, indicating that it both tasted better and looked more interesting. The ads concluded by encouraging consumers to compare the square and diamond shapes, too (to encourage Shreddies sales as well as awareness of the “new” variety). They could then go to diamondshreddies.com to vote for their preference.
Within twenty-four hours of the launch of the campaign, it had gone viral. Consumers generally liked the joke and ran with it. Most (hopefully) understood quickly that the product hadn’t changed at all, but liked the unusual idea. But others were less certain whether Diamond Shreddies was a new product or not. There were debates on online forums and social media. The company even received a letter from an apparently concerned consumer, which read:
I’d like to know how much money your firm actually paid someone to produce Diamond Shreddies? A square on its side? How stupid can you be?
The company maintained the spirit of its campaign in its formal response to the letter-writer, allegedly written by the “President of Shreddies”:
Thanks for your question. We don’t disclose our advertising budgets, but let me assure you that a square on its side is still merely a square.20
Within two months of the campaign’s launch, the Diamond Shreddies website had attracted more than 95,000 unique visitors. Fifty-five Facebook Groups had also been created.21 People were even taking photographs of the billboards, recalled creative director Nancy Vonk.22
Forecast sales for the campaign doubled, with the company selling out of four months’ worth of “limited edition” Diamond Shreddies stock within two months. Overall sales of Shreddies increased by eighteen percent.23
For the record, the online preference votes during the campaign finished at sixty-two percent for Diamond Shreddies versus thirty-eight percent for the original square version. And even if people didn’t participate in voting or think that the joke was that funny, they still noticed the ad and the Shreddies product. The campaign also generated hundreds of stories in both print and digital media, including being the cover story on several prominent business and marketing magazines. That sort of free publicity for a product is gold.
The Diamond Shreddies campaign revived interest in the Shreddies brand without the product needing to change at all. Post Foods Canada Corporation enjoyed the benefit of a product line extension without actually creating one!
The advertising campaign was fun, smart, and memorable, winning a prestigious international Clio Award for advertising in 2008.24 The campaign also won a Grand Prix CASSIES award, which acknowledges the ability of an advertising campaign to generate client business.25
Advertising guru Rory Sutherland paid tribute to the campaign:
This is the most perfect case of creating intangible, added value, without changing the product in the slightest. How many problems of life can actually be solved by tinkering with perception, rather than that tedious, hardworking, and messy business of actually trying to change reality?
The success of the campaign also helped launch Somerville’s career. He didn’t stay an intern for long. He was hired soon after as a full-time copywriter, and after spending two-and-a-half years at Ogilvy, he has since worked both as a staff member and freelancer for other major advertising agencies, including DDB and Saatchi & Saatchi. He has been ranked among the top five creatives in the advertising industry in both Canada and the UK.26
Good ideas can come from anywhere in an organization, not necessarily from the most experienced or senior people. For a company to develop a culture of innovation, we need to encourage all potential idea sources to contribute.
We need to look at problems from different angles to generate creative solutions (literally in this case for Diamond Shreddies, but the general principle is valid for any problem).
Young people can come up with very creative ideas. If leaders at Ogilvy hadn’t taken an intern’s idea for Diamond Shreddies seriously, they never would have developed what became an award-winning and successful campaign for their client.
Idea champions are important. If Ogilvy’s creative director hadn’t seen the potential in her intern’s idea, it most likely never would have seen the light of day. Seemingly silly ideas can be very creative and generate marketing results that expensive product upgrades or modifications can’t necessarily deliver. The Diamond Shreddies case provides ample evidence.
We often think that our most senior people are the most capable of coming up with our best solutions or that increasing a person’s responsibility will increase their positive influence on the organization.
Unfortunately, as responsibility increases, risk tolerance decreases. And with every year of work and every letter you add to the end of your name, you develop a deeper and more focused understanding of the world you live in, making it harder to see what might be happening outside.
To be successful, we need to create distance from our own expertise and distance from the responsibilities, the expectations and the structure of the workers in our companies. As long as you’re focused on what you still have to achieve, you won’t be able to accomplish what you’re capable of achieving.
While you can’t shut off your proximity to your own experience, you can create an environment that encourages the new blood to contribute ideas. We’re not just talking about young staff; anyone from a different department or background or a new employee who came from a different organization or industry will look at your company’s problems in a way you never can.
Tenured staff may not see any reason to invest more time and money in the marketing budget or to come up with new ideas when the old ones work just fine. Hone your change management skills to help others be open and receptive to new ideas. If the culture isn’t fully on board with a new person making changes, the changes won’t stick, and the person won’t stick around. Before long, the company will resume its old ways.
Pick the next project or problem to solve, and instead of putting it on the desk of an expert, create a tag team. If you’re considered the expert in that project, recognize that you won’t be able to innovate freely, and then find someone who can. Recruit a teammate — someone with whom you wouldn’t typically work — and combine his or her fresh ideas with your insight to develop some alternatives to your normal course of action.
When pairing up experts and innovators, consider your entire team, regardless of their roles or their seniority within your company. While it might not typically make sense within the company culture to have a junior designer working as an innovator with a senior production manager, when the goal is creativity, it can bring new ideas and energy to a project.
The combination of different staff members can also speed up the implementation of an idea. We’ve all worked on projects that are great in theory but fall flat because they weren’t executed properly. Assigning an innovator to an expert relieves the pressure on the expert to do everything himself or herself, or of shouldering all the responsibility when things don’t go to plan.
When you host a team brainstorm, are there a few big personalities who steer the discussion? Do participants defer to the most senior person in the room? Do some people sit on their hands while others draw on the walls?
People have certain brainstorm styles, and when they consistently revert to the same old styles, it can create a group dynamic that limits diversity of thought. To combat this problem, try assigning roles to participants.
This person is often the owner of the challenge. He can clearly define the problem and take others on a journey to solve it, painting a picture of where we’ve come from and the grand potential of where we might be able to end up. The Flag Bearer inspires others to take action. He brings the most value through his passion, not necessarily for his contribution of ideas.
This person may be the quiet one in the room. Her problem-solving process starts with mulling over the problem, researching it, reflecting on it, and exploring different perspectives. She often uses brainstorms to take in new information, but she does her best ideation independently. The Thinker can easily support her idea with a well-thought-out rationale.
This person can think on his feet. He thrives when the pressure is high and timelines are tight. In the brainstorm room, he’s often the one vibrating with ideas that he cannot wait to unleash on the world. The Inventor isn’t afraid to push for big ideas or multiple concepts, but he doesn’t always invest the time to fully understand the finer details surrounding the challenge.
This person is the marathon runner of concept or product development. She has the stamina to shepherd a project through every phase. In the brainstorm room, she gets the group to build on promising ideas. When the dust settles, she continues to test out the chosen idea and explore different applications. When it’s time to execute and others have grown bored with the project, the Producer still has energy to bring the idea to life.
When scheduling a brainstorm, assign different roles to participants — ones that are different from their normal brainstorming styles. Get big personalities to try the Thinker role, get the senior leader to become a Flag Bearer — you get the idea.
One way to identify innovative and creative thinkers in your company is to host a seeding brainstorm. Depending on how ambitious you feel, present your problem to a department or to the whole company. Upcoming marketing campaigns, customer events, product prototypes, philanthropic initiatives, and company retreats are all good topics for a seeding brainstorm. Tell staff what kind of solutions you are looking for; you can be specific or broad depending on the type of ideas you’re hoping to get back.
Hand out cards to everyone and request that they write, draw, or glue something onto the card. It can be anything that pops into mind when they think of your project. Ask staff members to tack their ideas up on a designated “idea wall” in the lunchroom or another common area. If you work with a remote team, share the challenge on your intranet or simply ask people to email their ideas to you to post on their behalf.
Make sure team members sign their cards so you know who is seeding each idea. It will give you a good indication of who’s interested in ideation because they will participate fully and seed a lot of ideas to the wall. The heavy seeders are prime candidates for the innovator role in future matchmaking exercises, as they bring a lot of enthusiasm to projects.
You’ll also learn who seeds the really different, out-there ideas. While their suggestions might not be viable for this particular project, stay connected with these folks. When you’re stuck on a creative problem, you know the out-there idea people will help you consider some new angles and shake some new ideas loose.
Consultants, for the most part, play an important role in a company’s ability to innovate and problem solve. They can help you see new ideas and think about your business in different ways. They are also not hindered by your company politics or past transgressions. Junior employees have the same qualities, so take advantage of their untainted outlook while you can.
Try holding a junior consulting day or challenge. Give your junior team permission to evaluate your organization or department as a whole. Invite them to provide recommendations in the same way that a paid consultant would. You can evaluate their input and have your team implement any winning ideas.
Here are a few simple steps to hosting a junior consulting day: