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Seeing the light
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09/10/2008
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Why does your boss continue to reject your brilliant idea? Perhaps you’re not presenting it to him in the right way. Lou Reade reports
You’ve just had the most fantastic idea – and the proverbial Eureka light bulb is still hovering above your head like a searchlight.
Your idea is the product, or solution, or service that the world has been waiting for. Not just a better mousetrap, but the ultimate mousetrap. Full of enthusiasm and confidence, you hurry to your design director’s office – who rejects your idea out of hand.
If you’ve been there then you’re not alone according to Anne Miller, whose recent book The Myth of the Mousetrap suggests how you might replay the above scenario to ensure that your idea is more readily accepted.
Miller is an inventor – she patented the manufacturing system for the female condom – and an authority on creativity and innovation. Her company, The Creativity Partnership, provides consultancy and training to a range of organisations.
“It makes sense to reject new ideas,” she says. “People prefer their own ideas – and embedding other people’s is hard work.”
There might be many reasons for rejecting the idea: it does not fit with the recipient’s needs; it sounds ‘too innovative’ – and therefore too risky; or perhaps it is a poor idea all along. Rejection can be demoralising, but Miller says there are ways back.
“When you realise that rejection is normal, you can do something about it,” she says. “And you realise that it was a good idea after all.”
The trouble is, people usually take two approaches – neither of which is likely to succeed. The first is to make the common assumption that Miller alludes to in the book’s title: that a ‘better mousetrap’ will cause the world to beat a path to your door.
“They won’t,” says Miller bluntly. “This is often when engineers get demoralised.”
Many then try to bounce back from this initial rejection by adopting Plan B – fighting doubly hard for their idea.
“They often go in like a battering ram, which creates stronger resistance from the organisation,” says Miller. “This can often lead to people being sacked.”
The notion of the ‘Eureka moment’ is not helpful, she says. While the spark of inspiration has its place, it is really just a beginning: the task of taking this initial idea to fruition is often a long one.
“In reality, innovation tends to involve a lot of false starts and confusion, and ideas need to be ‘morphed’ until they work,” she says. “It’s only in retrospect that the story is tidied up so that it sounds nice and logical.”
And, if anything, an idea is more likely to be rejected if it’s a good one. Again, Miller cites from history – and how Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift was rejected as ludicrous. The telephone, talking movies and The Beatles were all initially dismissed by ‘experts’ – while the Sinclair C5 made it to market.
Four stages
Just as effective product development uses a stage gate process, so the route to getting ideas accepted has four distinct stages. These are: blindness; frozen; interested; and integrated.
During the blindness phase – an aspect of which is the ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome – a corporation is incapable of realising that the idea is exactly what they need. According to Miller, our brains are designed so that our perceptions of the world are filtered and forced to fit in with what we expect. If what we see does not fit – and a radical idea would be expected not to fit – then we ignore them.
One aspect of this is called ‘inattentional blindness’ – in which you “look but cannot see”. It begins to explain why the relevance of good ideas is not always recognised.
During the frozen phase, people accept the notion of the idea but still do not act.
“We become rationally aware of the advantage of something, but don’t do anything about it,” says Miller.
She cites climate change as an example – arguing that most people accept it is happening, but too few are taking any action.
‘Unfreezing’ is then a key part of the process – and it goes back to understanding precisely why somebody is frozen in the first place. In one project, Miller was called in to a company whose new £2m production machine did not work. Her answer was to design a series of small, cheaper machines to do the same job.
“This lack of risk helped to unfreeze them,” she says.
The last two stages – interested and integrated – can last anything from months to years, but can be speeded up “if you have the right lever” she says.
“The more you think critically about these stages the more successful you are likely to be.”
Breaking through
So what are some of the ways to overcome this blindness, and improve the chances of your idea being accepted?
The main thing is to make your idea more attractive – and this means framing it in a way that the recipient will appreciate.
“Think about whether you should present a 500-page tome or a one-page summary,” says Miller. “Engineers often add more and more detail to an idea. I encourage them to develop a nine-word statement to encapsulate it.”
Another key point is to understand people – both yourself and those around you. Some are informal and creative – ‘creative mavericks’ as Miller calls them. (That’s you, with your good idea.) Then there are the structured, organised people – ‘careful conservators’ – who, as luck would have it, are the project managers that you have to pitch ideas to.
“As a creative maverick, you naturally present the idea to appeal to yourself,” says Miller. “It’s exciting and innovative, it could revolutionise the business, and it’s really different. That’s the last thing a careful conservator wants to hear.”
Instead – and she’s done this herself – write a boring memo, detailing how you’ve only created eight prototypes of the product, which offers minor advantages over your existing range, and arrange a meeting to discuss it.
“Engineers often don’t understand how different people react,” she says. “Once you realise that the people you try to influence are as different as the materials you are designing with, you will get somewhere.”
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Author
Tom Shelley
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