NMP Live Meets, motivational keynote speaker and expert on lateral thinking, creativity, innovation and leadership, Paul Sloane.
Watch the video or read the full interview below.
In conversation with Paul Sloane
Can you give us a potted history of your career?
I studied engineering at university. I worked for IBM for 11 years. I was top of sales school, I was sales and marketing and helped launch the IBM PC in the UK.
I became Marketing Director and the Managing Director of a database company Ashton-Tate in the glory days of the PC and that was a lot of fun. I became VP International for US Software company – mathsoft - on all the international operations for them and then I was CEO of a software startup company.
So my career has mainly been in high tech sales, marketing, general management but for the last 10 years I have been helping organisations improve innovation. I give talks and workshops on lateral thinking, creativity and the leadership of innovation.
What is lateral thinking?
Lateral thinking is approaching a problem from a different direction. It’s a phrase coined by Edward de Bono in contrast to conventional thinking, or vertical thinking, where we build block on block on block, and lateral just means coming at it from the side – that’s all it is.
So, in 2008 a man called Travis Kalanick was in Paris at a conference and he couldn’t get a taxi. Conventional thinking would say that if I cant get a taxi I should get the bus or I should get the metro or I should walk, and he thought, ‘is there a different way to solve this problem? Are there drivers around who could give me a lift?’ So he created Uber. That is an example of lateral thinking in business – approaching the problem from a different direction.
Everyone else thinks we need more capacity, we need more taxis, we need more buses, we need more trains. He thinks, no, there is plenty of spare capacity if we can just harness it. So lateral thinking is about finding a different solution for a client’s problem.
When did you first become interested in lateral thinking puzzles?
Well, I used to collect them and love doing them, and I couldn’t find a book so I wrote a book called ‘Lateral Thinking Puzzles’ and that was my first book. It came out in 1991 and it became a best-seller, has been translated in to many languages, and sold well over a quarter of a million copies.
I got interested then and I have written a number of other books on lateral thinking puzzles. I run a site called lateralthinkingpuzzles.com, where people set and solve puzzles interactively.
But I got interested in how you would use those principles of solving the puzzles in business. Can we use the same methods for checking assumptions, coming at the problem from different directions, asking the right kind of questions, could you put that in to some kind of business methodology, and that’s what I teach.
What are the ‘golden rules’ of lateral thinking in business?
The golden rules of lateral thinking in business are to check your assumptions, first of all. That’s the first rule and every time you approach a problem in business, or at home with your children, with your partner, in your social life, you bring assumptions to bear that limit your ability to solve the problem and limit your ability to see solutions because you put it in a frame.
We do it all the time, it’s very natural and I give a lot of examples in my talks of how assumptions limit us. One way you do that is by asking very basic, very searching questions. That’s the second rule, you ask basic, childlike questions.
The lateral thinker, the innovative leader, is endlessly curious and they are always probing – why are we doing this? What’s the added value here? What does the customer get out of this? What’s the real purpose about this? They are some of the very basic questions to really challenge the thinking of the people around them.
Then the third rule really is to approach the problem from a different point of view – to displace yourself from where you are now and start somewhere else, and approach the problem from a different direction. I teach methods to do that in my workshop and I talk about those methods and give a lot of examples and stories in my talks.
How do assumptions limit our ability to conceive better solutions?
Well, we see it all the time. Mark Twain said it’s not what we don’t know that gets us in to trouble, it’s what we think we know for sure, and the things you think you know for sure are the most dangerous things.
The captain of the Titanic was sure he could cross the Atlantic at high speed. Recently we have seen with the Hillsborough disaster enquiry that what has become apparent is that the police handled it badly because they made the wrong assumption. They thought they were dealing with a crowd disturbance, crowd trouble, and they have been trained for that and applied the methods, which are the methods of containment. If you have crowd trouble you contain it, but it wasn’t crowd trouble, it was a deadly crush. So, they applied the wrong assumptions to the situation, they applied the wrong solution and 96 people died.
We see time and time again that the wrong assumptions limit our ability to solve problems.
Are creativity and innovation one and the same thing?
Creativity and innovation are different; there is a lot of confusion. The definitions I like are these: Creativity is thinking about new things, innovation is the implementation of new things.
So if we have lots of great ideas in this room today that’s creativity, but it’s not innovation. Innovation only happens if you go back and you change something, you do something. So some people say you get creativity for free but innovation costs money. Innovation involves taking a risk and doing something, and then invention is doing something entirely new that has never been done before.
So with innovation, everyone else can be doing it, but if you are the first person in Leatherhead to be doing it then it is an innovation for you but it’s not necessarily an invention.
Then creativity is the forerunner to innovation and the way to innovate is to define the problem, analyse the problem, talk about the outcome that you want, and then to generate lots and lots of creative ideas. When I say lots I mean hundreds, and that’s where the creativity comes in. Then you select using some criteria and choose the most promising idea, it’s only a prototype though, you try them, if you can try them cheaply, that’s the best way.
Are risk taking and failure essential for companies to be innovative?
Risk taking and failure are absolutely integral to innovation. If everything you try succeeds, you are not being bold enough, it’s as simple as that.
So, one of the questions I ask the audience in my talk is why does Roger Federer serve faults? He doesn’t need to – he could get his second serving very safely but if you take Federer or Djokovic or Maria Sharapova (she serves a lot), in a match they will typically serve four, five, six double faults. The point is that the champion has learned that it’s not a good plan to go safe on your second serve – it makes it easy for your opponent. So they push the second serve as hard as they can and they are prepared to accept a certain number of double faults as a price for that. There’s an optimum number of double faults to serve in a tennis match, and it’s not zero, and there is an optimum number of mistakes and failures you should be making every month, and it’s not zero.
You should be trying new things that don’t work, and learning from them, and sharing that with your team. And very often innovation results from many failures. Fail stands for First Action In Learning.
What can companies do to maintain an edge over their competitors?
Well, the answer is innovate, that is what they have to do. But, they have to be exactly sure of why customers buy their products, and why customers don’t buy their products and that’s the source of innovation.
If you know exactly why people choose you, or don’t choose you, and what your real added value is, then you can find new ways to enhance that added value or you can see all the competition is.
So, the chairman of Black and Decker once famously said that people don’t go in to a DIY store to buy one of our drills, they are going because they need a hole in their wall, it is that concept of what are you supplying? Is it a drill, or is it a hole in the wall? And, in your case as a speaker bureau you are not just supplying warm bodies and speakers, you are supplying information, entertainment, education, enrichment for audiences.
Another example I like to give is Wonderbra. Wonderbra are a very innovative company, and what they say in their internal communication to staff is this: we do not sell underwear, we do not sell lingerie, what we sell is self-confidence for women.
Once you understand that, and you start to say ‘why is it that the customer really buys from us? Are they buying a service, are they buying security, are they buying piece of mind, what is it?’ Once you understand that, then you have a direction for your innovation.
What is leadership?
One of my pet sayings is this: Leadership and innovation live in the same house. By that I mean that a leader always changes an organisation, a leader always takes it from one place to another.
If what you are doing right now is making the current operation run really well, ironing out problems, improving customer service, looking after the staff, making the systems work really properly, you’re not a leader – you are a manager. All of those tasks are management tasks. They are essential though, somebody has got to do them, but they are not leadership.
Leadership is working on the organisation but management is working in the organisation. A leader always starts by saying ‘we’re here today, we have done really well, thanks guys, but where I want us to be in the future is somewhere different.’
A leader paints a vision of a better future, and then he or she inspires the people to come on a journey with them, and what that says is ‘we are here today, I want us to be in different markets, be serving more customers with fewer resources in these areas in five years time, and I need your help to get there. And, we are going to get there, not by working harder, or spending more money necessarily, but by working smarter, by finding new and better ways to do things, and you are the guys that can help see that and find that.
When did you first realise your talent for public speaking?
I did a lot of speaking in business when I was Marketing Director and Managing Director and VP International, I was speaking at conferences. I always enjoyed it. I was in the round table and did a lot of speaking there, which was more emphasis on entertainment and fun and humour, and I enjoyed that too.
I then started to get requests to speak even when I was in full time work and I found it very hard to fulfil them all. So about 10 years ago or so I started my own business to focus on my speaking, workshops and writing, and I have been all over the world, USA, Middle East, Asia, around Europe, and I’ve learnt a lot and enjoyed it greatly.
How do the workshops you offer differ from your keynote talks?
The keynote talk contains a lot of stories and examples and powerful messages, but the workshop contains methods, and people learn by doing.
They learn problem analysis techniques, we review their leadership styles, we look at advanced brainstorming techniques, idea generation, idea selection, we look at processes for innovation. It’s more hands on, more practical, more learning by doing.
I do a creative leadership workshop, and I also do an ideas workshop where we generate ideas specifically for an issue that the organisation has right now.
How would you describe your talks and presentation style?
My approach to the talks, and what makes me different I think, is I’m provocative and I’m stimulating. I challenge the audience, I ask them some questions, some are fun things, some are trick questions, some are lateral thinking puzzles, and some are very hard-hitting business examples and messages.
I use a lot of stories – I explain the key points with stories about real situations from various walks of life, mainly business but from sport and warfare and other areas. And I use that to get he message across and I have a number of key messages, and I try to make them as practical as possible so that people can take them back to their workplace and be a better manager and a better leader as the result of my talk.
If you're interested in booking Paul Sloane, you can enquire online, email us or pick up the phone and speak to one of our booking agents. For further information about Paul, speech topics, client testimonials and video clips of recent talks view his profile.
