Short audio preview

What's the unique selling point of your organisation? Chances are, it's not as unique as you think. We badly need to think differently, both as teams and individuals, according to Nigel Barlow. Otherwise we'll fail to reach our potential and probably lead less fulfilling lives. The solution, he suggested to the London Business Forum (LBF), is to "re-think" continually - to give ourselves a fresh perspective on everything from the products and services we sell to the daily newspaper we read.

"I am not going to be using phrases like 'thinking outside the box', 'lateral thinking' or 'brainstorming', for reasons that should become clear," Barlow said, shortly after he bounced on stage at the New Players Theatre. "If you want to be an extreme innovator... then you actually need to change the box." The venue was an intimate space with dainty galleries and a Victorian-style mirrored bar, hidden beneath the railway arches of Charing Cross. It suited Barlow's conversational style and his continual requests for audience participation.

But would we be sufficiently inspired by the end of the event? By his own admission, Barlow looked like an ex-Geography teacher. He wore dull, dark clothes and a five-day beard. The problem he faced was the problem every organisation faces at one level or another: stereotyping. "Most of the time you and I are not thinking, we are stereotyping," he said. "That is quite useful for finding our way around the world, around our life, around our job, but if we want to open up... and think in fresh ways, it really boxes us in."

Barlow suggested we are limited by our "grid of experience", a pattern of thinking built up over time that is very difficult to resist. When we hear the word "Kodak", for example, we probably still think of cameras and film even though the company moved into photocopiers 20 years ago and now manufactures a range of products including medical imaging equipment. "You know how difficult it is to change the customer's or client's grid of experience," he said. "We are all experts as customers. When you walk into a hotel, a bank or a restaurant, how quickly do you make judgements about its quality...? Straight away. But when we're serving customers ourselves we think: perhaps they'll understand... we're short-staffed, we've got IT problems."

Fortunately there is an antidote to stereotyping that can help us to refresh our own thinking and help us to see our own businesses through the eyes of our customers. "It's called the beginner's mind," Barlow said, "and I have stolen it from the Japanese zen tradition. Here's what it says: 'In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few.'"

You could recapture the innocence of a beginner by periodically "firing yourself", as the senior executive team at Intel does - in other words, taking an away-day to imagine how you would change your organisation if you no longer worked for it. Or, for example, you could do what Richard Branson did when he founded Virgin Atlantic. "His rethink was to hire people who did not have a background in the airline industry, except the pilots," Barlow said. The key point to remember here is that although Branson had no idea how to run an airline, he did have plenty of experience as a dissatisfied customer of other airlines.

"To really change the box and open up your grid, you need to be able to think in a child-like rather than childish way," Barlow continued. And this usually requires help from other people. It's a simple truth that one of the best ways to rethink a problem is to "go for a walk with somebody," he said. "Explore with them what assumptions you are making... you may not get a eureka moment straight away but you'll start opening up your grid."

Another re-think suggested by Barlow was a fresh organisational approach to language. "If we're going to think differently then we have to [declare] war on jargon and clichés," he said. "When you read [most] mission, vision, value statements, it's almost impossible to tell one apart from another." Yet it is possible to surprise and delight readers even when your written output has a boring task to perform. For example, Barlow said, "this was a real job advertisement in a Norwegian newspaper three years ago: 'Tiresome and boring wholesale company seeks indolent people with a total lack of service-mindedness for a job that is completely without challenge. If you're still interested, sit down, have a cup of coffee, relax. If you can be bothered, call.' They had 140 applicants for this one single job."

Similarly, in South London, the plumbing company Patel famp; Co. showed fresh thinking in their slogan: "You've tried the cowboys, now try the Indians." "I don't know whether their plumbing is any damn good," Barlow admitted, "but they're the sort of people that, when flicking through the Yellow Pages, I'd hire."

Language is also vital if you wish to tell the "story" behind your offerings - an increasingly important source of differentiation in a world of surplus products and services, where many industries have reached a plateau of quality. "You can sell two things if you're different: you can sell benefits, but you can also differentiate by selling a story," Barlow said. He cited a slogan used by Innocent, the smoothie company, on some of its drinks bottles: "If you've enjoyed your Smoothie, why not try our other products, like sand, rainbows or perhaps plankton?"

Whatever re-thinking you intend to do, make sure you do it quickly. This was the other overriding message to come from Barlow's speech. The need to "design the future" is a pressing one, he argued, quoting Bill Ford, the CEO of the Ford Motor Company, who recently said: "The future arrived much sooner than we anticipated." Barlow's response to this excuse for poor performance was incredulous: "What? Fuel economy, hybrid engines? I'm delighted to be working with Toyota and Lexus who saw the future coming."

A healthy dose of paranoia is very useful when trying to make predictions, he added. "As Mark Andreeson, inventor of the world's first graphical Web browser, said: if you have an idea and you say it to people and they nod and say, 'Yes, that makes sense,' then it probably means there's 10-12 people in the world already working on it. His criterion for a successful idea is that it has to make people laugh and be outraged. Then you know it's really breaking the mould and it's really fresh." Barlow summed up his views on urgency with a Far Eastern expression: "It is later than you think..."

Of course, it's relatively easy to re-think your own situation and relatively difficult to get others to re-think theirs. If you want your staff to follow your example, Barlow said, the three golden rules are "appreciate, appreciate, appreciate". As William James, the father of modern American psychology, pointed out: "The greatest human craving is to be appreciated."

In the workplace, you can show appreciation by "catching people out doing something right," Barlow suggested. "This is the opposite of what happens in most businesses, which is management by exception, i.e. you do not hear from the boss except when there is a problem." The word feedback should be banned, he added, because for most people it is pejorative. "How many of you can think of someone you're really overdue appreciating? I know of no organisation in the world where people are appreciated enough."

However, Barlow said, the worst enemy of re-thinking is "yes but" thinking - an attitude in which reasons are always found for not going ahead with something new. Try noting how many times you come up with a "yes but" response to ideas over a 24-hour period, he said, or better still put some money in a "yes but" box every time you or your colleagues commit the same sin. You'll be astonished by how negative and self-limited your organisation really is.

"Take a different route home, be more curious, take a risk, talk to a stranger," Barlow implored. "The riskiest thing is not to take risk." Asked to expand on this point, he said: "I think you have to reward risk; most organisations when they talk about it aren't serious... You almost need symbolic acts where someone took a risk that resulted in genuine learning for the organisation." This thought led him to conclude with a case study that was perhaps the greatest business re-think of recent times: "Who was it that transformed the music industry? None of the music companies. It was Apple Computer. For them, was it a risk? No, they probably didn't know what was impossible and therefore they did it."