In the Idea Kitchen, Too Many Cooks Can Spoil the Broth

Adam Bryant | The New York Times

This interview with John Nottingham and John Spirk, co-presidents of Nottingham Spirk, an innovation consulting firm based in Cleveland, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q: What are some things you've noticed in some organization's culture that can impede innovation?

JOHN SPIRK: One thing we sometimes see is that everyone from the C-suite level on down talks about innovation, and they will go through the motions. They'll give titles to chief innovation officers and the like, but they won't follow through.

Many times, that's easy to identify because you can go to people below the C-level people and ask them: "Where's the priority? What's the urgency? What's the mission?" They don't know because they were never given that. It's like it's set up to fail from that standpoint. Our feeling is that many times the directives aren't there to follow through on. And a directive to us is establishing a budget for it. Then it's serious. But many times there are no budgets for innovation.

JOHN NOTTINGHAM: And too often we see groups that say: "O.K. Today we're going to be creative. Let's shuttle into a room and have a brainstorming session." And they'll have this clipboard, the sticky notes and all kinds of techniques.

Q: What are other things you've noticed?

SPIRK: One is lack of speed. The meetings have to happen. The sign-offs have to take place. The budgets have to be approved all the way through the system. If those don't happen, that will bog things down.

NOTTINGHAM: The analogy we use is that you're in a Jeep S.U.V. on one side of a pond of quicksand, and way on the other side is the place you want to get to. That's the goal. And you rev up your engine and start moving and you're negotiating this tricky pond. If you pause to think about it for awhile, you start sinking in the quicksand and all of a sudden you disappear.

SPIRK: The other thing that is absolutely critical for success with companies is to have an internal champion. Not the C.E.O.; that's a given. There has to be a champion inside. And they have to have the ability to do it without any penalties or risk to their career for trying new things.

Q: Other things that can slow innovation?

SPIRK: I'll tell you there's nothing more frustrating than to sit in on a conference call, and we'll have maybe three people on our side, and there will be 15 or 16 people on the other side of the call. The bigger the company, the more people tend to be on the call. And once we kind of figure that out, we have a talk with the company because that is no way to innovate. It just does not happen with 16 people on a weekly conference call.

We'll tell them that we need to narrow the team down, and get the key people involved -- the ones who own the project. Not just people who are watching it, but the ones who own it. And there's usually only two or three who truly own it.

NOTTINGHAM: The more people you have in a meeting, the more you have the opportunity for a naysayer — "Wait a minute, what if it doesn't work? What if it doesn't happen?" All of a sudden the dynamic just slows down.

Q: I'll keep asking. What else have you noticed in terms of common innovation pitfalls?

SPIRK: Death by PowerPoint. And there's the problem of testing things to death — retesting and recalibrating and retesting. At some point you have to end that and move on to the next phase. But somehow it just gets stuck in those areas of testing and retesting. And I'm sure there are good intentions behind it, but nothing is certain, especially when you're working on an accelerated timeline and you've got competitive forces coming in.

Q: What's the right size for an effective brainstorming meeting?

NOTTINGHAM: Between 8 and 12. If you get too many people in the room, it's not collaborative enough. And if it's too few, there are just not enough good ideas. But we've been to Fortune 500 companies where they had a creative session with about 100 people in the room. It gets unmanageable. People end up shutting down.

Q: Once you generate a bunch of ideas, what's the best approach for winnowing the list?

NOTTINGHAM: There is a technique we use, and it's very simple. The first phase is to generate a lot of ideas. People often do that pretty well. The frustration that I've seen is when people say: "Well, gee. We had that creative session six weeks ago. Whatever happened to that?" There's a whole notebook full of ideas, but they're not implemented.

For the second phase, say you have 100 ideas, but you're gong to do only one or two products. And that's the part that most people don't get. One technique we use involves notecards, and one notecard says, "Wow." One notecard says, "Nice." And the third notecard says, "Who cares?" Everybody sits around the table with their cards face down.

Now you have somebody champion one of the ideas on the wall and talk about why it's good. When they're done, everybody — at the same time — has to hold up a card, and then you look around the room. If everybody says, "Wow," well, "wow" is an emotional word, and you're going to keep that idea. That's easy, but it doesn't happen a lot.

So another idea is presented, and everybody may up the cards that say, "Who cares?" So you take that product and just shove it off the table. It's not going to work.

Guess what the hardest one is? "Nice." So the product manager comes in, talks about this thing and everybody says, "Yeah, it's nice." You know what? Nice is the hardest thing because somebody will actually produce the nice product and will have nice sales but it's not going to move the needle. Too often, too many nice products get produced.

In these meetings, it's very important that everybody shows their card at the same time so nobody influences anybody else. You don't go around the room taking turns, as in: "What do you think, Harry? What do you think, George?" Well, if Harry's the leader, then everybody starts answering the same way.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 25, 2012, Section BU, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: In the Idea Kitchen, Too Many Cooks Can Spoil the Broth.

About Nottingham Spirk
Nottingham Spirk is a world-class product innovation firm with an unrivaled record of developing and commercializing disruptive consumer products, medical devices, digital IoT products and connected industrial products. We collaborate with Fortune 1,000 companies, middle market companies and funded venture companies to discover, design and execute product innovation programs and strategic business platforms that will delight customers, grow markets, and generate new revenue streams. Learn more about what makes us different.