Interview with Roger von Oech

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Interview with Roger von Oech Chuck: Hello everyone, this is Chuck Frey, author of Up Your Impact - 52 Innovative Strategies To Add Value To Your Work.

He is an internationally recognized leader in stimulating creativity and innovation.

1 Interview with Roger von Oech Chuck: Hello everyone, this is Chuck Frey, author of Up Your Impact - 52 Innovative Strategies To Add Value To Your Work. Joining me today on this podcast is Roger von Oech, author of two of the best-selling creativity books of all time, A Whack on the Side of the Head, and A Kick in the Seat of the Pants. He is an internationally recognized leader in stimulating creativity and innovation. Since 1977, his seminars, workshops and presentations have enhanced the creative skills of over a million participants. With creativity being such an important part of adding value to your work, Roger was my first choice for someone to talk to on this subject and I m very pleased he s able to join me on this call today. Welcome, Roger. Roger: It s great to be here and great to share a few ideas. I love the title of your new book, Up Your Impact. I think that s something that everyone who is either looking for a job or in a job now and trying to stand out even more and make a more valuable contribution, is trying to do. I wish you a lot of success with this endeavor. Chuck: Thanks. Yes, there certainly seems to be a tendency of people to become commodities, almost like a product becomes a commodity, and if you don t stand out you are at more risk today. So, let s kick into our questions right away. What has changed in the last few years in your mind that makes working creatively more important to do than ever? Roger: Well, I think a lot of things I m going to say, well the truisms have become clichés, companies are trying to do more with fewer people. That means they are expect more from their

2 Roger von Oech interview Page 2 people and that means people need to have more skills and be more productive. One of the things companies are looking for is to have people become more creative and find more uses for the resources they already have. I think there s a much greater expectation of companies for their personnel to be creative on the job and to look for opportunities. Certainly, that s much more the case than say in the 80 s or 90 s. An expectation of creativity on the part of their people certainly stands out in my mind. Chuck: A lot of the people I know insist they are not creative. How can they cultivate the ability to become more of a creative problem solver in their work? Roger: Well, I think that everybody is born with the ability to look at the world in new, different and original ways. But I think a lot of the creativity gets drummed out of us as we go through school and become socialized into adulthood. I think that there are certain specific things an individual can do to increase their creativity. A couple of things I like to say is that obviously not everyone has the creativity of an Einstein, a Beethoven or Madame Curie. I think there historically has been a tendency to put certain creative figures up on a pedestal and say everyone can be like that. But I think you have to realize most creative heavyweights didn t get their big ideas out of the blue. They got them from paying attention to their medium-sized ideas and playing with them and manipulating them and turning them into something larger. By the same token, most of them don t get medium-sized ideas out the blue. They often come about because they paid attention to the small ideas and then worked with them and manipulated them. So, I d say one of the chief things that differentiates creative people from lesser creative people is that creative people pay attention to their smaller ideas and then have enough self-trust and faith. They give it time and make it a priority to turn these into larger ideas and often times a lot of these medium-sized and larger-sized ideas don t go anywhere but I think there s a fair amount of self trust and self-faith that you can say, Oh, that odd thing maybe it will lead me somewhere. So, I think that would probably be one of the first things that I would say you may not be a Beethoven or Picasso or Einstein but pay attention to your smaller ideas and see where it goes. It s kind of a playful attitude, actually. Chuck: I think, too, in a lot of cases, companies aren t expecting you to hit a home run creatively all the time. There s plenty of room for incremental or medium-sized improvement. I think everyone gets blinded by the idea that they have to come up with the one big idea that s going to solve everything. Roger: One term that I have been hearing over and over again for the last, maybe since 2004, 2005, is the term innovation, and I would make somewhat of a distinction between creativity and

3 Roger von Oech interview Page 3 innovation. When I hear innovation I typically think that is creativity in an applied sense, much more of a commercial sense where you are getting a product or a service or something to market or you are trying to make an impact in the commercial sense. In that case, innovation can be very incremental. You can make something a little bit better, faster or cheaper or anything to give your customers a more competitive advantage or give them more satisfaction. One thing that I push for a lot in my seminars, I started doing this in the late 70 s and when I was doing a lot of corporate seminars in the 80 s and 90 s, was the idea of people to be inhouse entrepreneurs. That you don t have to go off and start your own company. You can find opportunities within a department, no matter if it s IT or finance, to get more out of your resources, to use something in a different way. And I think that s something that has been picked up more and more in the last seven or eight years as more companies begin to have VPs of Innovation. And there s an expectation that people not only do your job, but think of new and better ways to do what you are doing, to streamline processes, to think of new markets or uses for the things you do, because that s the way you are going to out-compete your competition. I think that s one of the things that you may be driving at with your book, with Up Your Impact, is that readers should have an expectation that they can find new ways to do things, that they can use their creativity. I think that companies that have that expectation on the part of their people will outperform their competition. Chuck: Your tool for creative thinking, the Creative Whack Pack, is marvelous. I m a big fan of creativity tools and your tool is one of the very best that s out there. It s a card deck designed to jump start your thinking in new directions, for those of you listeners who haven t heard of it. It s available as a card deck and also and an iphone and ipad app. Can you explain a little bit, Roger, about how the Creative Whack Pack works and what benefits our listeners can gain by using a creative catalyst like this? Roger: It would be my pleasure. I will give you a little bit of a background: I ve always wanted to have a creativity tool like a creative workshop in a box and so I created the Creative Whack Pack in the late 80 s. It was first published in 1989 as a card deck. I ll just give your listeners some basics on the methodology. In my experience, people who are able to generate, manage and apply ideas are able to move in and out of different mindsets when they do this and as I see it, they adopt the mindsets of thinking of like an explorer, like an artist, like a judge, and finally, and most importantly, like a warrior. I ll just go through these very quickly and explain how this applies to the Creative Whack Pack.

4 Roger von Oech interview Page 4 As the explorer, you look for new ideas and information, or facts, you re looking outside areas, outside departments, outside professions for ideas, and then once you got these new resources then you shift mindsets and you adopt the mindset of the artist and you start asking What if? and Why not? and you challenge the rules and you use humor and you make fun of it and you turn it upside down. There s a whole variety of things you can do as an artist and at this point, you may have some ideas. And what you do now then is you shift mindset again and you adopt the mindset of a judge and you say does this idea solve my problem? Do we have the resources to implement it? Is the timing right? Maybe the timing was perfect two years ago. That window has already closed. Or maybe it will be better in three years. And there s a whole number of things you can go through when you evaluate an idea and if your judge says yes, let s give it a try, if you judge says yes, then you take your idea into action and at this point I think you adopt the most important of the four mind sets: You become a warrior and you motivate yourself, you motivate your team, you get rid of all of your excuses, you put together your plan, you sell, you sell, you sell really hard, you pick yourself up when you get knocked down and ultimately you make your idea a reality. So, you may spend 5%, 10% of the explorer, maybe 10% or 15% on the artist, you know maybe 20% of your time as the judge and then the most important part is actually implementing the idea. I took these four mindsets of the explorer, the artist, the judge and the warrior and they are actually an important part of the book, A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, and I said ok, I m going to look at these as the four suits of the creative process. That s why the Creative Whack Pack consists of 64 creativity strategies. There are sixteen explorer cards, sixteen artist cards, sixteen judge cards and sixteen warrior cards. Each of these has a creativity strategy and a story to talk about what that strategy is and then a question or sometimes a couple of questions to help whoever is using it to say, How can I apply this to my problem? So, I developed it in the late 80 s and that was actually one of the very first business card decks. Now you see them everywhere. And the product has been a million seller. It s been very popular. In late 2008, I decided to turn it into an iphone app. So I spent three or four months with a developer in Austin and I came out with it in You were kind enough to give it a nice review which I really appreciated and it s done very well. It was #1 in the business category for a while as an iphone app and then in 2010 I turned it into an ipad app and we had to rework a lot of stuff with it. People find it useful. You know, if you get stuck you can do a workshop with it, you can just pull a random whack out and kind of get your thinking going in different ways. A lot of people like it a lot.

5 Roger von Oech interview Page 5 Chuck: I love the way when it made the transition to a digital form you didn t just do kind of a one-to-one transfer there. You took an opportunity to really enhance it to make the most of the features of the iphone, and later the ipad, like to be able to make some notes of your ideas and things like that makes it more powerful. Roger: I think that s important to do, to take advantage of the medium in which you are operating, and I tried to do that throughout my creative career. If I found that I had success doing creative thinking workshops early in my career and I thought ok, I want to turn some of these ideas into a book. Well, I find that what works in a workshop doesn t necessarily work in a book. You have to take advantage of that medium and follow certain narrative and how people jump in and out of books and so on. I did that there and the same thing when I was turning a lot of my intellectual content into a card deck: What works in a book doesn t necessarily work in a card deck as well. Also, what works in a card deck is not going to work in a dynamic medium such as an app, like the iphone or the ipad, you have to take advantage of that. So, that would be advice I would give to anybody is taking advantage of the medium that you are working instead of just plop content into another thing and expect it to work out. Chuck: You touched on questions briefly, Roger. They seem to be a pretty important part of the creative process. How can our listeners ask some better, more creative questions to help them in their work? Roger: Wow. That s a great question in and of itself and that s one of the reasons that I created the Creative Whack Pack, it s got a lot of questions in it. I think probably the simplest thing I would say is a lot of people have a tendency to ask questions that solicit singular answers. They ll say, What s the reason for this mess up? What s the cause of this problem? Or what s the result? as though there s just one result or one answer or one reason. And I think if you can train yourself to solicit multiple answers and ask questions, such as What are the reasons that this isn t working or what are five ways we can get better customer service? I think you ll find the people who are asking this question will go beyond the obvious first right answer and start digging deeper. I really like the idea of looking for the second right answer, I mean so much so that was almost the title of my first book, A Whack in the Side of the Head, it was almost Look For the Second Right Answer, because usually the first right answer is what you used to solve a problem before or it s just the top of your head. I think if you look for the third or fourth or fifth right answer, you get to be more creative and you go beyond that.

6 Roger von Oech interview Page 6 For example, I ve got a pen in my hand and I could say, What is this? Well, it s a writing device, yes, but if I said, what are five or ten things a pen is, then you might say, I guess a pointer, or an ear cleaner, or if you take a self-defense class, it s a weapon, or it s an advertising medium if you write stuff on it, and it s a scratcher and a hole puncher, and so on. So, the idea of looking for multiple answers to a problem or a situation is, I think, a great way to get your creativity in gear. Chuck: I think the perception of the average person is that this prolonged economic downturn we are in the middle of means there aren t very many opportunities around. And actually, history shows us that downturns tend to be hot beds of creativity. What s your take on this? How much opportunity do you think is out of there waiting for our listeners to discover it if they have a creative mindset? Roger: I think there s a lot of opportunity out there. I ve been in business for myself for 35 years and not everybody can do it but, I mean it s a great time to give it a try for yourself if you can champion yourself, you can go from there. I ve heard over the years, venture capitalists say the best time to start a new venture is in a downturn, because you find more people are more likely to answer your calls and maybe cut their rates to work with you and to try new things. You know, in really good times people are fat and they re less likely to try a lot of new stuff. I ll give you a personal example. Iin the late 70 s, when I started my seminar business, it was really difficult to sell creativity because one of the reasons was that inflation was running 12-15% a year and companies were having a pretty easy time to reach their goals and what their quotas were. One of the things that really helped my business out a lot was the recession from because companies that before had been successful in reaching their objectives now found that they couldn t and so they figured out that they better be creative. But they didn t know how and so they said oh, OK, well maybe we should try some creativity. So, I found it a lot easier to sell my services during a downturn. In a recession, people find the things that aren t working and it becomes incumbent upon them to have to find out new and better ways. Getting back to Up Your Impact, one of the things you have to do is perhaps use your own creativity to promote yourself a little better or just stick your neck out or to manage a project more creatively or to get better results. If you do that, you certainly put yourself in the position where you re more likely be successful. Chuck: Do you have any other advice for our listeners in terms of what they should focus on and do in order to add more value to their work?

7 Roger von Oech interview Page 7 Roger: Well, I don t know about adding more value, but I d say keep a sense of humor about this. I think that one of my favorite ways to get into a creative frame of mind has been using humor. I think if you can laugh about a problem or project or a way you do things it frees your mind up from a lot of deeply embedded assumptions. You know, you ll look at things in a fresh way if you can do that. The other thing I would say is this; don t fall in love with ideas. That s probably the best advice I can give you, in addition to keeping a sense of humor. When I first started out in business for myself 35 years ago, I asked a lot of people what it would take to be successful in business. I talked to coaches, other businesspeople, ministers, but the best advice I got on this question of how can I be successful came from my printer. And what he said was this: He said, Roger if you want to be a successful designer, don t fall in love with typestyles. And the reason he said that is, if you do, if you fall in love with a particular typestyle, after a while you will want to use it everywhere. Soon, your designs will look hackneyed and clichéd and it won t have any freshness. Well, I didn t listen to him and pretty soon I feel in love with Palatine semi-bold and I wanted to use that font everywhere and he was right. Soon my designs looked hackneyed. Theye just didn t have any originality and I was able to generalize that advice beyond typestyles to the idea; don t fall in love with ideas. You know, systems, methodologies, the way you go about stuff. As soon as you fall in love with a particular way of doing things, you are going to want to use it everywhere, even in places where it s inappropriate. I think that one of life s greatest pleasures is falling out of favor with a previously cherished idea because it allows you to look at things in a fresh, new way and that s probably why Mark Twain once made the comment, One of life's most over-valued pleasures is sexual intercourse; one of life's least appreciated pleasures is defecation, because there s something about letting go that allows you to try some new things. I would say to your listeners what closely held beliefs, systems whatever the way you approach your job can you let go of? But this often gets very difficult for people to do because if you have been successful in a particular approach, you get emotionally attached to it. But often that s what you need to do. I guess that would be my advice, don t fall in love with ideas. Chuck: It certainly seems to be a problem on a larger scale that companies tend to fall in love with processes or ideas or approaches because they are still making money on it they are reluctant to let go. Roger: Yes, you look at company and say a particular process or system was put in place and it probably made sense in the year 2007, 2008 or 2009 but a lot of conditions have changed since then. Yet once an idea is in place, it has a tendency to live on so once again, it s that idea of letting go.

8 Roger von Oech interview Page 8 One other idea about innovation: I think it s pretty easy to come up with new ideas. I mean, people are doing it all the time. I think the hard part of innovation is letting go of what worked for you two years ago or three years ago or five years ago. It may still solve your problem but may not be the best way to deal with the problems and opportunities of the next few years. I think you ll find that more successful companies are able to let go of successful products, successful strategies, and keep reinventing themselves. I think that s a whole new discussion. But that s definitely something I believe in. Looking at my own career, I ve continued to try to take the creativity stuff that I like but find different mediums in which to do it. I mean, I started with seminars and conferences in the 80 s and then I wrote books but then turned it into card decks and then into software then into apps and for the last six or seven years I have created a line of magnetic geometric art toys like the Ball of Whacks and the X-Ball. That s currently what I am working on. So, I'd say you have to continually be reinventing what you are doing. Chuck: Very good, Roger. Where can our listeners find your work online and are there any current projects you d like to highlight? Roger: Well, you can find me probably easier at creativethink.com and as I said a lot of my energy is involved with the creative whack company and this is a line of geometric magnetic art toys, manipulative toys. Probably the most famous is the Ball of Whacks, which has been a real popular product. I ve also developed the X-Ball, the Y-Ball and Star Ball, and I m working on another product right now along those lines that should be out later in the year. I appreciate this opportunity, Chuck, and I wish all of your listeners a lot of success. I hope you can take advantage of some of the ideas that Chuck shares in Up Your Impact and make the world a more creative place. Chuck: Thanks for your time today, Roger. Roger: Good luck. Bye. Interview conducted by Chuck Frey chuck@upyourimpact.com Chuck Frey Up Your Impact

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