Allianz Get a Creative Payback
As part of a global innovation programme, the worldwide insurer, Allianz, has been looking to develop practical creativity in the workplace. Here Anthony Landale outlines the drivers for innovation and reports on the drive for new thinking at all levels of the business.
Innovation is a big game in business. It promises to break open rigid thinking, free up energy and release imagination. Without innovation, leaders recognise that their organisations typically lack spark, while, in contrast if they can harness the latent creativity in their workforce, all sorts of possibilities come to the surface. As management guru, Michael Porter, says: “Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.”
One organisation that has taken this message to heart is the leading worldwide insurer and financial services firm, Allianz, which has encouraged all of its operations worldwide to commence an innovation programme. In essence, it is the company’s mission to create an environment of innovation where every idea counts; where employees are motivated to get creative and where the take-up from ideas is seen to bring bottom line payback to the company in terms of new products, new markets and hard savings.
But just because a culture of opportunity and new thinking is being championed by senior management, does it mean that employees immediately come forward with great new ideas? Some may, but the truth is that many of us need help. We need to be guided, to be prompted and we need to be skilled-up.
UK Training and Development Manager, Trevor Smith says: “At Allianz, innovation means we are seeking to promote creative thinking in order to produce more ideas, better ideas, and breakthrough ideas. But this will be new territory for many of us. That’s why creativity is now a core part of our leadership programme. We want training that equips our people with best practice tools and techniques that translate into the Allianz workplace - and we want our managers to use these tools with their teams and transform the nature of the environment in which their people work.”
It is training like this that is now being run in Allianz by the accelerated learning company, Illumine, - Training which challenges leaders to apply uncharacteristic thinking and idea-generating techniques in the projects and markets in which they work. As Illumine’s MD, Clive Lewis says: “There are no businesses I know where people can afford to stand still. People have to both get creative and be prepared to try out new ideas. Our programme gives people practical creativity tools which help them to improve performance and find new ways to deliver. “
According to Trevor Smith, there is an encouraging push for such training from the managers themselves: “The managers who come on this programme enrol on it because they want it. In this respect, this programme has to be powerful, practical and relevant. They know the imperatives of the market and they are up for the challenge. That’s why we asked a company with a proven track record to provide a toolbox that would give creativity a practical focus.”
The lead trainer who has been working on the Allianz programme is Rebecca Stewart, and she outlined her approach.
“The brief I’ve been working to is to deliver creativity into the Allianz context. The groundwork has been done by the company around global innovation and the managers I’ve been working with are very open to new ideas. More than this, they all clearly want to apply these ideas in their departments. They know where the pinch points are and they want processes that help them to get a different outcome. In this respect I provided them with effective models and processes which they then worked with and started to apply to the real issues that they are facing.”
The creative toolbox that Rebecca Stewart has opened for Allianz has included some interesting idea-generating tools. One such is the reversal thinking method which can be explained as follows.
Often people get stuck in their ways of thinking about problems and have difficulty finding a new perspective. One way to break out of old paradigms is by reversing the situation or problem. Take, as a simple example, the case of the manager who needed new ideas on how to run a stimulating meeting. Situation reversal helped this leader by asking her how she could ensure that the next meeting she ran would be exactly the opposite of this - i.e. a complete failure. Looked at from this point of view she was quite clear on what she could do to ensure the meeting would waste everybody’s time. She would:
- Invite the wrong people
- Fail to inform people what the meeting was about
- Ensure she gave people no advance notice
- Interrupt whatever people were doing
- Make the room too hot or too cold
- Give people little or no chance to contribute
- Fail to arrive at any actions
- Wander off the agenda
The point of this process is that once you identify what doesn’t work, it immediately highlights what to avoid and, in so doing points to what you should be doing instead.
Another creativity technique familiar to some but still not used widely enough in business is Mind Mapping.
Illumine are the UK’s leading provider of Mind Mapping training, and an easy way to think of Mind Maps® is as a visual way of organising and presenting information which correlates with the way our minds actually work. In brief, we don’t think in lists or long essays - we think in images and key themes, shapes and patterns, all connected one to another.
But is Mind Mapping a serious business tool? According to Illumine it most certainly is. Mind Mapping is a technique that is proven to help learning, aid memory and is efficient in recording and storing information. As to how it relates to creativity, one example is in the way leaders can use Mind Mapping to help teams brainstorm for new ideas. “By using the techniques of Mind Mapping, a manager can help a team to gather all the key ideas and present them in one big visual,” explained Rebecca Stewart. “Mind Mapping is a non-hierarchical process that encourages group thinking and allows people to build on themes as they arise. When teams are trying to combine their various ideas around key issues or projects, such an associative thinking approach is extremely productive.”
But if idea-generating techniques are one part of the equation, there is also another hugely important aspect of creativity that is at stake here - and that is how to evaluate the ideas that are generated. In this respect, The Six Thinking Hats® model that Illumine introduces into their programmes is particularly powerful.
Explains Rebecca Stewart: “The Six Thinking Hats® method is simple. The team leader or facilitator outlines six imaginary hats, each of which has a different colour. When the team ‘puts on’ any single hat they then agree to operate exclusively in that mode of thinking. And when they change hats they change their thinking mode. So, for example, ‘White Hat’ thinking is like a white page and encourages people to look at a problem from the perspective of ‘what information do we need?’ It provides a neutral, information gathering perspective. In contrast to this ‘Red Hat’ thinking provides the opportunity for the team to look at the problem from what they feel about it - from their gut instinct or intuition. And ‘Yellow Hat’ thinking gives the team permission to address the benefits of the issue … to say what will work.”
“The beauty of Six Hats is that it allows a team to have productive discussions based on different perspectives. Instead of adversarial thinking it promotes co-operative exploration,” she says.
Training Allianz’s managers in techniques such as these is absolutely in line with the company’s innovation programme, and participants who have already attended the courses have already started to apply them to their projects. Indeed, according to Trevor Smith, the demand for such training is only likely to grow.
“Innovation at Allianz in the UK has already produced over £1m in benefits from implemented ideas, and we are only at the start of the innovation campaign. Encouraging everyone to come up with their ideas is bound to unlock some exciting opportunities. The way I see it, the cultural change will lead to people changing their mindsets and finding much smarter ways of doing things. In this respect, the current campaign has helped us establish the foundations which will further build Allianz’s reputation, and will underpin the company’s future success.”
Innovation in Action
Allianz’s Ideas to Success programme has been launched in 72 Operational Entities (OEs) worldwide, and has welcomed ideas from more than 160,000 employees.The program encourages staff to get involved in idea generation sessions, and for Allianz companies to develop their own methods to help employees come up with new ideas ready for implementation. Over 30,000 ideas were submitted worldwide between August 2006 and June 2007.
The international success of the program came to the fore at our first Global Innovation Awards in which more than 100 ideas were entered, and 30 OEs put themselves forward for the “Most Innovative OE” award. Initiatives that were recognized included a mobile medical nurse service, pioneered in Thailand, which allows potential customers to take out life insurance without having to make the sometimes immense effort to attend check-ups at a hospital.
Mind Map® and Mind Maps® are trademarks of the Buzan Organisation.
MindManager® and Mindjet® are trademarks of Mindjet.
Tags: Case studies, Creative focus, Creative thinking techniques, Creativity and Innovation, Creativity for Logical Thinkers - Illumination Workshop, Creativity training, Idea generation, Mind Mapping, Six Thinking Hats - Edward de Bono (Training)