Ideas culture, a business about creating ideas transcription

By Fiona Boyd |

This is the transcription of the video interview between Fiona Boyd of Into the Mountain and Yvonne Adele, entrepreneur and founder of Ideas Culture, called Ideas Culture a business about creating ideas.

Fiona: Today I’d like to introduce you to Yvonne Adele who runs a business based around creative thinking and ideas called Ideas Culture. Welcome Adele.

Yvonne: Thank you.

Fiona: Yvonne!

Yvonne: You know what, that happens so often…

Fiona: Look, congratulations on creating a business in an area that I know is often considered the domain or the patch of those in academia and certainly the policy wonks think it’s their thing. What you’ve done is you’ve started a business around ideas and the business of ideas. What made you want to do that?

Yvonne: Well I was doing technology before that, it was everything about technology and you know, I was sort of helping people to understand technology and, that’s what I like to do is to help people find the answers to things, whether it be technology or mates who are having trouble coming up with a solution to something.

And that business started winding down because the technology started becoming easier to use and people could find the answers quickly on the internet. And my husband actually said to me, look I’ll give you three weeks, let’s give you three weeks off, go into the cone of silence and work out what is the second most common thing your network of people come to you for. And I worked out that it was ideas, and it really is just simply that I don’t take no for an answer for anything, I think there’s a way out of everything, and as it turned out I seemed to have a little method of generating ideas quickly, so I wanted to do that.

Fiona: You do have a famous persona that goes back into your history that you’re sort of referring to there called Ms Megabyte. Tell me more about the era of Ms Megabyte, what you learned from that, and if there’s anything from that time that you’ve carried forward to now.

Yvonne: Yeah, I guess, I was a programmer at Microsoft back in sort of the late 80s and coming back into the 90s and I went all around the world with Microsoft which was fantastic and then when I wanted to get back into having my own brain that wasn’t a Microsoft brain – because you do get a bit brainwashed when you’re there. I wanted to start my own business and I was in Melbourne and to go back to Microsoft there was no sort of tech support or technical roles there so I started my own business doing Microsoft consulting, with those sorts of products. And I found that I was really enjoying working with businesspeople and getting them untied and unpacking the issues and leaving them with automated systems and that sort of thing. So, um, I was watching TV one day and I saw they had a money person and a gardening person and home decorating person and medicine and health and everything…

Fiona: …but no technology…

Yvonne: …no technology, yeah. And I had always wanted to be on TV, since I was a little kid. So that was my sort of ah-ha moment and I was like, I want to do that. So I just waltzed up to the producers and said, you know, well, obviously you’ve got no technology and that’s going to have to be me. Which is ridiculous. So…

Fiona: …and they agreed?

Yvonne: Yeah…no, not really. It took me about a year to work out, a year of bashing on doors to work out that they were scared of technology and they thought it was boring. And so eventually I worked out that all the people on TV had their own magazine column so then I went in that way and I ended up getting a magazine column, which was all about how to find pictures of Brad Pitt on the internet and you know, things like that, and then I got onto TV and so when that whole technology thing started dying down I had become a professional speaker by then, sort of by default, people having seen me on TV and saying, oh there’s a girl who talks about technology, let’s get her at our conference. Yeah, so then I realised that professional speaking was the thing I wanted to do, so I started with that, when I wanted to do the transition, and then worked out that it was ideas, and I guess that the thing that I took from that whole Ms Megabyte era was that if you have the persistence, the Steven Covey things, the persistence, the belief, the vision and the action you can get whatever you want.

Fiona: You’re in ideas now with Ideas Culture. Why is it important, more generally, and across business, to have fresh thinking and ideas.

Ideas culture - generating electric ideas for your business

Yvonne: Well you know the way I kind of put it is that, you know, we are scrambling to get the work done on a daily basis. As an employer you cannot push your people any further than they are pushed right now, at this moment in time. They’re working longer hours than they agreed to work, everyone, you know, we expect executives to work long hours but even people at those sort of administrative levels, sort of mid management level actually being expected to get in at seven, when it says on their contract eight thirty till five. They get in at seven, they leave at six, they have fifteen minutes for lunch so the only way to actually get more out of them is to teach them to think smarter and you know that can even be working on, brainstorming a way to have a bit of life balance or whatever it is. But, you can’t work them harder, you can teach them to work smarter. So it does touch every single level of the business whereas the technology stuff was really just the people who were in mid-management, who were struggling to get stuff done, needed help with the technology but either side of that they didn’t care.

Fiona: So what do you do to help those people in an organisation think smarter, use their thinking capabilities better to get some more ideas that they can put into place around them.

Yvonne: Yeah, well, I have this sort of cycle which shows that if we generally start introducing techniques for creative thinking slowly then the people who take them up become advocates of them and then they become little champions of them in the business so this cycle happens where, you know, you’ve got your sort of first level of people who then farm all the idea thinking techniques out to the others, which works really well, but we’ve narrowed it down to three different things that we offer.

And one is that we will do the thinking for you in an instant, overnight. One is that we will come in and facilitate a brainstorm – which I actually call an idea sparking session because a brainstorm sounds really difficult – an idea sparking session with your team, and the other one is that we will be your secret weapon, behind the scenes, and we will feed you, via email and phone, creative thinking techniques and teambuilding activities that you can use in your own meetings.

So as far as how we teach people to think differently, it can be as simple…one of the activities is just a random word association, so perhaps you’re being faced with the challenge of, well I did this with the business women’s networking group yesterday – how can we generate five new pieces of business from each of our existing clients before the end of the year? That was one challenge half of the room was working on. And the other half was working on, how can we generate five new business leads or pieces of business by the end of the year from new customers?

So I just get people to think of one thing that they used today – and that gives them instantly a noun, an object like teabag or soap or car or footpath. And then we just do a word association with that, we come up with ten words associated with that word or any other word. Because the fact is, an idea, the definition of an idea, is that it is the connection of two things that aren’t seemingly related.

So if you use all the facts that are floating around in your head right now, to try and get an idea for a problem that you’ve got, you won’t get a fresh idea. But if you come up with some random thing that had nothing to do with you at that moment…so when they’ve created their list, I get them to swap lists., I get them to give their list to the person to the left at their table. And then they’ve got a list of words not only that they weren’t thinking about but that someone else was thinking about. So then they use each word to generate an idea.

So for example in a group of accountants last week, he had the word teabag and he was trying to come up with a way to show his manager how important the documents were for signing off. And he came up with, from teabag he went hot, and then went hot, cold, traffic lights, red, orange and green. So now he’s got red, orange and green stickers that he put on the front page of every document that needs signing. Red if it needs signing today, orange if signing in two days and green if it needs signing in a week.

Fiona: What a great solution.

Yvonne: Simple things like that, from the word teabag. So it works, that works every single time without fail and that’s one of about ninety different techniques that we use.

Fiona: Is this because people become too locked into a very small range of ways of thinking in their work, and the work does that – in order to do good work they have to narrow down what they’re doing to some very limited strategies?

Yvonne: Yeah, and people, they often don’t realise that they do have a favourite strategy that they’re using, and they get in this sort of rat race mode where they’re just trying to get the work done, they’re going round the wheel…

Fiona: …wondering why it’s neverending…

Yvonne: …yeah, it’s neverending, there’s no variety and they’re not actually coming up with anything new. And it’s not just for creating products, it’s for streamlining processes, it’s for, really, what’s a great theme we could have for our Christmas party? It’s anything, and people default to that old brainstorm technique of, let me get my team in a room and we’ll all come up with ideas – yeah, right – but you know that’s what they do and they sort of hand over the responsibility for the thinking to the group and nothing ever seems to happen.

So one of the very important things that I teach is that you must brainstorm solo first because it has been shown that you’ll get eighty percent more ideas, even if you’re in a room with a group of other people, everyone brainstorms solo first and then you share your ideas with one person and that sort of organically grows the idea rather than half of the room going, oh, don’t come to me, don’t come to me, I don’t want to say my idea. So you share it with one person and then you build on it before you present back to the group, so yeah, it works really well.

Fiona: Yvonne, thank you for your time today.

Yvonne: Thank you.

Fiona: I’ve been speaking to Yvonne Adele from Ideas Culture, it’s a business about getting new ideas into your business.

Yvonne Adele joins Fiona Boyd regularly to talk about her experiences in business and in the business of Ideas Culture.

Image: Flickr apesara

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