Interview with Fred Rosenzveig, president of Mindrange, the Institute for Thinking Development and an instructor at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University.

Stephen Goldberg: What do you teach at the John Molson School of Business?

Fred Rosenzveig: I teach in the area of creative thinking and innovation as it relates to strategy, product development, and process improvement.

Stephen Goldberg: What is lateral thinking?

Fred Rosenzveig: Lateral thinking actually made its appearance in the Oxford dictionary in the 1980s, and it was defined there as coming up with unusual solutions or ideas using a process that would normally be ignored by the logical mind. Also approaching things differently from a logical perspective through using various techniques. And it leads to those ideas, which are obvious only after they’ve been thought of.

Stephen Goldberg: Is there a difference between lateral and creative thinking?

Fred Rosenzveig: It’s basically one type of creative thinking or another major thinking process, which is to get away from whatever your usual thought pattern is and develop a brand-new one.

Stephen Goldberg: What are the steps to becoming a creative thinking company?

Fred Rosenzveig: To start you have to look at three basic things that makes a company creative. First is expertise in the area you’re working in. So if you’re working for a Google or an Apple or a Microsoft, you have a lot of people who are expert at computing, engineering, programming and all that kind of stuff. Whatever you bring to the table is that expertise, so obviously the more expertise you have in an area the more depth you can go in your creative thinking.

The second thing you need is an attitude and a motivation. If the attitude isn’t there of encouraging creativity, removing bureaucracy that gets in the way where you need multiple sign offs and there’s multiple layers, or getting permission to work on things that seem promising.

The last thing is creative thinking skills. You see the problem with expertise is it trains creative thinking out of you. By the time you’re a PhD in chemistry or engineering or computer science or something, you’re hired for that skill, but believe me the creative thinking is trained out of you. You’re trained to build something that is going to work, that won’t fall down, so creative thinking skills has to be brought back in.

Stephen Goldberg: What are the creative thinking skills or processes that you teach?

Fred Rosenzveig: I focus on a conceptual toolset that I call software for the mind that is very simple, very easy to use that helps people enlarge what they take in so they’re not in dreaded tunnel vision and they think more broadly. And also change the way they think, which is the creative side of things. So it’s taking more in and thinking more broadly and looking beyond your field, your company and whatever area you’re in. And then there’s thinking differently and there’s techniques and training that will help you do that. If you think of creativity as a funnel, you need the widest possible input to get the best outputs. So thinking more creatively more broadly we train people to develop the ability to generate as many ideas as possible and then there’s a process of harvesting those ideas.

I believe in targeted and focus brainstorming, which brings the rigour of the logical mind together with the creative. I teach brainstorming from a whole variety of angles so you’re going from one perspective of the situation to another and then another so you get almost a three dimensional view of the situation rather than just a single view with a whole bunch of ideas. I have something I call the ABCDE process. I call it that because it’s fairly easy to remember the first five letters of the alphabet. You start with the aim, you then go broad and that’s where the creative thinking is, where you take in all the information data and perspectives you can. And then you go to the C stage which is to contract, which is basically to boil things down to a plan, an idea, and an initial concept, something you want to take further. Then you go to the D stage, which is to take action or develop it further. The E stage is to evaluate how what you developed matches your aim from the A stage. If it doesn’t match that well, like the Montréal Olympic stadium where they aimed to have a modern classic world class monument for the ages, but they found out the roof didn’t pass the first winter despite a cost of $1 billion. So they had to go back to the B stage again and figure out what factors did were left out; oh yes winter, and rethink that and take it through the process.

Stephen Goldberg: That’s what’s nice, you could always go back and rework it if the result doesn’t meet your aim rather than abandoning it.

Fred Rosenzveig: Yes, it’s a continuously cycling process. So you could take any element and go broader with it and then contract and boil it down and develop that idea further and just do it if you decide it’ll work.

Stephen Goldberg: What are the benefits of becoming a more creative organization and of applying some of the techniques of creative thinking?

Fred Rosenzveig: There is huge ROI for creativity and I measure that with organizations I work with in three ways. One way is that you’re able to do things better, more quickly, and more profitably than the way you’ve always done. The second thing is doing things completely differently, something totally new. That can be called disruptive creativity.

I worked with one major confectionery company, Mars, and I worked with the Senior Plant manager at a totally modern completely upgraded plant. They were meeting using these Mindrange tools for creative thinking for 15 minutes every morning before the plant opened. They found all kinds of ways to reuse and redo things like reducing scrap and looking at every single process. This saved them over $2 million in the first quarter that they started those meetings. So that really paid off for them.

In terms of brand-new ideas I worked with one of the major lottery companies in Canada, Atlantic lottery company serving the four Maritime provinces and they had some problems. They were afraid one of their biggest provinces would defect with 60% of the revenues and go off on their own. They looked at new ideas and one of the things they developed using these Mindrange tools and a team from IBM as well to do the tech part was the first absolutely online provincial lottery where you could buy every single product including lotto 649 and the big jackpot products with a lot of social controls. So the problem gamblers, people who gamble too much and minors couldn’t play. And the dealers and concessions for this could still get their cut and so forth. Also they could sell that idea or system to any other province or state because they don’t compete geographically. So instead of just developing a new lottery game for their own market they have something that they can sell around the world.

Stephen Goldberg: Anything else you’d like to add about creative thinking that would be of value to our listeners?

Fred Rosenzveig: I think it’s important that once you allow creativity in an organization I think it is very empowering to people. They like working in those kind of organizations and you’re going to attract like Google does, like Apple does, like some of these tech start-ups do, very engaged and highly motivated people, particularly younger people who don’t want to do things the old way. Also creativity is fun and you can be very humorous and lighthearted. When we do programs for three or four days people come out more energized rather than drained and that’s terrific. Einstein said something very interesting about creativity. He said creativity is catchy or infectious, pass it on. So indeed it’s a good bug to catch.

Stephen Goldberg