Page 170 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

Moment of Acceptable Truth 161

MOMENT OF ACCEPTABLE TRUTH

“So, are you happy with the final output?” I asked the client, knowing
I was likely to get an affirmative answer because we had just completed
a session that reduced their time-to-market cycle from 120 days to 87
days, actually three days shorter than the target.
“I’m very happy,” said the client, smiling at me.
I probed further. We had uncovered hundreds of ways to shorten
their production cycle, dozens of timesaving steps, it seemed, at each
stage of the production process. “So, what are some of the newer, more
radical ideas that wound up in the final mix?” I asked.
The client wrinkled his brow as he pondered this question. He
finally spoke up. “I don’t think there were any new ideas in the final
mix,” he said, not the least bit smugly.
I pretended to remain cool. These people had just paid my company
a good deal of money to help them through the birth canal of this
process. They had been a great client over the years, bringing us in fre-
quently to help them tackle big challenges and opportunities. I hoped
the answer to my question was not going to backfire on me. I had to get
to the bottom of this.
“Alan,” I said. “You’re happy with the session?”
“That’s right,” he answered.
“And we did come up with a ton of new ideas, didn’t we?” I queried.
“That’s right,” he affirmed.
“But the final output included nothing you hadn’t seen before.”
“Yes, that’s true,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I admitted, “but I don’t get it.”
He thought for a while before he proceeded. “Well, we may have
had all of those ideas before, in different forms and at different times,
when tossing around ways to get to market quicker, but we never
pulled the trigger on them prior to today.”
I remained silent, taking in this interesting phenomenon. My client
continued with his explanation, “I guess stirring up the pot with so
many new ideas, many of which were pretty radical, kind of put some
of our old radical ideas into perspective and made them look a little
more practical, a little safer.”
“Interesting,” I said. Then I fell into a brief silence to think about
what had just become clear to me.
We had solved my client’s problem. He and his team had uncovered
a plethora of truly new ideas, but they were going with a solution that
included none of them. And they were happy.