Communication is everything

One thing with working with technical people, such as engineers or science people and programmers and so on, is that they have amazing ideas, but they can't communicate these ideas to others.

Communicating ideas to others is a crucial thing, because we are people and people communicate. In more relevant terms, great ideas will die unless you can get them across to others who can get on board and make them into reality. You might have a great idea, but if you can't turn it into reality and start producing it to the benefit of others, what was the point of having it at all?

Often techies or (as the Swedish business magnate Rune Andersson called them,) technical freaks, have great ideas on a technical level, but they often don't know how to turn them into commercially viable project. This is nothing against technical people in particular and I'm not suggesting that they are deficient in business specifically, but people can usually only be good at so many things. People that are good at both business and technical things are hated anyway: just look at Mark Zuckerberg. They even made a nasty movie about him.

Today at Innovation In Mind, a conference going on in Lund, we had a speech by William Cockayne from Stanford University. Cockayne walked to the stage to Eric Clapton's song Cocaine. It was cheesy.

What he said later in his speech was much more interesting though. He presented his communications tool, which he takes to companies around the world in order to help them get a bright spark idea and take it so people in the communication, market, finance and management departments so they can understand it and get behind it.

Instead of using paper, Post-its or a whiteboard, Cockayne suggested that you should get regular rubbish and items from around the office and home to create metaphorical models that everyone can see, touch and modify. Sticky tape, rubber bands, cups, cardboard, paper, scissors, straws, plastic and so it. The inventory doesn't need to be designed for the purpose: that would just limit creativity.

By making the creativity and communication process interactive, people can see it, change it, discuss it and really get an idea about how it works.

It gets people together and makes a memorable experience that can really trigger people. Its certainly worth trying.