A long time ago, in my very first SIT blog, I wrote about my nephew, Rani. Don’t worry though, it is not like I expect you to rememberJ. Anyway, a lot has changed since then but I’ll mention here just two relevant points: my nephew is now five years old and for the last 37.5 days he has been living in China with his parents and baby sister but unfortunately, without moi.

His move to China was accompanied by many concerns on my part, one of them being how do we manage to maintain our close relationship despite the formidable distance. I was reassured by friends saying that in today’s world, keeping in touch is much easier due to technology such as skype, but I kept wondering nevertheless how that would work when it comes to a 5-year old kid with the attention span of a… 5-year old kid.

37.5 days later, I can tell you: it works! I have between two to four weekly video calls with my nephew, each lasting something like 45 to 90 minutes.

The first time we had a skype video call, it was more of a Q&A type of thing but then I looked around and realized we are surrounded by a lot of elements that can be used to make our chat more interactive, more fun, more captivating and eventually last longer.

Let me give you a few examples of those elements identified and which activities we did using them:

Books: When I was home I noticed some of Rani’s favorite books left behind so I read to him. I just put the book itself close to the camera so he could see the pictures while he heard me reading it to him.

CDs: What I also had at home were his CDs so I put one of his favorite CDs on and we started dancing or actually more like going wild together (not recommended when you have an audience..)

Video camera: Moved the camera around and asked Rani to identify what he sees. He did the same thing and it became kind of a game with points gained for each item identified correctly.

Covered the camera with my hand, made a noise and asked Rani to identify the noise he heard.

Messages:

As Rani is just now learning his ABCs, I sent him one or two-word messages and asked him to read what I sent.

I asked him what he wanted me to write and sent him a message with this text.

Timer: for a kid as fascinated with numbers as this one, simply asking for a reading of the numbers, watching how they advance is considered an interesting activity with Aunt Iris.

Group video: add the grandparents to the chat and to the games. The more the merrier!

Our own faces: a staring competition to see who laughs first at the funny faces the other does. Again, not sure you’d want witnesses for that one…

The movements we do: triggered in me a childhood memory of the game “Simon says”. We added the grandparents to the game, by the way, using the group video which made it even more fun!

I hope that I have made the point about how easy it has been to come up with these practical ideas above simply by using what we have around us or as we call it at SIT our “Closed World”*.

By the way, our chats have become so successful that my sister- in-law actually found a substantial benefit for her. She sets up some of our chats herself to keep little Rani busy only so that she can take a much needed nap herself…

*Note: The SIT Closed World principle dictates that, when solving a problem or developing new products (or services or processes), one should strive to use only those resources that exist in the product (or system) itself, or in its immediate vicinity.

Constraints enhance creativity. When resources are limited or have been exhausted, constraints have a ball; and so does creativity.

For example, lack of access to safe drinking water is a critical problem in poor countries around the world. Every year, thousands of people die from infectious diseases, brought on by polluted water. PlayPumps International has come up with a successful, creative solution to the problem: a merry-go-round that pumps water into a storage tank, while children have fun riding it round and round. What is so brilliant about this idea is its simplicity. Kids at play spin the merry-go-round anyway, so the system uses an existing resource to achieve a new objective, improving the quality of life for the entire village.

In SIT’s Contribution to the Community project, we work pro bono with non-profit organizations, which always face very rigid and restrictive limitations. It is quite fascinating to see how inventive thinking leads them to good ideas in spite of (or maybe because of) these constraints.

I recently came across a great example in a very successful initiative of a non-profit organization. The organization runs a program designed to train and empower unemployed non-skilled women to join the work force. The project provides classes where the women learn basic computer skills, standardized language, current affairs, and receive professional training as telemarketers. The project required purchasing an expensive computer laboratory along with a practice room equipped with a telemarketing system. Since the women could not pay tuition to return this investment, the initiators had to find creative ways to pay for it. They came up with the idea to fund the women’s morning classes by employing them in the afternoons at the practice telemarketing center, where they exercise their newly acquired telemarketing skills to secure contributions for the center itself.

One of the indications that an inventive solution is a good one is that beyond achieving its desired goal, it creates other welcome side effects. In this particular case, besides funding the project, the women’s entry into the work force is more gradual, in a supportive environment, and enhances their sense of self worth.

The organization’s creativity does not end there. Nowadays, the computer lab and practice center are rented out in the evenings and weekends to other organizations as study and practice rooms.

It is most likely that if such clear-cut constraints were not imposed on the project’s development, such innovative thinking would not have been required and these ideas would not have come up.

Sometimes, constraints are our excuse for being non-innovative: the budget is too low; the consumer is not ready yet, and ideas are nipped in the bud. In systematic thinking processes, we will always direct attention to our constraints. They are the trigger to our ideas.

In the article, Drew Boyd (Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson, one of SIT’s close friend and colleague), delineates some of the drawbacks of traditional brainstorming as it many times generates low quality ideas. Drew offers SIT’s method - a systematic method that combines creativity with a structured and predictable process as a more effective alternative for getting results.

Brainstorming according to Drew: “is the most overused and underperforming tool in business today… Among the problems are these: Throwing in an idea for public consideration generates fear of failure, and workers looking to advance their own interests often keep their best ideas to themselves until a more opportune time.”

One of the biggest challenges of brainstorming is filtering quality from quantity. At the end of a brainstorming session you are often left overwhelmed with too much information to sort from. Some of which are not relevant, others are too raw, and some are just not implementable.

My own experience as a facilitator in SIT taught me that our process is focused on generating qualitative data. At the end of an SIT process you are left with a much shorter, manageable, and easy to implement idea list. This is being done by incorporating two filters in the thinking process: the “should we do it” - market filter and the “can we do it” - feasibility filter. The filters force you to ask (and answer) for each pre-idea considered, what are the benefits of the idea (making sure it has a market) and check initial direction for implementation (making sure it can be done). Pre-ideas that fail any one of the filters are not furthered considered and do not mature to become ideas.

So how beneficial or implementable do you think the ideas in the Budget Brainstorming commercials?

To read the entire article that was published on the New York Times simply click here: