Measure Your Ideaflow

After over a decade teaching at Stanford’s d.school and consulting with the world’s top leaders, the most useful measure of creativity that my colleague Perry Klebahn and I have found is as follows: the number of novel ideas a person or group can generate around a given problem in a given amount of time. We call this metric Ideaflow, and it’s the focus and title of our new book being published today by Portfolio/Penguin Random House. In fact, we’d go as far as to say that this is the most crucial business metric you’ve never considered. An organization with low ideaflow is in trouble because it’s running out of an essential resource. Its leaders know there’s a problem. They can see that progress is stalling, but they can’t quite pinpoint the scarcity starving the organization of its potential. While the proper execution of ideas is crucial, ideaflow is the foundation, the essential force that drives all future success.

So how, exactly, does one measure ideaflow? No need to stick any electrodes to your scalp. As a metric, ideaflow is a simple gauge of the relative health of your creative engine or that of a team. The only value in measuring it lies in comparing your current score to previous and future ones. It looks like this:

ideas / time = ideaflow

 Measuring your ideaflow is easy. Take out a pen and piece of paper. Next, select an email in your inbox, preferably an important one, that needs a response. (It’s OK if you’ve sent an actual response already.) Now, set a timer on your phone for two minutes. For the span of that time, write down as many different subject lines for your response as you possibly can, one after the other. No deliberation, no pausing, no judgment or revision of the subject lines you’ve already written. Don’t give yourself time to think. Just write down every subject line that comes to mind as quickly as your hand can move. These subject lines can be serious, informal, humorous, even absurd. Variations on the same approach count. Fo- cus only on quantity, not quality. Come back when the time runs out.

Done? Now count them up. How many distinct subject lines were you able to generate? Divide that number by two and you have a rate of ideas per minute that, for the purposes of this exercise, represents your ideaflow. To be clear, you could spend five minutes generating ad slogans or ten coming up with product ideas. The important thing is that you take the same measurement regularly, using the same duration and a similar prompt, ideally the same kind of idea generation you’d benefit from in the normal course of your work. That way, you can gauge the waxing and waning of your ideaflow throughout a day or measure the effect of a specific technique from the book.

Ideaflow may seem simplistic, but think of the deceptively simple yardsticks and heuristics in your own area of expertise. A physical therapist, for example, might learn quite a bit about a client’s overall fitness from something as simple as an attempted toe touch. Likewise, a simple metric updated frequently is much more helpful to any practitioner than a complicated diagnostic that can be performed only once in a blue moon. Whether or not you found yourself brimming with possibilities, your initial score means something. As you learn and adopt the skills in this book and watch your own number change, that relevance will become more apparent.

What ideaflow isn’t is a measure of intelligence or talent. Instead, you might say it assesses your state of mind. Rapidly generating divergent possibilities requires you to suspend self-consciousness. To operate without fear of failure or embarrassment. Unleashing the full measure of your ideaflow demands what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety. When we feel safe enough to take intellectual and emotional risks, “the rewards of learning from failure can be fully realized,” she writes. Your brain opens the floodgates only once the social and financial costs of trying new things—and potentially making mistakes—are outweighed by the potential benefits. If the thought that people might laugh at one of your suggestions scares the heck out of you, psychological safety is sorely lacking.

You can’t just snap your fingers and “activate” creativity when you don’t feel safe, whether because of your own faulty beliefs or because of the conservative mindset of people in your organization. If your own ideaflow is low, you must adopt a creative mindset and develop the necessary internal resilience. If ideaflow is low among those you lead, it’s not their problem. It’s yours. Improvements at the profitable end of the creative pipeline—problems solved, plans executed, products shipped—requires a sense of safety across the entire team at the start of that pipeline.

Ideaflow is a spectrum, but from the outside it can look as though someone’s either got “it” or they don’t. One member of the team will fire off a ton of contributions when presented with a problem while others sit silent. Don’t fall into the trap of seeing creativity as an inborn talent. Instead, use ideaflow to identify and address bottlenecks on the team. Rather than let a single star performer carry the creative load— which, if nothing else, results in a more narrow and less interesting set of possibilities—help the other members unleash their own creative potential using these techniques. This deepens your bench of talent and opens up the creative floodgates to an unprecedented degree. Unlike a fixed metric like IQ, ideaflow fluctuates based on context. Raising it is not just possible but necessary. This is the driving purpose of both our work and this book.

Make a note of your own ideaflow here at the start and check it regularly as you progress. While your score will vary depending on factors like sleep and stress, you should see an overall upward trend correlating with the effort you invest in implementing these habits, behaviors, and techniques. To boost ideaflow, you will become input-seeking and curiosity- driven in ways you’d never previously imagined. Once you’ve seen the benefits of this shift in mindset yourself, you’ll be far better prepared to help elevate the creative output of others.

(Excerpted from IDEAFLOW: The Only Business Metric That Matters by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn, on sale today from Portfolio/ Penguin Random House.)

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