Thinking Tool: Turn it Upside Down (T U D)

1. Normal belief: A hospital is a place for sick people.

2. T U D: A hospital is a place for people who are healthy.

When we looked at a hospital as a place for people who are healthy,

1. Our base of customers increased to include a vast number of healthy people who come for positive health programs. The positive health theme included the “Well Woman” program, which involved a health and beauty focus: yoga experts, beauticians, and women’s health practitioners helped create a vastly successful program. Preventive health care became a positive activity. 15 check-ups including the heart check, the diabetic check and the child health check were part of the wellness check portfolio.
2. The relationship with customers, which traditionally started on a note of pain, anxiety, and death, began on a happy note. The focus was how to remain healthy and how to face problems. The lifetime relationship, which is the bedrock of direct marketing today, started on a happy, positive note, with wellness as the key.

Since then I realized that, thinkers from Plato onwards have developed hundreds of thinking tools which are as easy to learn as the 3R’s - Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. The simplest tools include checklists ranging from Rudyard Kipling’s famous “Five good serving men” (The questions Why, Where, When, Who and How) to Alex Osborne’s 9 Word Checklist.

Tent Thinking vs. Marble Palace Thinking

A bank wanted to rapidly open branches at a minimal cost. They were not sure which locations were most likely to succeed. An I Lab came up with the idea of using existing organizations such as schools, petrol bunks, and panchayat halls to set up branches. This solution has two advantages:


1. It was inexpensive
2. It could be easily dismantled or closed if not successful.

Today, the speed at which corporations are required to grow, involves experiments. An experiment should be inexpensive. In fact, in an experiment, there is no success or failure; there is only feedback.

This essentially is Tent Thinking. A tent can be put up, change shape, it can expand or reduce and it can be put up elsewhere.

Marble Palace Thinking involves a fascination with permanence. Permanent structures, people and systems are expensive and difficult to dismantle. Permanent staff is a fixed overhead, which cannot be reduced as a swift response to falling demand in a recessionary market. This is the Marble Palace mentality.

Success in today’s scenario goes to those who are swift, dynamic and able to respond to mercurial changes in the environment. Adaptability is the most important quality this millennium demands. Marble palaces become fixed overheads, which are difficult to adapt to any other use.Loneliness is the worst disease of the modern world. Loneliness attacks are deadlier than
heart attacks. Reach out and touch people around you. Let your hi-tech life not isolate you from a hi-touch life. Your family and friends are waiting for the hi-touch you. Reach out verbally, tonally and non-verbally. Write notes in gratitude to all those who make your life meaningful. Your parents, friends, your neighbours. Read to the blind. Coach a poor child. Exchange plants and seeds over the wall with your neighbour.

Thinking Tools

Thinking tools make the teaching of creativity simple. Tools can help us replicate innovation quickly across the organization. The world’s foremost companies have insisted on teaching creativity and innovation skills. IBM, Coco Cola, Unilever, Sony, ICICI, Ashok Leyland, TI, HLL, TVS - the list goes on. IBM even has a two year program for all its engineers. MindsPower I-Labs, over the last 20 years, have been dedicated to improving the creative potential of Asian companies.

Indian companies have an opportunity to learn a shared language of Innovation Tools. It is only through the systematic learning of tools, the generation and testing of new ideas that organizations can improve their Innovation Quotient (IQ). Company-wide innovation is not about nurturing solitary genius in sterile laboratories, but requires the bubbling enthusiasm of teams, playfully ping ponging wild ideas, taming them, using old ideas as a foundation for innovation and finally carefully hand-holding and nurturing innovative teams through the long and messy process of implementation.