You can sometimes be sure about the past. You can observe and measure. You can know what has happened. That is what history and science are all about.
It is not often that you can be sure about the future. If you explode a bomb you can be sure there will be some destruction. This is because we are following the routine of the past. A doctor who treats a streptococcal infection with penicillin can be reasonably sure that it will effect a cure. Again, this is repeating a routine that has worked in the past.
But if you are doing something new, something creative, or something different, you cannot be sure about what will happen. You can reasonably hope that putting together ingredients with known actions will produce a certain effect. This is what a cook would do when creating a new dish.
If a City Council decreed that people could only use their cars one day a week, could they fully predict what would happen? Traffic in the city might be reduced. Policing the system might be difficult, expensive, or even impossible. Citizens might be so upset that they voted out the Council at the next election. There might be vigorous protests. Businesses might start to move out of the city. Retailers might be very upset, etc. There would be a multitude of effects - both direct and indirect.
In addition to the difficulty of forecasting the effects, there is the even bigger difficulty of forecasting the extent or strength of the effect. How strong would protests be? Would people remember this at the next election? How many businesses would move out of the city? How long would it take people to get used to the idea?
In London there is a ‘congestion charge’ for driving into the centre of the city. This is currently £8. If this charge is low, then people accept it, take it for granted and still drive into the city centre. If the charge is raised and is perceived to be too high, then there are protests and a negative effect at election time. How do you estimate the right level of charge to reduce traffic and yet not upset car drivers too much?
Consider an alternative idea. Suppose everyone who lived within a certain radius of London were to be given a free permit to drive into the city centre. But to drive in you would need to display four permits. So four friends or neighbors could agree to share a car. Or, you could rent or buy permits from other people. This would mean that some people were now being paid for leaving their cars at home, and taking public transport into the city. The overall effect would be a definite reduction to one quarter of existing car traffic into the city. There would not be the uncertainty of the congestion charge level (though the city would not make money if the permits were free).
In China there is said to be a deficit of 100 million women. This is the result of the ‘one child’ policy. Baby girls are not much valued because they are not so helpful in the fields or in your business. Girls get married and then look after the ageing parents of their husbands. So who is going to look after you when you get old? So, somehow, the girl babies disappear. The result is a deficit of 100 million women - and even wife kidnapping.
Now it may well be that this outcome was actually foreseen right from the beginning. The deficit of 100 million women would cause a significant decline in the population. Was the deficit deliberately planned, or an unforeseen consequence of the one child policy? Risk means that things do not turn out quite as planned. Consider an alternative idea for China’s large population.
Each family is allowed to have one boy and must then have more children. This is the ‘one boy’ policy. The result is equal boys and girls. At the moment of conception there is an equal chance of the embryo being a boy or a girl. Since no one is being killed, this equal chance continues. On average each family has two children. This is less than is required for population replacement, which needs about 2.3 children. So there is a declining population of equal boys and girls and everyone gets the chance to have a boy. No babies are ‘lost’ or killed.
PILOT SCHEMES
There are pilot schemes, test-marketing and other ways of exploring the impact of a new idea or new product. These are valuable, but may not be as simple as they seem. Many years ago, McDonalds had the idea of serving breakfasts in their restaurants. They had the image. They had the locations. They had the staff. Why not open up this new source of revenue?
For four years the company lost money on this new venture. People were not in the habit of eating breakfast outside their homes. Any time in that four years, the new venture could have been scrapped and treated as a ‘failure’. They did not give up. After four years, serving breakfasts became the most profitable part of McDonalds’ operations.
How long is long enough for a pilot scheme? That is an impossible question to answer. Changing culture and changing habits takes a long time. To get people used to the idea of having breakfast outside the home was a change in both culture and habit. So the test could be expected to take a long time. But how long is a long time? Three years? Four years? Five years? Etc.
There may also be background factors. In times of inflation some cultures spend more money - but other cultures save money. The particular circumstances in which a pilot scheme is carried out will affect the results.
THE DESIGN OF IDEAS
Many toll bridges and toll roads operate with radio-sensed cards that allow a driver to go through the gate without paying any money on the spot. This seems to work very well. Could the same system be applied to car parks? So a driver would just show his card (which could be attached to the windscreen), and the gate would open.
If the car park was full, the driver would be rather upset at having bought a card and not being able to use it to park. How long would the card be priced? Someone who needed to park every day would be willing to pay quite a high fee, but someone who only parked occasionally would not.
How could the idea be designed to take these difficulties into account? A mixture of card and normal payment might work if the car park was big enough. Another possibility would be to make it time-dependent. Before 10am your card would work, but not after that time (to allow parking for work, but not for shopping).
Risks need to be foreseen. Creative ideas need to be designed to minimise the risks. It is not enough just to have a basic creative idea and then set out to use it. Many excellent creative ideas are lost because there has been insufficient attention to the design stage. The creative idea is tried in its original and crude form. It does not work, so the original idea is shelved. Yet with some design effort, the idea might have been very successful.
POLICY
We should not assume that creative ideas are always going to be high-risk. The result of such an assumption is that we avoid creative ideas as a matter of policy. The result of such a policy is that our organization or enterprise is operating considerably below potential. The more efficient an organization, the greater the need for creativity. Why?
Because every efficiency will extract the maximum benefit from a new idea. Inefficient organizations will be inefficient with new ideas. Efficiency and creativity are complementary - not opposites.
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