We will discover methods for working smarter, Hall promised himself. We will find a way or make a way.
The wizard of winging it, the iconoclastic barefoot guru, announced that henceforth creative sessions would go under the microscope. There'd be analysis, a scientific search for patterns, and systems installed -- yes, systems -- to govern future sessions.
"A lot of entrepreneurs essentially just run away and put somebody else in the center," says Hall, who believes that delegating works only "if you have systems and processes. Otherwise, your people have to be mind readers."
"When I came here [four years ago], we didn't have principles," says senior account executive Sean McCosh, whose very title indicates the new ways at the Ranch. "I'd run around and hear what Doug was talking about, and by osmosis I would pick up some stuff."
As chief rainmaker, Hall had brought in the business, taken stock of a client's mind-set and makeup, figured which of his many mind-liberating exercises might work best, and then turned things over to his staff and the freelance Trained Brains. Except that in reality there wasn't much he could turn over.
Sure, he'd articulated in his book and to his minions some principles of creativity: the importance of fun, the necessity of stimuli, the value of breaking into small groups. And sure, in the idea-winnowing stages, hurdles like "unique selling proposition" got raised. But just as surely, when the ideas morphed into concepts and potential products on days two and three, it was generally Hall's tweaking that nudged them into shape, and it was his stamp of approval that everyone awaited. It was, after all, his face that appeared no fewer than seven times in the foldout brochure; it was his experience, his judgment, and his mind that clients were paying for.
I just reviewed the past 12 months' calendars. No wonder I'm so tired. There must be a better way to provide the work than doing it all myself. I need to return to my core values, Hall noted in his diary.
To move from a practice to a business, Hall needed to replicate himself. To do that, he needed to pinpoint, instead of intuitively "knowing," the roots of creativity and the essential elements of successful new products. He began by activating his long underused left brain, the logical, scientific side he'd trained in college by studying to be a chemical engineer. "At the end of the day we tend to go back to our roots," he says. "Even though I've been the barefoot guru, I love science, I love engineering -- and engineers love principles. I'm also a big fan of Einstein, who said God does not play dice with the universe. The wonder of the world is that there are patterns, and if you look long enough and think hard enough and discover, it can make a dramatic difference in how you do business."
But Hall's business was in the quicksilver world of ideas. Could he really wrestle something as evanescent as creativity to the mat? To succeed, he'd have to do a Deming-like quality assessment in the white-collar world of intellectual capital. Hall had previously played with the notion and even devised a formula, E = (S + BOS) F, in which he proposed that a fun environment had an exponential impact on using various stimuli and brain operating systems in creating ideas. But he'd never rigorously analyzed what went on under his roof. He had simply been too busy, too much like Lucille Ball on the candy line. Besides, in the Mansion days, too much of the process disappeared from sight, like a train into a tunnel, into his own mind.
Beginning in mid-1997, Hall and his Ranch hands began illuminating that tunnel. They started by taking better stock of their clients. They used the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) to assess the impact of individual thinking styles on group dynamics and creativity. Soon clients filled out HBDI questionnaires before they arrived at the Ranch. The surveys were used to create a type of scouting report that helped determine the mix of creative exercises for each client. Clients inked still more questionnaires after each creativity exercise. Was the group filled with energy? How effective was the group in generating quality ideas? Did you like the creativity technique? Initially, Hall worried about burying clients in paperwork but convinced himself and them that the Ranch couldn't be a creativity laboratory without hard data tracked against output.
Hall assessed everything, including clients' reactions to the creativity exercises and the performance of the group-leading Trained Brains. Low-scoring Trained Brains weren't asked back. After the clients left, Hall and his employees assessed what had worked and what hadn't and where to go next. The change from the freewheeling Mansion ways wasn't easy.
"I'm almost allergic to anything that reeks of bureaucracy," says Hall. "But I knew unless I could figure out which exercises really worked and which were the true reproducible principles, I was destined to be a slave of the business."
And while all that was going on, Hall was ramping up his training for the Pole expedition, which, he knows now, helped greatly with the business transformation. Hall had wrapped the Great Aspirations fund-raiser around the quest for the Pole, but it remained at the core a very personal goal. As a boy he'd suffered a serious hip injury playing football and spent the better part of two years in various body casts at Boston's Children's Hospital, recuperating from an operation that had shortened one of his legs to offset the damage. He'd compensated for the injury by excelling in the realm of the mind. Now, decades later, he'd created an opportunity to prove himself physically -- and in his typical superlative-only style, on a grand stage.
