White ideas, the mystery of purity

"I  have a strange passion: I’m a “piperoman”, it means I’m found of pepper corns and spices. For years I’m giving talks on peppers, I’m invited by nonprofit organizations and companies to pepper tasting for their employees and clients. How does it happen?

I never had thought to offer to my clients a pepper tasting, nor a conference on peppers. I was just passionate about the king of spices, hunting wild peppers in India, Laos or Zanzibar. I had also at home a large collection of peppers from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, of course, but also from Brazil, Tasmania or Congo.

One day, perhaps fifteen years ago?, the HR Director of a leading cement company asked me :” hey, why would you come and speak about your peepers in front of our board of Directors. You know our weekly board meetings are so boring, it would pep up the afternoon!”.
I answered him “what do you want me to tell your colleagues about peppers ?”. It was not Unilever or Sara Lee. It was the largest Belgian cement producer. The HR Director insisted and convicted me to create a 45 minutes speech on peppercorns: where do they come from? How do they grow ? are there different qualities ? Etc, etc. Instead of talking from 2 to 2:45 as planned, they kept me until 5:30 and at the end proposed me to repeat the exercise in front of the management team, a club of 150 managers ! It was the beginning of my “Pepper Academy” that now ranked number one when you google “poivres” in French.

You see, white ideas are quite special! These are the naïve, candid, spontaneous ideas proposed by someone who is not at all involved in the situation. There is no problem, no demand, no special agenda or opportunity. For example, your brother in law who is a great engineer in the field of biotechnologies tells you one day that if he was in your position of creativity consultant he would manage things this way and that way. When listening to him, you will probably have the reflex to tell him “hey, that all nice and well, but it’s not at all the way things are working in our field!”.

Nevertheless, hours and days later the suggestion made by your brother in law could grow in your mind and end up as something really valuable, something that really could make sense.

In our busy professional life the risk exists that we neglect these suggestions, ideas, remarks, propositions made by non-specialists, by friends, by relatives, by the girl-next-door.

We should pay a greater attention to these white ideas, because they can really lead to real novelty. "

Mark Raison, extract of the conference "The Power of Impossible"

How to sell a white idea ?

A white idea has not to be sold: it has to be listened at. Its value lies in its ignorance of constrains and limitation. It opens widely the scope.

Love candid ideas, unexpected proposition coming from a non related field !