Delegates at the Recruitment & Employment Confederation 2011 National Convention on 29 September were given two contrasting ideas on how to grow their business: in one case being told to “have fewer ideas” but also to “let ideas have sex”.

Independent brand consultant Ralph Ardill told recruiters attending the ’Going for Growth’ event: “Calling for more innovation in itself is not enough, just saying ’we need more ideas around here’. The experience I have is that most businesses already have too many.”

Having promised to avoid the cliché of telling people to ’think outside the box’, Ardill instead argued that growing a business required owners to “listen inside the box”, concentrating on what the business is already doing and what its employees have to say. Innovation, Ardill said, does not require something totally new or ’out there’ but can involve “something that’s relatively commonplace elsewhere”. He concluded that success is 99% alignment and 1% vision.

Later Magnus Lindkvist, director of trendspotting and future thinking at the Stockholm School of Enterprise, humorously illustrated how in the space of decades enormous changes can take place: “When I was growing up, reading each other’s thoughts was called black magic now it’s called Twitter.” This was not because one day someone simply woke up and invented Twitter, he pointed out; the number of intermediate developments that allowed it to come into existence is enormous.

Lindkvist said: “The future is about one big thing being different that’s how people think. ’China will be big and there’ll be climate change’, but we don’t know what will happen.”

The future is in reality formed by small changes, slowly occurring in many different areas. Businesses can look at trends to make good guesses and assumptions as to what the future will be, but the further forward you look, the more uncertainty there is, he said.

Asking recruiters to embrace uncertainty and the fact that not everything works out perfectly first time, Lindkvist’s four big pieces of advice to recruiters were: ’Let ideas have sex’, ’experiment’, ’recycle failures’ and ’be patient’.