Fighting the Fears that Block Creativity

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Tom Kelley and David Kelley for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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What does it take to spark your creativity?

For Doug Dietz, the executive behind GE Healthcare’s magnetic resonance-imaging (MRI) equipment, it was seeing a little girl cry.

He remembers the day vividly. He’d come to a hospital to see one of his machines in action and was initially pleased. The scanner looked beautiful and was functioning well; the technician on duty had no complaints. But just as Dietz was about to leave, he saw a child, clearly distraught, crying and clutching her parents’ hands, terrified at the prospect of entering the MRI suite. When she couldn’t be calmed, an anesthesiologist was summoned. That’s when Dietz learned that hospitals routinely sedate young patients to get them to lie still for the procedure. The realization triggered a personal crisis. “I was so focused on the shiny object, the new features, how clever we’d been, that I missed the big picture,” he recalls. He resolved then and there to improve the MRI experience for pediatric patients.

He first shared his concerns with his boss at GE, who suggested he attend a customer-focused innovation class at Stanford’s Hasso Plassner Institute of Design, or d.school, which is where we met him. Fueled by that experience, Dietz then pulled together a small team of volunteers including childhood learning experts from a children’s museum and child life specialists from a local pediatric hospital to help him think holistically about how kids experienced the MRI technology. Soon, the group developed a prototype of what would later become the Adventure Series of GE scanners. The complex equipment inside the machine remained unchanged, but the outside, indeed the entire MRI room, was transformed with colorful decals suggesting a journey to outer space or a cruise aboard a pirate ship. The team also wrote imaginative scripts for the MRI operators so they could lead their young patients through the story — for example, telling them to listen closely for the moment that the rocket ship would “shift into hyperdrive” just before the machine makes what might otherwise be a scary, loud noise.

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Tom Kelley is the general manager of IDEO and the co-author of The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm (Crown, 2001) and The Ten Faces of Innovation (Currency/Doubleday, 2005). He is an executive fellow at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and at the University of Tokyo. David Kelley is the founder and chairman of IDEO and the founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, where he is the Donald W. Whittier Professor in Mechanical Engineering.

Teresa Amabile: Profile of a cutting edge thought leader

Teresa Amabile

Long before almost anyone else, Teresa Amabile began to think about and write about creativity and innovation in business. Perhaps only her associates at Stanford, Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers, staked an earlier claim as pioneers in what has since become one of the most dynamic fields of research.

Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School. Originally educated as a chemist, Teresa received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University. She studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Teresa’s research encompasses creativity, productivity, innovation, and inner work life – the confluence of emotions, perceptions, and motivation that people experience as they react to events at work.

Teresa’s most recent discoveries appear in her book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. The book, based on research into nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from over 200 professionals inside organizations, illuminates how everyday events at work can impact employee engagement and creative productivity. Published in August 2011 by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is co-authored with Teresa’s husband and collaborator,Steven Kramer, a renowned expert on behavioral psychology.

Her other books include Creativity in Context and Growing Up Creative. Teresa has published over 100 scholarly articles and chapters, in outlets including top journals in psychology (such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and American Psychologist) and in management (Administrative Science Quarterly and Academy of Management Journal). She is also the author of The Work Preference Inventory and KEYS to Creativity and Innovation. Teresa has used insights from her research in working with various groups in business, government, and education, including Procter & Gamble, Novartis International AG, Motorola, IDEO, and the Creative Education Foundation. She has presented her theories, research results, and practical implications in dozens of forums, including the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Young Presidents’ Organization annual university, and the Front End of Innovation annual conference.

As an educator, Teresa strives to teach leaders and aspiring leaders ways in which they can simultaneously achieve their most passionate career aspirations, further the success of their organizations and employees, and serve the higher aims of the societies in which they work. At Harvard Business School, Teresa has taught MBA and executive courses on managing for creativity, leadership, and ethics. Previously, at Brandeis University, she taught social psychology, organizational psychology, the psychology of creativity, and statistics. She served as the host-instructor of the 26-part series, Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, originally broadcast on PBS.

For more about Teresa or The Progress Principle, please click here.

You can also watch a video (about four minutes in length) offering a portion of a rare interview during which Teresa Amabile discusses her latest book, The Progress Principle.  To watch the video, please click here.

 

 

Our Crash Courses are the Way to Go

One of our unique services at Creative Communication Network is our ability to offer training on important topics based upon the information that we derive from books that we present at the First Friday Book Synopsis.

We call these Crash Courses, and you can look for the first offering, focusing upon Change and Innovation very soon.  Don’t miss the opportunity to register for this first course.  We will send an e-mail to you that announces the date, time, location, and method for registraiton.

In these Crash Courses, we take principles from several best-sellers on a particular topic and transform these into skill-based activities, facilitated discussions, assessments, and self-reflection.  You won’t find anything else like them anywhere.  We are putting the final touches on this first course right now.

We have  two major components in our first course on Change and Innovation, with these objectives:

Part One:            Creative Thinking

Objective 1:      Identify strategies to actively seek out and hire people with diverse backgrounds and thinking styles

Objective 2:      Explore steps to effectively manage resistance to novel or experimental proposals

Part Two:             Demonstrate how to develop processes, products, and services.

Objective 1:      Describe how to evaluate new opportunities unconstrained by existing paradigms but keeping an eye towards organizational goals

Objective 2:      Identify and describe steps to maintain the organization’s competitive edge with breakthrough solutions and disciplined risks.

In this Change and Innovation course, we draw upon principles from these books that we have presented at the First Friday Book Synopsis, and others:  

Kelley, T., Littman, J., & Peters, T.  (2001).  The art of innovation (lessons in creativity from IDEO, America’s leading design firm).  New York:  Doubleday.

Kelley, T., & Littman, J.  (2005).  The ten faces of innovation : IDEO’s strategies for defeating the devil’s advocate and driving creativity throughout your organization.   New York:  Currency/Doubleday.

Mauzy, J., & Harriman, R. A.  (2003).  Creativity Inc.: Building an inventive organization. Boston:  Harvard Business School Press.

Sutton, R. I.  (2002).  Weird ideas that work: 11-1/2 practices for promoting, managing, and sustaining innovation.  New York:  Free Press.

Tharp, T.  (2003).  The creative habit:  Learn it and use it for life.  New York:  Simon & Schuster.

Look for information about this course really soon! 

We hope you make plans to join us.

Design Thinking for Social Innovation

Tim Brown

Here is an excerpt from a brilliant article co-authored by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt for Stanford Social Innovation Review (Winter 2010). To read the complete article, check out other valuable resources, obtain subscription information, and sign up for a free newsletter, please click here.

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Designers have traditionally focused on enhancing the look and functionality of products. Recently, they have begun using design techniques to tackle more complex problems, such as finding ways to provide low-cost healthcare throughout the world. Businesses were the first to embrace this new approach—called design thinking—and nonprofits are beginning to adopt it too.

Traditionally, designers focused their attention on improving the look and functionality of products. Classic examples of this type of design work are Apple Computer’s iPod and Herman Miller’s Aeron chair. In recent years designers have broadened their approach, creating entire systems to deliver products and services.

Design thinking incorporates constituent or consumer insights in depth and rapid prototyping, all aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block effective solutions. Design thinking—inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential—addresses the needs of the people who will consume a product or service and the infrastructure that enables it.

Businesses are embracing design thinking because it helps them be more innovative, better differentiate their brands, and bring their products and services to market

Jocelyn Wyatt

faster. Nonprofits are beginning to use design thinking as well to develop better solutions to social problems. Design thinking crosses the traditional boundaries between public, for-profit, and nonprofit sectors. By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.

Design Thinking at Work

Jerry Sternin, founder of the Positive Deviance Initiative and an associate professor at Tufts University until he died last year, was skilled at identifying what and critical of what he called outsider solutions to local problems. Sternin’s preferred approach to social innovation is an example of design thinking in action. In 1990, Sternin and his wife, Monique, were invited by the government of Vietnam to develop a model to decrease in a sustainable manner high levels of malnutrition among children in 10,000 villages.

At the time, 65 percent of Vietnamese children under age 5 suffered from malnutrition, and most solutions relied on government and UN agencies donations of nutritional supplements. But the supplements—the outsider solution—never delivered the hoped-for results. As an alternative, the Sternins used an approach called positive deviance, which looks for existing solutions (hence sustainable) among individuals and families in the community who are already doing well.

The Sternins and colleagues from Save the Children surveyed four local Quong Xuong communities in the province of Than Hoa and asked for examples of “very, very poor” families whose children were healthy. They then observed the food preparation, cooking, and serving behaviors of these six families, called “positive deviants,” and found a few consistent yet rare behaviors. Parents of well-nourished children collected tiny shrimps, crabs, and snails from rice paddies and added them to the food, along with the greens from sweet potatoes. Although these foods were readily available, they were typically not eaten because they were considered unsafe for children. The positive deviants also fed their children multiple smaller meals, which allowed small stomachs to hold and digest more food each day.

The Sternins and the rest of their group worked with the positive deviants to offer cooking classes to the families of children suffering from malnutrition. By the end of the program’s first year, 80 percent of the 1,000 children enrolled in the program were adequately nourished. In addition, the effort had been replicated within 14 villages across Vietnam.

The Sternins’ work is a good example of how positive deviance and design thinking relies on local expertise to uncover local solutions. Design thinkers look for work-arounds and improvise solutions—like the shrimps, crabs, and snails—and they find ways to incorporate those into the offerings they create. They consider what we call the edges, the places where “extreme” people live differently, think differently, and consume differently. As Monique Sternin, now director of the Positive Deviance Initiative, explains: “Both positive deviance and design thinking are human-centered approaches. Their solutions are relevant to a unique cultural context and will not necessarily work outside that specific situation.”

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Tim Brown is the chairman and CEO of IDEO as well as the author of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. Jocelyn Wyatt leads IDEO’s Social Innovation domain, which she has expanded over the past several years.

I also highly recommend these sources:

Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era (Henry Chesbrough)

The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems (Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin)

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (C.K. Prahalad)

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Roger Martin)

The Three Threats to Creativity

Teresa Amabile

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Teresa Amabile for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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Creativity is under threat. It happens whenever and wherever there’s a squeeze on the ingredients of creativity, and it’s happening in many businesses today. According to the Labor Department’s most recent stats, productivity is up. But stretching fewer employees to cover ever more work in our job-starved recovery is no way to run the future. Without the creativity that produces new and valuable ideas, innovation — the successful implementation of new ideas — withers and dies. Creativity depends on the right people working in the right environment. Too often these days, the people come ill-equipped, and their work environments stink.

A recent story about the 40th anniversary of Xerox PARC

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20101008/check-out-parcs-40th-anniversary-doings/

stirred my memories of how the creativity ingredients overflowed at that place, in that time. PARC was a first light in the dawning of Silicon Valley.

By 1973, when I moved there, PARC researchers had invented the first user-friendly computer, laser printing, object-oriented programming, a personal workstation, and the foundation of the Ethernet. By the time I left Palo Alto in 1977, they had developed the first graphical user interface (GUI) with icons, pop-up menus, overlapping windows, and the basics of point-and-click screen navigation. At this moment, you are almost certainly using something that sprang from the blossoming creativity at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
We all wince at the thought of how Xerox utterly failed to innovate on PARC’s inventions, allowing Apple and Microsoft to run away with most of them. But there’s no denying how world-changing those inventions were. The organization that gave birth to them illustrates — by way of contrast — why so many of today’s organizations are creatively sterile.

What made PARC so different from organizations where creativity falters? An abundance of all three key ingredients:

1. Smart people who think differently. The first threat to business creativity is our endangered education system, with its downward trends in science and math, and its increasingly narrow focus on basic subjects. The four dozen people working at PARC were really smart, with two important kinds of smarts. First, they had deep expertise — in computer science, optical science, and system dynamics, as well as broad acquaintance with seemingly unrelated fields. Alan Kay, one of PARC’s first computer scientists, brought his colleagues vast knowledge ranging from music to biology. Second, the PARC inventors had creative smarts. Rather than getting trapped by what was already inside their heads, they voraciously consumed new information and combined it in ways no one had previously imagined. They didn’t develop those habits of mind by following mandated curricula.

2. Passionate engagement. Aside from small startups, too few organizations today give people a chance to do what they love in service of a meaningful mission. Robert Bauer walked into his dream job at PARC three months after its founding. He stayed for over 30 years. As he recently told Computerworld.com, “Conducting research at PARC four decades ago was like magic. …We came to work every day with a passion …” My research has shown that people are most creative when they are on a mission, intrinsically motivated by a love for what they are doing. Bauer and his colleagues found immense interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge in “dreaming, proving and making things that had never been done before.” Indulging their passion was so exciting, and so much fun, that they worked their tails off. These days, people are more likely to find work frustrating than fun.

3. A creative atmosphere. Under the severe pressures of the financial crisis, contemporary organizational atmospheres resemble assembly lines more than hotbeds of creativity. Too often, the imperative is to do the same thing repeatedly, ever faster and more efficiently; reflection, exploration, and intense collaboration become superfluous luxuries. The PARC culture could hardly have been more different. Like all great organizational cultures, this one started with a bold vision. PARC’s founder, George Pake, was out to create “the office of the future.” He and Bob Taylor,  head of PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory, built a near-perfect work environment for creativity: freedom to pursue passions, challenging goals, collaborative norms, sufficient time to really think, and the resources people needed to follow their dreams. Even the smartest, most passionate people won’t thrive in — or will soon abandon — a work environment that stifles them. Most people who got into PARC never wanted to leave.

PARC was ahead of its time, but it was no anomaly. Even today, many creative hotbeds exist around the world, in new ventures and in a few more established shops like MIT’s Media Lab, SONY, the design firm IDEO, and Disney’s Pixar.

But with the three ingredients of business creativity becoming scarce resources, the PARCs of tomorrow will face swift extinction.

Forty years after the birth of PARC, have workplaces gotten any better at fostering that sort of brilliance?

Are start-ups the only places where the ingredients of creativity abound today? Is creativity under threat — or is it somehow protected — in your organization?

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Teresa Amabile is Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She researches what makes people creative, productive, happy, and motivated at work. She is the author of two books, Creativity In Context: Update To The Social Psychology of Creativity and Growing Up Creative: Nurturing a Lifetime of Creativity, as well as more than 100 scholarly papers. Amabile holds a doctorate in psychology from Stanford University.

Tom Kelley’s “Mount Rushmore” of Innovation

Tom Kelley

If there were in fact a Mount Rushmore of those business thinkers who have made the most significant contributions to our understanding of innovation, Tom Kelley and his brother David would be among the first to be selected to be honored.

There are a few business books that I make a point to re-read at least once a year and Tom Kelley’s The Art of Innovation and  Ten Faces of Innovation (both co-authored with Jonathan Littman) are among them.

In the latter volume, Kelley explains, he and Littman focus on ten “people-centric tools developed at IDEO that you might call talents or roles or personas for innovation…We’ve found that adopting one or more of these roles can help teams express a different point of view and create a broader range of innovative solutions.”

The first three are Learning Personas:

1. The Anthropologist (Pages 16-39) brings new learning and insights into the organization by observing human behavior and developing a deep understanding of how people interact physically and emotionally with products, services, and spaces.

2. The Experimenter (Pages 42-65) prototypes new ideas continuously, learning by a process of enlightened trial and error.

3. The Cross Pollinator (Pages 68-89) explores other industries and cultures, then translates those findings and revelations to fit the unique needs of the given enterprise.

The next three are Organizing Personas:

4. The Hurdler (Pages 92-112) knows the path to innovation is strewn with obstacles and develops a knack for overcoming or outsmarting those roadblocks.

5. The Collaborator (Pages 114-140) helps bring eclectic groups together, and often leads from the middle of the pack to create new combinations and multidisciplinary solutions.

6. The Director (Pages 142-164) not only gathers a talented “cast” and “crew” but also helps to spark their creative talents.

The last four are Building Personas:

7. The Experience Architect (Pages 166-192) designs compelling experiences that go beyond mere functionality to connect at a deeper level with customers’ latest or expressed needs.

8. The Set Designer (Pages 194-214) creates a “stage” on which innovation team members can do their best work, transforming physical environments into powerful tools to influence behavior and attitude.

9. The Caregiver (Pages 216-240) builds on the metaphor of a health care professional to deliver customer care in a manner and to an extent that goes beyond mere service. In a phrase, the “extra mile” of empathic effort.

10. The Storyteller (Pages 242-259) builds both internal morale and external awareness through compelling narratives that communicate a fundamental human value or reinforce a specific cultural trait.

For me, these are Kelley’s key points:

• No one person can totally master the skills required of each of the ten.

• However, every member of a team should be able to understand the functions of each of them and assume primary responsibility for at least one or two.

• And surely formal training can enable every member of a team to improve the skills needed to observe, experiment, synthesize, avoid or solve problems, co-create, envision, positive and constructive encounters, “set the table” (i.e. prepare the way for breakthrough initiatives), protect and support those in need, and anchor ideas in a human context.

Lessons to be learned from Pixar about a “creative culture”

How to encourage risk taking within a “try, learn, and try again” culture?

Here is my take on what Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson learned during a lengthy and probing study of the Pixar culture:

1. Celebrate failure with the same intensity as you celebrate success. View each setback as a precious learning opportunity.

2. Become a “prototype junky.” There is no project too big [or too small] to conduct a real-world test of it within a few weeks.

3. Develop your own “skunk works” within the organization. [click here.], At least form a small group and enable it to meet regularly to brainstorm how best to answer questions, solve problems, and respond to unmet needs…especially those identified by past and current customers.

4. Dream BIG. Ask team members to think of ten over-the-top, outlandish, eccentric, far-out, wacky, unheard-of, unorthodox ideas for a project.

Note: In the most innovative organizations (such as IDEO, Nike, Apple, and yes, Pixar), two quite different approaches are taken: generate lots of what Jobs calls “an insanely great idea” and then decide what to do with them, or, tackle an especially serious problem with a totally open mind.

5. Don’t cry poor. The best new ideas tend to be produced by groups whose members are world-class scroungers. External limits and constraints tend to inspire original thinking and below-the-radar initiatives.

6. Planning is OK but do not allow the process to be a distraction from achieving the desired objective. Beware of meetings and considerations devoted to “planning to plan.” General George Patton once said, “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan next week.”

7. Each project is a “work in progress” so establish a planning center (perhaps online) where evidence of progress is on display. Grab low-hanging fruit” ASAP and celebrate completion of “baby steps” to reassure everyone that progress really is being made.

8. Forget about lengthy meetings, reports, analyses, etc. What’s happening NOW? Why is it happening? What more needs to be done? Who will do it? Everyone involved must have a sense of urgency. John Wooden said it best: “Be quick but don’t rush.”

9. Assume authority and do whatever must be done and done NOW. If appropriate, ask for forgiveness later. That said, be sure to do your homework, consider all the possible implications and consequences, and be prepared to explain later why the initiative you took had risks but the decision to make it was rigorously thought-through and prudent. Also be fully prepared to explained what of value was learned, especially if action was unsuccessful.

I highly recommend Capodagli and Jackson’s Innovate the Pixar Way: Business Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Corporate Playground, published by McGraw-Hill (2010).

The best books on brainstorming, idea generation, etc.? Check out these two:

The Idea of Innovation
The Ten Faces of Innovation
Thomas Kelley

If you need additional assistance:

A Knock on the Side of the Head
A Kick in the Seat of the Pants
Roger Von Oech

Cracking Creativity
Thinkertoys (Second Edition)
Michael Michalko

Jump Start Your Brain
Doug Hall

Six Thinking Hats
Edward De Bono

Warren Burger on “The Four Phases of Design Thinking”

Warren Burger & Tanner

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Warren Burger for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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What can people in business learn from studying the ways successful designers solve problems and innovate? On the most basic level, they can learn to question, care, connect, and commit — four of the most important things successful designers do to achieve significant breakthroughs.

Having studied more than a hundred top designers in various fields over the past couple of years (while doing research for a book), I found that there were a few shared behaviors that seemed to be almost second nature to many designers. And these ingrained habits were intrinsically linked to the designer’s ability to bring original ideas into the world as successful innovations. All of which suggests that they merit a closer look.

Question. If you spend any time around designers, you quickly discover this about them: They ask, and raise, a lot of questions. Often this is the starting point in the design process, and it can have a profound influence on everything that follows. Many of the designers I studied, from Bruce Mau to Richard Saul Wurman to Paula Scher, talked about the importance of asking “stupid questions”–the ones that challenge the existing realities and assumptions in a given industry or sector. The persistent tendency of designers to do this is captured in the joke designers tell about themselves. How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Does it have to be a light bulb?

In a business setting, asking basic “why” questions can make the questioner seem naïve while putting others on the defensive (as in, “What do you mean ‘Why are we doing it this way?’ We’ve been doing it this way for 22 years!”). But by encouraging people to step back and reconsider old problems or entrenched practices, the designer can begin to re-frame the challenge at hand — which can then steer thinking in new directions. For business in today’s volatile marketplace, the ability to question and rethink basic fundamentals — What business are we really in? What do today’s consumers actually need or expect from us? — has never been more important.

[Burger recommends three C’s: Care, Connect, and Commit. Here’s the first.]

Care. It’s easy for companies to say they care about customer needs. But to really empathize, you have to be willing to do what many of the best designers do: step out of the corporate bubble and actually immerse yourself in the daily lives of people you’re trying to serve. What impressed me about design researchers such as Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO was the dedication to really observing and paying close attention to people — because this is usually the best way to ferret out their deep, unarticulated needs. Focus groups and questionnaires don’t cut it; designers know that you must care enough to actually be present in people’s lives.

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But it’s also true that when you commit to an idea early — putting it out into the world while it’s still young and imperfect — you increase the possibility of short-term failure. Designers tend to be much more comfortable with this risk than most of us. They know that innovation often involves an iterative process with setbacks along the way — and those small failures are actually useful because they show the designer what works and what needs fixing. The designer’s ability to “fail forward” is a particularly valuable quality in times of dynamic change. Today, many companies find themselves operating in a test-and-learn business environment that requires rapid prototyping. Which is just one more reason to pay attention to the people who’ve been conducting their work this way all along.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

Warren Berger is the author of GLIMMER: How design can transform, business, your life, and maybe even the world (Penguin Press). He edits the online magazine GlimmerSite.com.

Innovation Is Cheap – Mediocrity (The Failure To Innovate) Is What Is Expensive

My blogging colleague, Bob Morris, has written about the difference between creativity and innovation.  And there are many books, some quite wonderful, about creativity and innovation.  But here is what hit me directly between the eyes about it this weekend.

It is a quote in Drive by Daniel Pink.  Pink argues that extrinsic motivation (Pink:  Motivation 2.0) – you know, rewards and punishments, the kind of motivation that was made famous and served workers well in the early part of the 20^th century, does not help in jobs that require creativity and innovation.  In fact, they can be counterproductive, practically de-motivating.

And in the midst of his discussion of the new approach to motivation needed in the workplace of today, is this quote:

“The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas.  Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive.  In the long run, innovation is cheap.  Mediocrity is expensive – and autonomy can be the antidote.”  (Tom Kelley, General Manager IDEO).

Kelley is an innovation guru, and his firm, IDEO, is an innovation factory.  They are hired to come up with designs for products.  So, everything has to be new.

But think about what he wrote.  Innovation is cheap, because breakthrough innovations provide the next product/system/approach that leads to market share and maybe market dominance.  In other words, if you want to discover what is really expensive, then fail to innovate.  If you don’t innovate; if you don’t stay ahead of the next iteration and/or breakthrough, then your success of today will disappear in a heartbeat.

It is mediocrity – the failure to innovate when you could have, and you should have – that is so very expensive.

So, whatever else leaders need to provide, this is one thing they’d best not fail it – providing an environment that truly nurtures innovation.

That’s really what Pink’s book, Drive, is all about.

Maybe Task One for Leaders: First You Look – Then You See

There are some really obvious truths.  I have oft quoted this:  “you are what you think about all day long.” The truth its obvious – what we fill our minds with creates who we are and what we do.

Well here is another obvious truth – what you see is determined by where you look and what you look at. And this oh so obvious truth has profound implications for leaders and what they accomplish.

The television show Undercover Boss would put CEO’s into everyday work situations in their own company.  They would go out in the field, work in the factory, alongside their own employees.  The employees would not know who they were. To a person, the bosses discovered all sorts of things about the work and about their employees that they did not know before.  Why?  They were looking in new places, thus they saw new things, and saw in new ways.

In the terrific Susan Scott book, Fierce Leadership, she calls on leaders to develop “squid eye.”

You need “squid eye” (squid hide among rocks that hide their presence) – you see many things that others cannot and do not see; you are an effective and efficient information gatherer…

For a person new to the task of finding and catching squid, this is a very difficult skill to master.  Squid hide very well, and you have to look in between the nooks and crannies to see the little tell-tale signs that squid are present.  She uses this metaphor to argue that a key task for every leader is to simply learn to look at people, processes, situations, much more carefully – look well enough to see what others miss.

In The Art of Innovation:  (Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm), Tom Kelley describes the practice of “observing” that IDEO follows on all projects for all clients.  I remember in one instance they were hired to design a new chair that would be more comfortable for women in the workplace.  Their design team members literally crawled around on the floor at the office, looking at ways women sat in chairs.  One discovery:  many women were using the yellow pages as foot rests, leading to new design challenges.

Here are some quotes from the book, giving us a little insight into this practice:

In many parts of your life, you go through steps so mechanically, so unconsciously…  When you’re off your own beaten path, however, you are more open to discovery:  when you travel, especially overseas; when you rent an unfamiliar car; when you try a new sport or experience a new activity.  At those times, you are more open to ask childlike “Why?” and “Why not?” questions that lead to innovation.

By studying people of all ages, shapes, cultures, and sizes we’ve learned that the best products embrace people’s differences.

You don’t just send your researchers out to do research and your designers to do design.  You send your designers with researchers to do design and vice versa.

Finding the right people (to observe) helps.

Observe real people in real life situations to find out what makes them tick…
Visualize new to the world concepts and the customers who will use them.
Innovation begins with an eye: Inspiration by observation…
Make small observations, which lead to small improvements — keep that process up continuously, and you will find yourself at the head of the pack…

And though where you look “from” matters, just actually, simply looking really matters.  In the Vaclev Havel speech I quoted on this site yesterday, delivered as he assumed the presidency of his country, he stated:

Allow me a small personal observation. When I flew recently to Bratislava, I found some time during discussions to look out of the plane window. I saw the industrial complex of Slovnaft chemical factory and the giant Petr’alka housing estate right behind it. The view was enough for me to understand that for decades our statesmen and political leaders did not look or did not want to look out of the windows of their planes. No study of statistics available to me would enable me to understand faster and better the situation in which we find ourselves.

And then he describes what he intends for his presidency:

To be a president who will not only look out of the windows of his airplane but who, first and foremost, will always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.

Here are some lessons/reminders for leaders:

1.  Actually look – at people, at processes, at products.  (Think design, and the brilliance of Steve Jobs and Apple).

2.  Look at people and products where they are actually used.  Look when people don’t know you are looking.  Simply observe.

Most of all, remember this:  First You Look – Then You See.