Creative People Must Be Stopped (29 page)

Your Innovation Resources

As we saw in Chapter Three, groups can bring unique strengths to the challenge of innovation, provided they are managed well. When groups work well, they drive productivity and efficiency by bringing more capable hands to helping perform a given task. They can be organized to perform specialized functions on a task, thereby ensuring that each part of the task gets done as expertly as possible. By breaking up the task, we can also use a group to tackle a much larger and more complex task than could be completed by an individual. But we have already seen how groups can go wrong if they let social and emotional forces overrule their information processing and retard their progress. What can you do to help optimize the performance of groups?

Intervene in Errant Groups

An important job, albeit a difficult and sometimes distasteful one, of a leader will be to intervene in groups that are clearly having problems. It can be bad enough to have one person working in wholly nonproductive ways, but having a team of six or more people do so should be completely intolerable.

One tool I use in the self-managing student teams I assign is the team contract (see Appendix B). The team contract, drafted by the team and signed by all members, outlines at a high level their goals for the project and their agreements about how they will make decisions and about how they will resolve disagreements. But it also delves into much more mundane issues where much of the potential for conflict seems to reside, such as what constitutes commitment and respectful behavior, or at what time meetings will actually start.

I want to share my experience in implementing this tool, as you may run into the same dynamic. When I assign the completion of the contract to graduate-level MBA students, they moan and groan about this “infantile and patronizing” assignment. Of course they know how to behave, of course they know the goals, of course they can work together—they are adults, after all. However, whenever I have made the assignment optional for teams, I end up with several teams lined up outside my office door ready to complain about the errant members. Of course these are the teams who have not executed a contract specifying what was reasonable behavior and what was not. With a contract, teams are able to resolve these issues themselves. In the spirit of a teachable moment I send them away, seeing as how there is nothing I can do without a contract that specified what the behavior was that was considered so egregious. In my case, this actually improves their learning. However, unless you are in the business of teaching, you will need to intervene. With a contract or other formal written agreement, at least all the team members understand the expectations at the start.

Show Them Your Box

And what about your expectations for the outcomes of the team's innovation efforts? Perhaps you are asking the team members to “think outside the box,” but do you really mean that you want them to develop a radical innovation, one that will take ten years for the company to implement, be a great risk for the company, and make you a hero or make us all unemployed? Or maybe you mean that you want a clever but safe adaptation of your current offerings that can be implemented immediately to help ease this quarter's earnings pressure?

I have discussed how being clear about your expectations will allow people to draw their own sense of the constraints around a meaningful solution. Rather than trying to keep them ignorant of the constraints in the hope that they will think of something you didn't, go ahead and tell them the actual constraints (which they probably know or suspect already anyway). Trust them to thoroughly explore the space for possible solutions and trust them enough to believe that if they run across an exciting, radical new idea, even though you asked for a small safe one, they will bring it to you for discussion. Then open your mind and see if maybe you've drawn the constraints in the wrong place.

Once you've set the expectations, start rounding up the resources that the innovation team will need. If you've asked for something radical and you have a mandate from the organization, then turn on the spigot and let the dollars and people flow. If you are aiming small, then you can afford to provide a lower level of resources. At any rate, make sure your organization provides sufficient early-stage resources for both authorized and unauthorized experiments. If there's ever a time to experiment, it's an early cheap stage. By not experimenting, you are pushing off important learning to later in the project, thus delaying your climb up the learning curve. Further, learning (especially where learning from intelligent failures is involved) is going to be much more expensive in terms of time, money, and people in later phases. Put in enough money up front to facilitate the team's significant exploration of the space of possible solutions. And then enforce your expectation that the team search it and search it hard, just as it would if members' hair were on fire.

Creative People Must Be Stopped!

There are clearly times when we need to stop creative ideas—for example, when those ideas have the potential for great harm. But there are also occasions when creative
people
must be stopped. For example, they must be stopped when they sabotage their own creativity by staying stuck in ruts of seeing and thinking. They must be stopped from fearing the consequences of standing up for their ideas, especially ideas that cut against the grain of a group's conventional mind-set. They must be stopped from wandering down paths that take them far from their organization's strategy, paths that can end only in frustration for them and for the organization. They must be stopped when they use only traditional characterizations of the markets they serve as the basis for trying to create value. They must be stopped from judging the desirability of change solely on the basis of their limited self-image and their own values. And they must be stopped when they have become so sure that they know, that they actually don't.

Although there is clearly a great deal that you can do to support, manage, and lead creativity in others by stopping them in these ways, what about your own creativity? I think the famous line from Pogo is most apt here: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” If you have problems being creative, it's not going to be because you lack the capability. We are
all
creative; you couldn't last a day on this Earth if you weren't able to solve the innumerable problems that life throws at you every day, like finding food or shelter, or getting around from place to place. Being creative is human and natural, and using it to the ends of positive change, it has power to bring joy and meaning to life. If anyone has the power to facilitate your creativity, it is you. All you need now is the will.

Appendix A

Using the Assessment Results

Working with your results from the assessments in each chapter, you can use the following steps to determine which specific constraints and which types of constraints are likely to be a significant impediment for innovation in your organization.

Which Category of Constraints Is the Primary Problem?

After completing the assessment in each chapter, write down the number of statements that you rated at each of the three rating levels, and then total the number for each constraint category in the worksheet on page 250. If you have rated more than six items in a single assessment as a 1 (“Highly Descriptive”), then working on that category of constraint is likely to be a productive effort. Once you have completed the assessments for all of the chapters, you can compare your ratings across all six constraint categories to gain insight into which of the constraints pose the greatest challenge for you.

After you have completed the assessments for all chapters and transferred the results to the worksheet, use it to identify the one category where you have the most 1's and 2's. You will use your answers there as a guide for where to focus your change efforts.

What Specific Constraints Do You Face?

As you may have already noticed, each assessment consists of several sets of statements that correspond to the constraint categories discussed in that chapter. For example, Chapter Two, on individual constraints, describes three categories of constraints: Perception, Intellection, and Expression. The assessment for each of these categories has two statements describing the specific symptoms of a constraint in that category. Continuing with the example of Chapter Two, the first two statements in the Perception category describe symptoms you're likely to see when
selective perception and stereotyping
is a constraint. The next two statements describe
limiting the universe of “relevant” data
, and so on. This pattern repeats for each of the specific constraints.

At this point you have identified those specific constraints that may be present for you, and you can now develop a strategy for action. You may wish to turn back and reread the description of the constraint and the specific strategies for addressing it in the relevant chapter of the book. You may also find that strategies are obvious given the description of the symptom.

Using Teams in the Assessment Process

If you work as a member of a team or group in your organization, you can use the innovation constraints framework to facilitate a productive session to identify and remedy the innovation constraints in your group and organizational environment. Although the process of identifying constraints is not difficult, differences in people's intuitive definitions of innovation or creativity can quickly derail the conversation in a group. To prevent this problem, you can use the following procedure to manage the process of identifying constraints. This is the first step toward developing a strategy for addressing them. Having more people involved in the diagnosis will lead to deeper investment in the solutions and thus lead to a more effective change.

Working one chapter at a time, start by having each member of the team complete the assessment for that chapter. This should be done individually and without discussion, ideally before the team members meet face-to-face. It is critical to have them work independently to preserve the differences of perception and interpretation that members will have as they make their assessments.

Next, have the team meet to compare ratings. Be sure to meet in a place where you can use a flip chart or whiteboard; this aids communication and encourages all individuals to participate in the discussion. Start by recording each member's rating for
each
item on the assessment on the chart. Then begin an orderly discussion about each item, with the goal of developing a team consensus rating for that item. Give special attention to those items where members' ratings differ significantly from one another. Try to find out why the ratings differ: Is it because members interpret the question differently, because they have differing perspectives depending on where they sit in the organization, or because they differ in their perception of the relative impact of the restraint? Each of these potential differences is worthy of discussion. Gaining an understanding of these issues will be instructive to the team and will build commitment to the team's conclusions about the need for change.

Finally, the team should now try to reach a consensus on the top three constraints that have been discussed in the meeting. Write each of these three on the flip chart along with a specific example of how each one is most commonly manifested in the organization. Now talk about the strategies you can employ to overcome these constraints. Although this book presents a large number of tested strategies that you can use, do not overlook the wisdom of team members who may have experience or contextual knowledge that can impact the potential success of a particular course of action. As you consider the possible strategies, be sure to engage the question of the kind of commitment that each possible approach may require from members of the team or from the organization as a whole. You may wish to review Chapter Eight, which discusses many of issues that are involved with successfully leading innovation in a team and organizational context.

Appendix B

Innovation Team Contract Guidelines

To create an environment conducive to the success of your team, you can create a team contract using the following process. Complete each of the following steps to help the team conduct an open and honest conversation about the mission, goals, norms, behaviors, and expectations that you will hold for yourself and each other during the course of the team's life. It is important to perform this early in the life of the project because you can hold members accountable only for expectations or responsibilities that were agreed on and clearly communicated.

Before Your First Meeting

• Schedule a one-hour team meeting that
  all
  members can attend.
  
• Select a space where the team will not be interrupted and that has a whiteboard or standing easel to facilitate note taking and open sharing. Also have a pad of large Post-it notes and a Sharpie marker for each person in attendance.
  

During the Meeting

• Start by quickly reviewing the agenda and designating a timekeeper and a facilitator for this process.
  
• Start with a ten-minute discussion of the types of items that might be included on a contract. These items might include ground rules for conducting discussions, time commitments to the team, online communication rules and standards, how decisions will be made, and more.
  
• Next, spend ten minutes allowing each and every member to have balanced input. To resist the urge to have one person write the contract for others to vote on, have each member write down her ideas of what needs to be included on her Post-it notes. Make sure all members write at least a few and that they do so in large print.
  
• Collect the Post-its and position them on the board or easel so that all members can clearly see all of the suggestions.
  
• Spend fifteen minutes prioritizing, clumping, removing, or adding ideas. With each idea, make sure to discuss the ramification of including it, or not including it, in the team contract. Ensure that everyone participates substantively and has a chance to offer ideas.
  
• Spend ten minutes discussing how to incorporate the important issues into the contract.
  
• Next, spend ten minutes pulling together a rough draft of the final agreements that you have reached. At a minimum, make sure there are provisions for attendance at meetings, for participation in discussion, and for addressing violations of established rules.
  
• Now, have all members sign the contract draft document (
  literally
  sign it!).
  
• Assign one member to type up the document and circulate it to all members for approval.
  

After the Meeting

• Bring a personal copy to all team meetings, and plan to revisit the contract at major phase changes in the life of the project or when new members enter the team.