The Right Environment for Creativity

We talked about Observations and Insights & Framing of the Clarify phase of Design Thinking. Let's wrap it up with a discussion about the right environment for creativity!

The Operational and Innovation Worlds

Let's:

• Describe the difference between the operational and innovation worlds
• Reflect on the innovation environment at your organization

Some words come up frequently in discussions of the ideal environment for innovation: safe, flexible, playful, experimental, and collaborative. These characteristics are broadly accepted, but they are difficult to implement.

In the Conference Board's 2020 survey of global CEOs and C-suite executives, for example, "create a more innovative culture" was the third highest internal hot button issue. And the other top issues were related: recruiting top talent, staying ahead of disruption, and developing leaders for the next generation.

Even in organizations that rate their work in innovation highly, there is a sense they could be doing more. Why is there a perception that innovation goals are still not being met? One reason is the tension between the operational and the innovation worlds.

Every business faces pressure to improve performance through operations, but the metrics for increasing efficiency and production aren't a good fit for big picture innovation. While it is important to have goals and structure for innovation, the end result cannot only be measured according to the number of ideas a team produces or how many prototypes it creates. Ultimately, it's about results. Has the project resulted in a desirable, marketable innovation?

The two worlds also have different methods for achieving their goals. Results in the operational world come from following rules, having routines, using rational procedures like total quality management, and well-crafted decision-making processes. These tools of management that work so well in the operational world are not effective in the innovation world.

Any chance of success in the innovation world requires the team to be curious, willing to speculate, connect different dots, allow the development of half-baked ideas, and be willing to experiment.

While managers want curiosity in the operational world as well, they want it to a much lesser degree, and it's more likely to be punished than rewarded, in some situations.

Innovation can appear to be an amorphous, open-ended exploration rather than the running of an efficient machine. By the same token, the management tools and processes of the innovation world are not always appropriate for the operational world, where things need to function like clockwork.

We can refer to these two skills as exploitation in the operation world and exploration in the innovation world. To be successful, managers and organizations need to be ambidextrous. The result of the exploration and creativity in the innovation world will be implemented in the operational world, but they are separate environments. Keeping this in mind will help managers create environments for innovation that are closer to the ideal described above: teams that can explore ideas and take risks without fear of reprisal.

Creative teams must occasionally cycle to the innovation world to explore new ideas, conducting open-ended research and probing for insights in a structured but lower-pressure environment. It may be difficult to explain the value of this environment to someone embedded in the operational world, but it is important to sustaining innovation.

Let's meet Yoni Stern, the Senior Vice President of Business Development at Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). SIT is a management consulting organization that specializes in creativity and innovative problem-solving.

Yoni Stern explains how many organizations make the mistake of attempting to measure innovation outputs too quickly. This represents an operational viewpoint, but it is actually better to begin slowly - first by measuring how people are contributing to innovation processes, and then gradually building to more quantitative output goals.

SIT is an international, or global, consulting firm in the field of innovation. One of the problems that we find in organizations is that they declare that they're going to become more innovative, and they supply a lot of what we call the necessary conditions to make that happen. Say we're going to allow ideas to come up, we're going to allow the ideas to percolate, and we're going to have a repository where people can contribute ideas. We find that those don't work very well because they're missing the sufficient conditions for making innovation happen. Some of those sufficient conditions are giving people tools to actually innovate, like the tools we mentioned in previous articles. Oftentimes, organizations think that people can be creative if we just give them the space to be creative, and that's just unfortunately not true. Another thing is that they try to measure the progress and the results of their innovation effort way too early in the process. They declare that we're going to become innovative, and then six months later they check to see what the impact was on the bottom line of their innovation declaration. They didn't give enough time for innovation to actually stick within the organization. What we find is if you're trying to really build a culture of innovation within your organization, you have to first measure the inputs. What are we doing as an organization to help people become more innovative? Are we giving them the right platforms where they can share ideas? Are we giving them the space to come up with ideas? Are we giving them the tools to come up with ideas? Are we supporting them in some way to help them take ideas to fruition? Are we funding some of their ideas as skunk works or some other mechanism to help things come to fruition? What are our inputs right now to encourage that? And what are their inputs in exchange? Are people actually doing things actively and proactively to increase the level of innovation in the organization?

Consider the following four tensions in an innovative workplace:

• Psychological safety versus candidly critical feedback
• Collaboration versus individual accountability
• Toleration of failure versus intolerance for incompetence
• Experimentation versus discipline

Suppose you were implementing a new innovation initiative. What would be the most difficult balance for you to maintain, and why?

Brain scans show that insights release measurable bursts of gamma band brainwaves, as different regions in the brain communicate with one another. This often creates a satisfying rush of energy. The rush is fleeting, so it is crucial to take advantage of insights at the moment. Write them down, and act on them. You need to strike the right balance between reflection and action. This balance will help clarify what we mean by a relaxed environment.

Note that the yin of psychological safety, when you lower pressure and give people the freedom to explore insights and reflect on ideas, needs to be balanced with the yang of structure, and rigorous feedback and evaluation. For psychological safety to work, it must be accompanied by honest feedback. Likewise, a collaborative environment must not excuse individual accountability. A tolerance for failure must demand intolerance for incompetence. And experimentation requires rigorous discipline. Let's explore this balance further.

Supporting Collaboration and Effective Feedback

An important part of building a culture of innovation is giving and receiving feedback. People respond to feedback in ways that can be difficult to predict. Some welcome feedback and take time to reflect on it, while others may be hesitant to receive it at first. However, feedback is important to safety, honesty, collaboration, and accountability.

One of the challenges in establishing a collaborative innovation culture is overcoming the inclination to critique. According to social psychologist Dr. Heidi Grant, people naturally react to a new idea by bringing up obstacles and why it wouldn’t work.

Heidi Grant urges managers to model more productive behavior by clearly setting expectations.

• Tell your team when it is time to focus on ideas instead of obstacles, and put your own ideas out for consideration first.
• Offer thoughts instead of solutions. Even if you think you have a great solution, don’t tell someone what to do with their idea. Offer feedback on what works, and help them reach their goal as they describe it.
• Practice being honestly positive. It is important to always include some positive feedback, but false praise can undermine trust.

It is very helpful if team members also practice the skill of requesting and receiving feedback. The following are some actionable tips for doing so.

• Seek feedback on specific ideas. This will lead to a more productive conversation.
• Stay objective and don’t take feedback personally. This is some of the hardest advice to follow. It is natural to feel defensive if you receive negative feedback, especially from people you don’t know. Think of these experiences as a time to build trust. Accept the feedback as impersonal and focused on achieving the team’s goal.

The following is example feedback on early user research:

The research you did was great, and I think the explicit pain points you identified will be helpful. Your framing of the problem surprised me. I think you should focus on the earliest stage of your journey map, because the opportunities seem less promising after checkout.

It's important to establish at the beginning that different viewpoints are valued and welcome. And remember that the most productive teams are those in which everyone has a voice. Teams that are not dominated by one or two people are usually more creative and more pleasant to work on.

Clarify Wrap-Up

People who develop an insightful perspective don't have better vision, are not more determined to find a solution, don't focus harder on the problem, and are not geniuses. While there are certainly very talented thinkers out there, anyone can acquire insights through tools that force you to consider additional perspectives and guide you toward empathizing with users.

You now know several of these tools from the clarify phase of design thinking. The AEIOU framework breaks down the context of a design problem into categories, like activities, environments, and interactions. This answers the "what" of your research. Journey maps provide structure to your research, showing how individuals might move chronologically through the context you are analyzing. Look-ask-try encourages you to deeply observe how users engage with the situation. You can find this out for yourself by attempting it, or you can simply ask or observe. We also emphasized how important problem framing is to the innovation process. If you don't have the right frame, you may confine your thinking to paths that lead to short-term solutions. Experimenting with "how might we" questions can help you break free and identify more interesting approaches. These tools provide a structured approach to innovation.