Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

Two words.  Robert De niro

In one corner you’ve got the raging bull – Jake LaMotta in a 3-piece suit.  In the other, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle – a quiet, simmering time bomb draped in a casual Friday Polo shirt.  And in the middle, a lot of corporate chameleons not sure what color to change.

Most of us wish for a harmonious, up-with-people kind of workplace. Conversation, not  annihilation. 

But according to business consultancy eePulse, “the problem is that a peaceful, harmonious  workplace can be the worst possible thing.”

Saj-nicole A. Joni and Damon Beyer, have written a provocative article in the Harvard Business Review on how leaders can create the kind of conflict that sparks creativity and innovation.

“Most leadership experts argue that the best way to manage change is to create alignment, but our research indicates that for large-scale change or innovation initiatives, a healthy dose of dissent is just as important. Within an acceptable range of competition and tension, science shows, dissent will fire up more of an individuals brain, stimulating more pathways and engaging more creative centers. “

This is not a comfort zone solution for most companies. It’s counter-intuitive.  And it just may actually work. 

I have worked for companies ranging Fortune 500 companies to two-person startups, and I’ve watched how people interact when tensions mount.  It’s like watching an Olympic skater fall in the medal round.  There’s a collective wince in the room.

The problem is that most arguments are not about ideas – they are about ego.  The argument becomes internalized and personalized.  Essentially, love me, love my ideas.

I believe that there are two general types of tension -- dynamic Iwhich improves performance] and disruptive [which decreases performance].  But where's the sweet spot?  While I typically like a grass roots or a bottom up approach -- this has to start with leaders.  They set the tone and they need the training. This is where outsourced consultants are ideal.  They don't have a bias (except for the profit). 

Here's one extreme story:

When I worked at a large advertising agency in California, the creative director got up in the middle of a client meeting and said to senior client, “I will tolerate just about anything but you sir are a jerk. You are behaving like a jerk and treating my team with disrespect.  So, I am leaving.”

Two things happened. We eventually lost the account. But surprisingly, the client behaved like a gentleman from that time on. It may have been the first time anyone had challenged him in front of his staff. 

The core of Joni and Beyer's thesis is that there's a sweet spot between illusory harmony and downright Gordon Gecko nastiness. 

So what’s the right way to “fight?”

According to Joni and Beyer, there are some smart rules of engagement.

To determine how well a battle is being fought, ask yourself:

Rulebook

Are there clear boundaries for conduct and behavior?

Are people with dissenting points of view encouraged to speak up?

Are mechanisms I place to keep the debate on a professional level?

(One technique I’ve use in my Inotivity Seminars to diffuse and reuse anger is to have people switch sides and promote or defend the other person’s idea or perspective.)

Referees

Is the leader neutral or genuinely open to differing points of view?

Does the leader keep the debate on track and enforce the rules?

Does the leader create the sense that competition us fact based and fair?

Playing Field

Does each side of the debate have realistic chance to win?

Is it clear how a resolution will be reached – by a decision from the top, a major vote or consensus?

Gaps to Exploit

Do different groups have different agendas based on their roles?

Does each group have a specific objective to champion?

Relationships

 Is there trust that individuals will deliver on their commitments and behave with integrity?

Will leaders throughout the organization test perspectives up and down the hierarchy?

Energy Levels

Are tension levels high enough to promote optimum performance?

Do leaders have good sense of what people care about, and are those passions used to motivate performance?

Outcomes

Can the leader give people bad news without damaging personal relationships?

Is there dignity in losing an is risk taking rewarded?

The late Phil Dusenberry (Former Chairman of the ad agency BBDO North America) believed that one good insight is worth a thousand ideas.

Under his stewardship, BBDO developed successful campaign like GE's "We bring good things to life" and Pepsi's "The Choice of a New Generation."

His book, Then We Set His Hair On Fire was a book about insights in business  -- how you get them, how you recognize them, how we keep them coming. "Ideas, valuable as they may be are a dime-a-dozen in business. That is certainly the case in ad agencies where ideas (not all of them good) are the currency of the realm and even the mail people spit out ideas as if they were candy from a PEZ dispenser...a good insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand commercials. More than anything else, an insight states a truth that alters how you see the world."

What are the insights that have moved your world?  What's your insight resume look like?  Take this simple 10-step questionnaire and see if you unearth your own insights? Have you put them to work for you or others?  Are they still valid?  Have they moved from insight to wisdom?

Thanks Phil.

1.  What is the fist insight you remember?

2. What is your best insight?

3. What made it great?

4. What was the problem that was solved?

5.  Can you connect the dots that led to this insight?

6.  What is your second best insight?

7.  Again why?  What did it solve?

8.  What is your dumbest insight?  Why?

9. When all else fails, to whom or what do you turn for inspiration?

10.  What is your ideal creative activity?

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

                                                                                    Carl Jung

Tension. Friction. Conflict. All words that are the usual suspects when defining an unpleasant workplace. 

But they are also words that are catalysts for creativity. Scott Peck did a lot of pioneering work on civility, community and the health of organizations.

“The point of health is not so much the absence of disease as it is the presence of an optimal healing process is crucial for understanding our lives.  It is crucial because the principle applies not only to our physical health but our mental health and to the health of our organizations. 

A healthy organization –whether a marriage, family, or a business corporation – is not one with an absence of problems, but one that is actively and effectively addressing or healing its problems.”

The greatest cause of organizational disease and incivility arises out of the attempts of top executives to escape tension, friction, and conflict that arise out of the human factor.  Peck adds, “They forget that it is their job to face tensions head on.  From this point of view the single greatest cause of business failure is the failure of the business living in the tension."

So Jung's thesis "neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering" applies beyond the individual to the organization.

I have worked for both healthy and unhealthy organizations.  The key difference is how they handled and managed conflict.  Conflict is an inescapable part of life and it not inherently uncivil.  The core of civility is openly deal with conflict in our organizational lives through respectful discussion and clarification.  “Conflict, says Peck, “is uncivil when it is hidden or is disrespectfully blown out of all proportion.”

As always, civility begins at the top.  Some CEOs and owners are good leaders – setting the tone for civility and healthy management of problems. Others just flame the fires by either instigating or avoiding conflicts. 

So where does creativity come in?

It begins with a simple question, “what is wanted, wished or desired?’  If you desire a conflict-free workplace, then you may be experiencing the La Mancha Effect – forever tilting at windmills.

But if you wish that there more effective systems or solutions for dealing with conflict or tensions, you’ve built a foundation for healthy change.  Does your company have management training on collaboration or conflict resolution?  How are conflicts resolved?  

John Maxwell has a wonderful 3-point guide to thinking about change:

“As you prepare to present new ideas to people, keep in mind that they are willing to embrace change when they:

• Hurt enough that they are willing to change

• Learn enough that they want to change

• Receive enough that they are able to change

If you’re not in management, you need to discover whether or not you “hurt” enough to begin the change process. (This definitely takes into account the current economic crisis and your primary need to take care of your basic needs and the needs of your family.)

The summing up:  I do not think individuals know how empowered they can be when they become a team.  A manager may not listen to one or even two people.  But if 25 people show up at his or her door, then you’ve got collective leverage – especially when you aren’t the problem, but are part of the solution.

This year, don’t be still. Be creative.

Resources:

If you’re in management, I recommend you read Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There http://www.amazon.com/What-Got-Here-Wont-There/dp/1401301304 and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. http://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Lencioni/dp/0787960756

I am a serious collaboration junkie. 

Unfortunately, not all collaborations are created equal. Often the value of the collaboration is undermined by the time expended, the loss of focus on core projects and the sometimes deleterious effects on interpersonal relationships within an organization.

So there’s a Catch-22 of overselling collaboration as a positive solution to innovation and business growth. 

In my experience, many collaborative efforts are short circuited by lack of relevant training. Often, experts in various areas of a business, haven't had the time to work on collaborative skills.  I have witnessed this myself in organizations where a task force is created and personal agendas, not group goals guide the meetings.

That’s why I was pleased to come across Morten Hansen, a professor at the University of California.  Hansen was a professor at Harvard Business School and at INSEAD, France, where he retains a part-time role. He holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

In his recent book, Collaboration, he takes aim at what many leaders inherently know: in today's competitive environment, company-wide collaboration is an imperative for successful strategy execution, yet the sought-after synergies are rarely, if ever, realized.

Conventional wisdom is that the benefits of collaboration are significant.  But according to Hansen, this wisdom is based on the assumption that the more employees collaborate, the better off the company will be. 

“I’ve seen it happen many times during my 15 years of research in this area.  In one instance, Martine Hass, of Wharton and I studied more than 100 experienced sales teams at a large IT consulting firm.  Facing fierce competition from such rivals as IBM and Accenture for contacts that might be worth $50 million or more, teams putting together sales proposals would often seek advice from other teams with expertise in, say a technology being implemented by the prospective client.

Our research yielded a surprising conclusion about this seemingly sensible practice. The greater the collaboration (measured by hours of help a team received) the worse the result (measured by success in winning contracts.) We ultimately determined that experienced teams didn’t learn as much from their peers as they thought they did.  And whatever marginal knowledge they did was often outweighed by the time taken away from their work on the proposal.”

Hansen says that the problem wasn’t collaboration per se, rather the problem was determining when it makes sense and, crucially when it doesn’t. “Too often a business leader asks, how can we get people to collaborate more? That’s the wrong question. It should be, will collaboration on this project create or destroy value?”

To distinguish between effective and ineffective collaboration, Hansen recommends estimating the factors below.

Return: What cash flow would this collaboration generate if executed well?

Opportunity costs.  What cash flow would we pass up by investing in this project instead of a non-collaborative one?

Collaboration costs.  What cash flow would we lose owing to problems associated with cross-unit work? 

Would the return exceed the combined costs of opportunity and collaboration costs? Initiate a collaboration project only if the answer is yes.

Hansen’s insights are the inevitable thermostat effect – the balancing effect of an idea (collaboration) that can sometimes be counterproductive in a variety of situations.

There are so many positive stories of successful collaborations, so Hansen’s book is good cautionary advice.  It’s a reminder that collaboration has to be managed and evaluated as well and as purposely as other areas of an organization.

Thanks to the Harvard Business Review (April 2009) and Morten Hansen for quotable material.

"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”   T.S. Eliot

Aha. Eureka. Epiphany.

All words that probably have their chemical basis in a dopamine reward pathway.  

But the magic of the aha (or Ah Ha) moment is more alluring than the clinical. I have always had a passion for aha moments. One of joys of being a creative consultant is watching others experiencing these moments of a novel connection or flash of insight.

I often ask people in our seminars to write about their aha moments. Which ones still linger? How do they motivate you today?  What feels universal? What feels uniquely personal? Did you explore the aha moment for other ideas?

This blog is mostly about Scott Peck's aha moment as a young psychiatrist in the military.  But it's also about how to be more creative with your (and others) aha moments.

1.  Write down as many personal "aha"  moments as you can.  Pick one that resonates for you now.

2.  Write about the connections or catalysts that led to that moment or the situation where you had the experience.

3.  What new ideas might come from that aha experience? What other ideas can you evolve from that insight?  Write down as many as you can.

4.  Keep an "aha" notebook -- each page an aha and a list of ideas derived from it.

5.  Check out Mutual of Omaha's Aha Page http://www.ahamoment.com/

My aha moment comes form a story from A World Waiting to be Born, Peck's book on Civility. It's from a long passage entitled "The Hole in the Mind."

What follows is a condensed version of the story.  Peck, the late author of the Road Less Traveled, became the Director of the U.S. Army Medical Center in Okinawa in the late 1960s. The newly-minted psychiatrist had to fulfill his military service and his first assignment was to manage a department of 40  –  mostly enlisted men and women in their late teens and early twenties. 

Until that time, he had no formal training in management. In Peck's words,  “I had no idea how to define consensus, but I was going to strive for it. Certainly my model was a highly consultive one.  Not only did I never make an administrative decision without  consulting everyone involved; I did my very best to see that within the constraints of professional competence, the people under me made their own decisions whenever possible about the matters that affected their own lives.

Everybody spoke glowingly of what a good leader I was and how relieved they were to be free of that stupid old lieutenant colonel, their previous commander.The department morale was superb.

After just about six months, things began to go sour. The euphoria was gone. The staff stopped talking about what a great place it was to work.  By the ninth month mark, it began to get worse.  The bickering had escalated and the work was beginning to suffer. Little things were being left undone. 

A major new outpatient medical complex was in the final stages of construction and the hospital commander told me that the clinic, the largest of our department would move there. Surely, the morale would improve at the prospect of such a pleasant move.

Only it didn’t.  It got worse. As moving day approached the entire staff grew even more irritable.  They began to squabble with each other over who would get what office in the new building.

I announced to the staff that we were going to meet over in the new conference room for the entirety of the next morning.  The two 4-hour meetings we had were two of the stormiest I have ever attended,  Everyone had something to complain about.   It was unrelieved chaos.   But towards the second morning one of the enlisted men said “I feel I don’t know where I stand.”  The young man’s words reverberated through my mind. 

We returned to the old building and I sat in my office staring at the ceiling. Was it possible that the department needed more structure than I had provided it? What did they want me to do – boss them around like a bunch of children?

I called the noncommissioned officer in charge of the department and asked him to bring the plans for the new building. I pointed to the large corner office, “That will be mine,” I announced.  Then intermittently pausing just long enough for him to write each assignment, I proceeded along the blueprint through the smaller offices. We’ll put Captain Ames here, you here, Sergeant Ryan there..etc.

You could practically here the howls of dismay across the island but by evening morale had become to improve. The next day I watched it escalate. By the end of the week it was back to  where it had been at its best.:

You could think of it as a success story. I did eventually acknowledge that there was a problem and it was my responsibility. I was able to readjust my behavior to meet the needs of the organization."

The aha moment was his insight into what is often called contingency theory.

Or simply; a class of behavioral theory that claims that there is no best way to organize acorporation, to lead a company, or to make decisions. An organizational / leadership / decision making style that is effective in some situations, may be not successful in other situations. 

Okay, this is not going to send shivers up everyone's spine. But for me, the idea that a open, collaborative and nurturing managerial style would not be effective or rather would be detremental in an organization was a huge aha.  

It would not be an aha moment for parents who know that stucture and boundries ususally provide a saftey zone of behavior for kids.  It would not be an aha moment for seasoned managers or athletic coaches who have to manage and motivate with the talent they have.

Peck's theis was part of a larger story of civility -- that true civility requires consciousness of the self, conciousness of another person, and consciousness of the larger context of an organization.

Or more directly stated, his aha in Okinawa led to his belief that the challenge of civility is the poverty of our consciousness of larger organizations and systems.

Creativity, to me, is both personal and collective. We often neglect the collective part because it is often seen as the opposite of freedom. It feels Orwellian to consider creativity as a group consideration. But seeing it through multiple filters (personal, interpersonal and larger organizations) is when you up the ante.

My aha moment was that my similiar "democratic" style of management wouldn't work in some organizations.  And that's okay. The paradox of the aha is that I now have the conscious freedom to choose to work with organizations that I believe would thrive with a collaborative mindset. 

So, celebrate your personal aha moments.  But think about the larger possibilities within an organization. That's when the dopamine gives you double the buzz.

Ten years ago, I discovered a gem of book.  It's called Sketchbook with Voices.  It was a collaboration of Eric Fischl and Jerry Saltz.  The premise was to ask a variety of artists "What's the best assignment you can give an art student?"  The result is a book that invites you to play with ideas right on the page and beyond.

Over the years, I have added to the book, creating my own assignments and inspirations for artists, writers and creative thinkers.  (SV is Fischl and Saltz's questions and CC are mine.) The questions are provocative, whimsical, non-linear, and some tap into emotional experiences as a source of ideas.

So, I invite you to fill your head with some of these voices and then listen to your own.  

Hold an object behind your back and recreate it drawing with your other hand.  SV

Do your own work but use someone else's clothes. SV

Make a work (drawing or painting) and then immediately create work that satirizes it.  SV

Paint faster than you can think.  SV

Read a passage from  T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and make a picture from it.  SV

Choose a spot and put an X on the ground.  For the next few weeks, take a photograph every day of only those things you can see while you are touching that X.  SV

Close your eyes and touch a person's face (yes, get permission first)  -- feel that face and without looking draw that face from tactile memory.  CC

Draw a piece of fruit on paper and then cut the drawing up and rearrange it on the page in any form you wish.  CC

Find an object to draw and imagine you are infatuated with it. Then, draw the same object as if it repels you. Then, do the same assignment with words.  CC

Take a package of clothes pins (any kind) and create three sculptures from it.  CC

Enjoy.

P.S. Please feel free to share your results by sending a JPEG to inotivity@gmail.com

Perhaps we have a hernia to thank. 

In 1942, Eric Hoffer attempted to enlist in the armed forces in San Francisco was rejected because of a hernia. A former migratory worker and longshoreman, Hoffer received laudatory notices in 1951 for his book The True Believer.  .

Of his early life, Hoffer has written: “I had no schooling. I was practically blind up to the age of fifteen. When my eyesight came back, I was seized with an enormous hunger for the printed word. I read indiscriminately everything within reach—English and German.”

Occupying a prized position on my desk is his book “The Passionate State of Mind.” It is a  collection of 280 aphorisms – ideas and insights on everything from passion to the art of living.

# 58 is one of my favorites. “Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we don’t want to know.  One often obtains a clue to person’s nature by discovering the reasons for his or her imperviousness to certain impressions.” 

At my Inotivity Seminars, I often ask the question “What don’t you want to know? Or what does your company not want to know?”

Nell Merlino, Founder, President and CEO of Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence, recently talked at BIF5 (Collaborative Innovation Summit) in Providence and talked about some of the barriers women face in growing their business “Some women believe that if they pay attention to numbers, their dreams will die.”

What didn’t they want to know? They didn’t want to know that the effort and motivation they were investing in a dream wasn’t paying off. (Merlino added that the opposite is actually true.)

It is a great question to inspire creativity and deeper thinking.  There are always easier questions to ask.   What do you know? What don’t you know or need to know?  But what don’t you want to know?  Or what are you avoiding or clouding or ignoring may be a strong key to solving your biggest challenge.

Here is an example in a larger organization.  The answer to What don’t we want to know may be “our business model or product” may be obsolete.  (Think the brick and mortar DVD or music store vs. broadband downloads and streaming).  But that very question could be the catalyst to transforming your model or finding new ways to deliver value.  That’s where an innovation initiative is critical. 

So 58 it once in a while.  Check out Hoffer’s The Passionate Mind for more.