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Creating a Climate for Innovation
"The business enterprise has two, and only two, basic functions:
marketing and innovation. It is not necessary for a business to
grow bigger; but it is necessary that it constantly grow better." --
Peter Drucker
An enterprise that does not innovate will not survive long. Management
that does not innovate and foster creativity will not last long.
Businesses and organizations have to be designed for change as
the norm. They must create change rather than react to it.
Innovation is the means by which the entrepreneur
creates new wealth-producing resources. It also enables existing
resources to have enhanced potential for creating wealth. Innovation
is the effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise's
economic or social potential.
Some innovations come in a flash of genius, but most result from
a conscious and purposeful search for opportunities. Above all,
innovation is work rather than genius. It requires knowledge, ingenuity
and focus . Without diligence, persistence and commitment, all
the talent, ingenuity and knowledge are to no avail.
In order to innovate, there must be
a fertile atmosphere of creativity. Unleashing creativity requires
more than brainstorming sessions. It
is more than problem solving. People have ideas all the time.
The real question is, “Which
ideas are you going to use?”
Few workplaces actually encourage creativity.
Management inadvertently stifles it with procedures and the status
quo necessary for stability and performance. Individuals stifle
it internally through their own voice of judgment.
Negativity, judgment and fear are the enemies
of creativity. To the extent these exist in the work environment,
there can be little creativity. In business, it isn't enough for
an idea to be original; it must also be applicable to creating
greater economic growth . It must improve a product or service
in some way. Ideas can come from anybody, anytime, and anywhere
within the organization.
Enhancing Creativity
People will be most creative when they feel
motivated by the work itself. When people are engaged because of
their own natural interest and satisfaction in their work, they
will be challenged to be creative through their own intrinsic motivation.
External pressures or rewards are never as effective as internal
motivation. In order to tap into that resource, people must be
matched to jobs that tap into underlying values that motivate and
excite them.
In addition to intrinsic motivation, two other components are
necessary within an individual for creative resourcefulness, according
to Theresa Amabile.
1. Expertise: a
person must have the necessary technical, procedural and intellectual
knowledge.
2. Creative-thinking skills: a
person must be able to use their thinking in flexible and imaginative
ways.
Trying to develop someone's expertise and creative-thinking skills
can be time-consuming. It is far easier to enhance and tap into
someone's internal motivation .
Amabile writes about six managerial practices
that enhance creativity. These categories emerged from more than
two decades of research that focused on the links between environment
and creativity.
| 1 |
Challenge:
Matching the right person with the right job in order to play
into their expertise and creative thinking skills . This can
ignite the intrinsic motivation that is the key to unleashing
creative potential. Making a good match requires the manager
to have access to important information about employees and
their preferences . This may mean using information available
through assessments such as DISC, PIAV, Meyers-Briggs or any
other instruments that indicate values and preferences. This
also requires good listening and observing. People express
what interests them and excites them all the time; are you
listening? |
| 2 |
Freedom:
Intrinsic motivation and ownership
is enhanced when people are free to approach their work the
way they choose . They may not choose the mountain, but at
least let them decide how they will climb it. Managers tend
to mismanage freedom by changing goals frequently or failing
to define them clearly. Worse, they grant freedom in name only,
declaring employeess to be “empowered” and
then they delineate the process to be followed and give penalties
for divergence. |
| 3 |
Resources: Time and
money can either support or kill creativity. Some time pressures
can heighten creativity . Organizations routinely kill creativity
with fake deadlines or impossibly tight ones. This creates
distrust, or burnout. Creativity takes time. Incubation periods
have to be scheduled in. Project resources that are too limited
can push people to use their creativity to finding additional
resources, rather than actually developing new products or
services. |
| 4 |
Work-Group
Features: Managers must create teams with a diversity of
perspectives and backgrounds . When people come together
with diverse intellectual foundations and approaches to work,
ideas often combine in exciting and useful ways.
Managers often make the mistake of putting similar people
together . This may seem desirable because the people see
eye to eye and get along, thus making decisions quicker.
Their very homogeneity, however, does little to enhance expertise
and creative thinking. |
| 5 |
Supervisory
Encouragement: Managers neglect to praise creative successes
and unsuccessful efforts and thereby inadvertently contribute
to stifle creativity. To sustain passion, people need to
feel their work matters and is important. A certain tolerance
is required for mistakes and failures so that they can be
used creatively.
Managers often look for reasons not to use a new idea. Research
shows that an interesting psychological dynamic underlies
this phenomenon. People believe that their bosses will perceive
them as smarter if they demonstrate critical, analytical
thinking.
This creates a bias that has severe consequences for the
creative process . Such a culture of evaluation leads people
to focus on external rewards and punishments instead of on
being creative. It creates a climate of fear that undermines
intrinsic motivation. |
| 6 |
Organizational Support:
Creativity is truly enhanced when the entire organization supports
it . This is the job of the leaders of the organization who
must put into place appropriate systems and procedures that
emphasize that creative efforts are a top priority. Leaders
can support creativity by ensuring that information sharing
and collaboration is the norm . Political problems and gossip
take people's attention away from work. That sense of mutual
purpose and excitement that is so central to tapping into the
power of intrinsic motivation must be encouraged and supported.
It can be killed by cliques and political factions. |
"Foremost among life's teaching is the recognition that humans
possess the capability to deal with complexity and interconnection.
Human creativity and commitment are our greatest resources."
-- Margaret Wheatley
Meaning is the Key to Engaging Creativity
Whenever someone has a burst of creativity, it is because they've
spent time thinking over some problem or situation that has meaning
for them. They have become immersed and totally engaged. If we
want people to be innovative, we must discover what is important
to them, and we must engage them in meaningful issues.
Robert E. Knowling, Jr. says there are three best practices for
leading innovation:
1. Leaders need to deliver a clear and
compelling vision and strategy to the organization
2. It is Important for the leader to live the vision and strategy
and to be the teacher of the process
3. Leaders must ensure that the metrics used focus people on what
is most important
Michael Ray is a Stanford professor who has led some of Silicon
Valley 's most creative entrepreneurs through his class “Personal
Creativity in Business” for the past 21 years. Underlying
his teaching on creativity is a search for two fundamental questions:
• Who is my self?
• What is my work?
Ray says you can't know what or how
you want to create until you know who you are and what you hope
to do with your life. He believes
that creativity exists within everyone, and that when people
can't tap into their creativity it's because of an internal “voice
of judgment” which is often heavily influenced by society,
employers and parents.
Negativity is the true enemy of creativity.
Negative self-judgment is compounded when new ideas in the workplace
are systematically criticized. There is often a belief in the workplace
that having a sharp critical eye is preferred by managers and leaders.
Such a negative bias can kill creativity.
According to Ray, there are five qualities of creativity:
1. Intuition
2. Will
3. Joy
4. Strength
5. Compassion
Those qualities are drawn out of people by four tools:
1. Faith in your own creativity
2. Absence of judgment
3. Precise observation
4. Penetrating questions
"Everything in the world already exists; whatever seems new
is only something old rearranged." -- Max de Pree
The paradox of success is that when things
are going well there's no need to change. Innovation needs to begin
before a need is felt. Customer or client complaints when viewed
objectively and not defensively can point to areas where change
is needed.
Cognitive psychologists have shown that the biggest hurdle to
solving problems often isn't ignorance - it's access to the right
information at the right time. Information sharing within big organizations
is not easy due to geographic distances, political squabbles, internal
competition and bad incentive systems that hinder the spread of
ideas.
Taking the Mystery Out of Innovation
Using old ideas as raw materials for new ideas lets companies
innovate continuously. However, the key is to systematize the constant
generation and testing of fresh ideas. In order to foster innovation,
Andrew Hargadon and Robert Sutton (HBR, May-June 2000) advocate
four steps:
• Capturing good ideas
• Keep ideas alive and accessible
• Imagine new uses for old
ideas
• Putting promising concepts
to the test
"Social innovation and not technical innovation drives most
successful companies." -- Jim Collins
Seven Sources of New Ideas
According to Peter Drucker, four areas of opportunity for innovation
exist within a company or industry:
1. Unexpected occurrences
2. Incongruities
3. Process needs
4. ndustry and market changes
Three others exist outside a company in its social and intellectual
environment:
5. Demographic changes
6. Changes in perception
7. New knowledge
"Innovation is the way two ideas are brought together to
generate something greater than its sum." -- Robert E. Knowling,
Jr.
Business leaders must change how they think about innovation.
They must change how their company cultures reflect that thinking.
If people are given opportunities, innovation can be bolstered
anywhere if people are encouraged to use good ideas from all sources
inside or outside the company. Innovation and creativity are far
less mysterious than previously thought. They are a matter of taking
developed ideas and applying them in new situations. If the company
has the right connections and the right attitude, it works.
Creating an Idea Factory: Lessons from Edison
Perhaps the greatest creation of Thomas
Edison may have been his invention factory. His
Menlo Park , New Jersey , laboratory was the world's first R&D facility.
He built it for the “rapid
and cheap development of an invention” and delivered on his
promise of “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing
every six months or so.” In six years of operation, it generated
more than 400 patents.
Rather than focusing on one invention, one field of expertise,
or one market, Edison created a setting that enabled his inventors
to move easily in and out of separate pools of knowledge, to keep
learning new ideas and to use old ideas in novel situations.
They used old ideas and materials in new
ways. The phonograph blended elements from past work on telegraphs,
telephones, and electric motors.
In 1820, H.C. Oersted, a Dane, discovered
that a wire carrying an electric current was surrounded by a magnetic
field. In 1825, W. Strugeon, an Englishman, wound a live wire around
an iron bar and created an electromagnet. In 1859, H. van Helmholtz,
a German, discovered he could make piano strings vibrate by singing
to them. Later L. Scott, a Frenchman, attached a thin stick to
a membrane; when he spoke to the membrane, the other end of the
stick would trace a record of his voice sounds on a piece of smoked
glass. Then, in 1874, a Scotsman from Canada , working in Cambridge
MA , put these elements into one instrument. The instrument was
the telephone and the man was Alexander Graham Bell. The only thing
Bell contributed was a fresh synthesis; there was no new discovery.
An example of a modern invention factory
is IDEO. IDEO has developed thousands of products with companies
in dissimilar fields such as medical instruments, furniture, toys
and computers. IDEO fosters an atmosphere conducive to freely expressing
ideas, breaking the rules and freeing people to design their own
work environments.
In innovation there is talent, there is ingenuity,
and there is knowledge. But in the end, innovation requires hard,
focused and purposeful work. If diligence, persistence and commitment
are lacking, then no amount of talent, ingenuity or knowledge will
produce results.
(Resource: Hargadon, Andrew and Robert I. Sutton; Building an
Innovation Factory, Harvard Business Review, May-June 2000)
Working
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Dr. Maynard Brusman
Consulting Psychologist and Executive Coach
Trusted Advisor to Senior Leadership Teams
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