Contents

Copyright

At a glance overview

1: Sense

Why change the climate?

Climate defined

Where you as a facilitator add value

The approach we recommend

Choosing change

Meet the method

Process step by step

2: Dimensions of change

Making a Challenge

Building Freedom, Trust and Openness

Supporting Ideas

Playing Dynamically

Debating without Conflict

Taking Risks

Making Time for Ideas

3: Embed the change

How was it for you?

When it all comes together: 1

When it all comes together: 2

It's all about you

and us...

Notes

Creative Climate Change

For innovation producers, facilitators and stewards

Published by Comscientia

Copyright in the text and illustrations © 2014 Keith Burnett, Zak Moore

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9930090-0-6

At a glance overview

When seeking to increase innovation, many organisations find that the surest long-term key to success is to generate a creative climate; an environment which makes room for creativity, values creative outputs, and takes these through to innovative outcomes.  This book will help you as a manager to commission change, or as a consultant to deliver change.

Part One of the book introduces the model, and a free tool for measuring the climate.  By the time you finish reading this introduction, you’ll want to use it.

Part Two offers a range of workable solutions for dimensions or aspects of the climate which could or should be better.  It can either be read in one go or dipped-into as needed; not all sections will be relevant all at once.  The results gained from using the tool will guide you to the relevant sections.

Part Three aids the user of this book to identify whether, when and how change has happened, and what further steps may be most fruitful in sustaining improvements.

The model within assumes some experience of managing change, but not too much.  If you’re a seasoned team leader, a management consultant, or a manager who has to work in the style of a facilitator, you’ll be able to follow and use this method successfully.

1: Sense

Why change the climate?

Every organisation which wishes to survive and succeed has to have an ‘edge’ – a source of competitive advantage.  From the challenges we respond to as change agents, that seems increasingly to apply as much to the not-for-profit sectors as the commercial world, (where talking about how to capitalise upon great ideas has perhaps been ‘in vogue’ a little longer).  In our experience, organisations in every sector have the potential to be creative and innovative, with the right climate.

But what makes for organisational success?  If it were just luck, we’d be in the hands of astrologers and necromancers (and such techniques are firmly beyond the scope of this book).  If it were efficient bureaucracy, then bureaucracy would be a growth industry.

The secret isn’t heroic leadership either.  True enough; leadership that tells a story to wins hearts and minds is vital to making space for change, as Kotter pointed out.[1]  But the myth of the sole leader sweeping away all impediments before them looks as unconvincing as any of Homer’s lead characters (however alluring).  In a knowledge economy, we propose that finding new ways to solve problems and create value is the core source of impetus.

Of course, we’re not the first authors to identify creativity as key to innovation, nor the first to seek to enhance it.  But we think that some of the previous approaches have sought to treat individuals as cogs in a large machine which can be refurbished.  Such attempts to audit and retrain individuals in ‘being more creative’ have not delivered enough value[2] – whether that’s return on investment, or generation of intellectual capital.  So this book focuses upon where creativity becomes innovation, which is within teams; organisations made up of individuals, finding complementary sources of idea-generation, testing and application.

The best harvest comes from the best weather, so this handbook is specifically not about training individuals to develop a new talent, and is about providing an environment in which teams (and therefore team members) can access the creative potential which they already have – and direct it to mutually profitable ends.  Anyone who has ever painted a picture, grown a flower, baked a cake, doodled in the margins, or given life to a limerick has creativity in plentiful supply; the challenge is to provide a climate where the fruits of this natural human ability do not wither on the vine.

- Change the climate because this will enable innovation and organisational success.

- The command and control metaphors and processes from the industrial era are not adequate for the knowledge era.

- You have to have the right weather/environment if you want a bumper harvest.

Climate defined

Climate is team-level culture.  You have sensed climate immediately upon entering any workplace.  You have felt climate differences between teams when you have walked around a large organisation.  You have been aware of tacit tensions in meetings between different groups.  These are all manifestations of climate.

To help you move from mindfulness to actionable metrics, this book provides an approach for measuring climate.  Using this tool, areas needing improvement can be identified, remedial actions can be designed and enduring improvements made to stick rapidly.

Culture can be defined as the set of soft factors by which the organisation operates.  There are many ways to describe the culture within an organisation.  A rather memorable approach is taken by Professor Charles Handy in his book on the ‘Gods of Management’,[3] where he invites comparison between leadership styles and ancient deities.  But of course we’re dealing with people, in teams.

Team-level climate changes are easier to achieve than whole-organisation culture change.  They are flexible, and allow for team by team tailoring.  Collectively, the changes will have a ‘bubble-up’ effect on the culture – and in our experience this is more reliable and effective than waiting for improvements to ‘trickle down’ from attempts at resetting whole institutional cultures.

By talking about organisational climate, we are also engaging in a meteorological metaphor.  The graphic below illustrates this.

The explicit, functional elements of strategy, structure and systems are in the sky section.  They are necessary for ‘business as usual’. The green elements are the  tacit, personal factors of values, leadership and culture.  The clouds depict the climate elements we measure and change as necessary.

The ‘crops’ are vital team attributes of: shared vision, common mental models, team learning and ‘personal mastery’ by team members.

In the knowledge economy it is the yield from the crops that moves from one cell to the next along the organisational value chain and finally to market.  The market is where creativity at team level is manifested as innovation – on the balance sheet.

It is often observed that large organisations are generally bureaucratically heavier and slower-moving than start-up organisations.  This is not, however, inevitable – insightful managers of FTSE-100 companies who have used this approach at team level have noticed measurable increases in start-up-type attitudes and behaviours.

The approach outlined in this book is flexible and solution-focused.[4]  It can be used with any of the planning and control processes currently in place at the organisation you’re working with.

- Climate is the team level culture you feel at work – and it is possible to measure and change it.

- Teams do not exist in a vacuum.

- The change we seek is for the overall climate to be more conducive to creativity and innovation.

Where you as a facilitator add value

A change facilitator or consultant adds value to the creative climate change process.  That can happen in the ways common to any assisted change experience; as a source of external perspective, a bringer of new technique, a sharer of insight, and as someone who ‘speaks truth unto power’ – the full range of qualities needed for ‘flawless consulting’,[5] in short.

In the process outlined in this book there are also a number of specific value-adding roles.  Facilitators can and should be a source of expertise, advice and support as regards choosing what size or definition of team/department to work with and, following measurement, the design of any change initiative to be carried out by and with the team.

Consultants often have a vital role to play in connecting leaders and participants too. That can include coaching/mentoring ‘in-flow’[6] during innovation exercises and ‘above-flow’ in enabling leaders to ensure that newly-released creative energies are channelled well and continue to flow.

The facilitator also, crucially, contextualises the theory so that it helps to create change without ‘staging a coup’ and taking over altogether.  As Csikszentmihalyi points out, the point at which so many behavioural models fail is when application goes beyond acting ‘as if’ a theory applied, to a belief that ‘nothing but’ a mechanistic process is under way.[7]  So keep it real.

- Bringing fresh insight and challenge.

- Coaching/mentoring leaders to get creativity used.

- Contextualising theory / anchoring method in reality.

The approach we recommend

To use the approach within this book:

1. Ascertain whether this really is a ‘creative climate’ issue (as distinct from a ‘stuck team’ or an individual with ‘writer’s block’).

2. If it does look like a creative climate issue, gauge the problem using the creative climate questionnaire or a similar tool.

3. Use the techniques signposted in this book to commence work on the dimensions which are highlighted by the measuring tool/questionnaire.

4. Test for change, and then either apply further ‘treatments’ or embed change in the team and withdraw.

5. Manage your own reflection and learning.

If you prefer this summarised as a flowchart, we think it looks like the figure overleaf (although we encourage you to chart your own course).

The approach starts with a process of measurement which is open, comprehensible, and reliant upon the teams’ involvement – not a mysteriously opaque ritual imposed from outside.  With those measurements in place, change techniques can be more appropriately self-selected (with the facilitator’s advice, not control).  Work practices can then be developed, using those selected solutions, in a way that makes change stick.

Realistically, most teams do not exist in a vacuum, any more than the individuals who are members of a team do.  Even the most un-bureaucratic organisational form has some form of leadership, and whether that’s a king by divine right, the elected chair of an anarcho-syndicalist cell, or someone somewhere between those extremes, they clearly have a part to play.  Given the degree to which leaders can make or break a working culture (and, therefore, the creative climate) it is essential that they are involved.  For the change facilitator, getting leadership buy-in  can be vital, for instance in practical terms to clear diaries and make space available for a rapid innovation intervention.

For the leader this can represent a powerful opportunity to offer a different and more engaging form of leadership, which visibly values the creative genius of each individual and deploys the differences between team members as a source of strength.  All change management and consultancy fares best when the prescription on offer can address several issues at a time; plan the change so as to find new ways for the team to function and new ways for the leader to enable that, and visible value is more likely.

- This is an open process – no mysteries!

- Written for fellow consultants/ facilitators / change managers – or people who have to work like one of these at the moment.

- Leaders can enable change for creativity.

Choosing change

The climber Joe Simpson[8] suggested that in a difficult situation, the important thing is to keep making decisions – any decisions.  As a reversal to an old adage, ‘when you’re in a hole, keep digging’ has its merits – at least compared to inertia.

However, simply making decisions to break the status quo has obvious risks in settings where creative collaboration is essential to competitive advantage.  To put it in Kirton’s terms, change for the sake of change may be attractive to Innovators but an alarming prospect in the extreme for Adaptors.[9]

If you’re not yet familiar with Kirton’s Adaptor/Innovator continuum, it’s a concept worth having at the back of your mind as you consider some of the solutions in this book.  Briefly, Kirton investigated why ideas for change get blocked at work.

‘Adaptors’ like doing things better, and want lots of detail.  ‘Innovators’ like doing things differently, and want a big picture painted with a broad brush.  Most of us are somewhere between the poles, but recommendations for change need to have something to offer people of both preferences before they will get put into action.

The model outlined in this book uses a creative climate assessment tool in a way which teams can sense collegiate ‘ownership’ of.  In the same spirit, it’s most effective to select change methods and solutions along with the participants too.  The list of techniques in this book will therefore remain a ‘rough guide’ rather than a set of rigid rules. Consultants/facilitators are encouraged to adapt the recipes, and indeed augment the menu, as appropriate to the tastes of the team.

Reading the results of the creative climate self-assessment tool is a good place to start.  While the methods outlined here are suggested responses to dimensions which ‘score low’ on the measure, the idea behind the concept is really that the ten dimensions need to be broadly in balance.

The key to reading the spider diagram (see next section) is therefore not to look for adherence to a magic blueprint, or to spot problems in order to ‘trouble-shoot’  them.  The point is to identify where the focus of energy may be out of proportion.

Missing development from any of the dimensions on Ekvall’s scale can have dramatic consequences for creativity, as Henry and Walker[10] summarise (with some adaptations) in the following table:

Dimension

Creative Climate

Uncreative Climate

Challenge

Enjoyable and energetic

Alienated and indifferent

Freedom

Independent initiatives

Passive, rule bound

Idea Support

People listen

Critical, negative comments

Trust and openness

Trusting, failure accepted

Suspicious, failure punished

Dynamism

Excitedly busy

Boringly slow

Playfulness

Happy, humorous

Dull, serious

Debates

Contentious ideas voiced

Little questioning

Conflicts

Debated with insight

Warfare

Risk taking

Act on new ideas

Detail and committee bound

Idea time

Off-task play

Little off-task play

Looking for dimensions which score much higher than others can be as useful as starting with attention on low-scoring aspects.  An environment which over-emphasises challenge, for instance, may produce such a high-pressure work experience that the playfulness so essential for creative ideas to surface is repressed.  If idea-time is high but not accompanied by adequate trust and openness, team members may be incentivised to develop great ideas to take elsewhere.  If playfulness is high but not accompanied by adequate debates and risk-taking, the team may not progress from creativity to innovation, in that new ideas are generated but not filtered and experimented with.

So, before emphasising deficits, try the Appreciative Inquiry question,[11] “what’s good about working here?”, and see what light it throws upon the areas which appear to score highly.  Having applied that qualitative filter, test the emerging understanding of the obstacles to creative climate (if appropriate, with the team leader first then the whole team) and then direct energy to the most relevant and useful low-scoring dimensions.

The approaches here cover the most likely issues to arise from assessing the climate, but they are intended as a starting point.  We will be interested in every experience of applying these approaches and, indeed, new diagnoses which emerge in practice.

For simplicity, we have grouped likely creative climate deficits and action ideas into seven main diagnoses:

1. Challenge

2. Idea Support

3. Freedom, Trust and Openness

4. Dynamism and Playfulness

5. Debates and Conflicts

6. Risk-taking

7. Idea Time

- Beginning with a shared assessment of climate allows for shared ownership of change.

- There is no magic blueprint, but spotting Ekvall dimensions which are ‘out of proportion’ offers a practical way in for action.

- Begin analysis of responses with the Ai question – “what’s good about working here?”

Meet the method

What matters is providing a context, or an environment, in which creativity can flourish and lead to effective problem-solving and useful innovation – and for these purposes, that’s all that matters.

It’s not just the self-styled ‘creative industries’ which require the exercise of innovation in order to survive and thrive.  A late twentieth-century examination of sources of competitive advantage in the steel industry, for instance, found that it relied upon ‘underlying values’ such as respect for individuals, tolerance of failure, and openness to new ideas from outside.[12]

But values are hard to measure, and harder still to change.  By setting out to measure climate, we can then move on to influence and adapt it, including by increasing the likelihood of some changes in behaviour.

While there is doubtless scope for interesting academic distinctions to be drawn between climate, culture and behaviour, such semantics do not actually drive change (any more than an argument about the differences between climate and weather helps a community experiencing a drought).  Similarly, we occasionally use quantitative language to explore rather qualitative issues.  The application of a ‘measure’ here is less about codifying potential and more about unlocking it, and the most exciting and useful work happens in between measuring points.

The work of Swedish researcher Goran Ekvall is central to the method here.  Ekvall initially considered creativity from three perspectives; person-oriented, product-oriented, or process-oriented, before settling upon ‘climate’ as a term encompassing all three.  His experimental comparison of creative climate identified that although the quality of the culture at work is essential if creative ideas are to be taken through to innovation, the multi-factorial elements of that culture/climate could indeed be quantitatively measured.

Ekvall has seen enough of creativity and innovation in practice to have a practical feel for capturing new ideas and getting them into use.  That’s a drive likely to be shared by many organisations seeking to apply this Creative Climate Change concept.

Realising (as did Nietzsche when writing about Dionysian and Apollonian thinking)[13] that organisations require divergent thinking to generate new ideas, then convergent thinking to work out what to do with them, Ekvall developed his creative climate questionnaire to measure ten dimensions which can either stimulate or stifle creativity:

- Challenge

- Freedom

- Idea-support

- Trust /openness

- Dynamism

- Playfulness

- Debates

- Conflicts

- Risk-taking

- Idea time

Using these ten dimensions for creativity and innovation, you can identify weaknesses, blockages and obstacles, allow change to be built upon success, and make room to then re-measure the climate (and how the team functions within it) afterwards.  The process is therefore consciously intended to share knowledge about how team progress has been achieved, in the manner of ‘double-loop learning’.[14]

Real-time results aid understanding, so users and facilitators are encouraged to generate understanding (not blame), focus upon solutions, find new ways of doing things rather than revisiting old targets, apply the lightest touch required to achieve change and then consolidate the approach which best applies creativity in each case.

The approach has ample room for expert facilitators to aid the process of escaping from ‘stuck routines’ and the adoption of new ways of working – but it does not require or encourage dependence upon a ‘guru’.

- All that matters is that the environment becomes (or remains) conducive to creativity and innovation – so measure not the stated ‘company values’, but the reality of the workplace experience.

- Ekvall offers a breakdown of climate dimensions you can use to gauge what happens now, instigate change, then re-assess: measure, change, measure again.

- Divergent thinking to generate ideas, convergent thinking to use them.

Process step by step

Inovation may feel like a closely-guarded secret in the organisation you’re working with, so we’ve sought to get the concepts out into the open.  If you have good internet access, we can recommend an approach which will prove far more satisfying than filling-in yet another web-based web form.  We have supplied some simple open-source spreadsheets issued under a creative commons license.  To use them:

1 Download the Climate Workbook from this link

There are three sheets: Questionnaire, Results & Targets

§§

Now apply the ‘little grey cells’ which enable all the best gap analysis

6 Design changes to address weak dimensions.

7 Implement changes.

8 Re-measure to determine if changes worked.

For department- wide change processes we recommend a Kotter-style change management approach.  If you are seeking to change Agile teams we would usually suggest an A3 approach.

2: Dimensions of change

Making a Challenge

Why Change?

Insufficient challenge – or at least, not enough of the right type of challenge – can make the work environment a dull, uninspiring place to be.  That doesn’t necessarily make people’s creativity dry up altogether; humans are rather irrepressible that way.  But lack of a sufficient challenge to step up to will often cause creative energies to be diverted away from the work task and directed into displacement activities such as pranks, skiving and online social media.  Those displacement activities, because they disconnect from the organisation’s reason for existence, don’t simply waste time and energy; they allow creativity to run wild without any hope of it leading to innovation.

But if displacement amusements can be a sign of an insufficiently challenging environment, that’s not to say that work can’t be enjoyable and satisfying.  Indeed, it is unlikely that a work experience which fails to provide interest and satisfaction will maximise creative potential or harness the benefits of innovation.

Getting the level and type of challenge right can be a particular issue in organisations which have traditionally been bureaucratic, or have become hierarchical.  Too much of the wrong kind of challenge can leave us out of our depth and stressed.  Not enough challenge means there is insufficient opportunity to meet it, and a lack of scope to demonstrate efficacy or put our own stamp on things.

This isn’t a new idea in itself, of course.  Students of many disciplines will have encountered the work of Maslow, whose ‘hierarchy of needs’ places the ‘self-actualising’ condition necessary for the most effective creativity at the top of the ladder – with food, warmth, safety and belonging as necessary prerequisites.

Although now a little long in the tooth as a theory, this ordering of needs still has much to recommend it as a basis for planning the overall development of an organisation or even the constitution of a society.  However, it can fall down rather quickly as a structure for improving capacity to innovate, for two reasons.  The first is that, in practice, too much of a brief change event’s time can be taken up in relatively fruitless discussions of lower-order concerns – and however irksome a shortage of chocolate biscuits or poor toilet paper may be, solving these will not break the log-jam.

The second reason Maslovian models can be problematic is that there will often be a participant ready to point out that much art comes from working within restrictions.  They have a point.  A concern with a feeling of safety doubtless is doubtless humane, but one only has to look at the creative scrimshaw of nineteenth-century whalers, or the accelerated innovations in aircraft design during the Second World War, to acknowledge that safety is not always an absolute prerequisite.

So, the recommendation in this case is to examine the potential to re-shape work so as to maximise the intrinsic satisfaction of the working experience.  That satisfaction comes from the overlap of sufficient skills and appropriate challenge which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi terms ‘flow’.  In his account of his early research with a range of different flow-creating activities (in this case, surgery) Csikszentmihalyi observed that “many – perhaps most – occupations can be made to provide intrinsic rewards if the activity is restructured, either from above or by the person himself, so that it can produce a flow experience”.

How to change – by finding Flow

The aim of intervention here is to gather intelligence which will enable the team and its leader(s) to instigate restructuring for optimal flow.  The most effective approaches for identifying flow (or its absence) use live sampling of individual experiences during activity over a set period.  In fact, the original experiments which gave rise to flow theory did just this, using early radio pager technology. There are plenty of to-do-list apps that are easily customised to record flow-state.

Should real-time flow sampling be impractical or undesirable, for instance if the consultant has only a day or two with the team to agree and commence change, a more ‘virtual’ approach can be used.  This is somewhat more open to question given its reliance upon memory, but since flow experience is unavoidably subjective, it will still have value.  To arrive at a simulated estimate of flow levels, ask participants to self-rate their last week’s work experience on a scale of one to three (where 1 = rarely and 3 = frequently) on the following criteria:

1. Feeling I know what I need to achieve and whether it’s working

2. Feeling my skills match the difficulty of the task at hand

3. Feeling ‘in the zone’ where the work happens naturally

4. Having focused concentration for a period of hours

5. A sense of control or influence over the results of my work

6. So involved in the work I almost forget myself

7. Time flies, but a lot is also getting done

8. I’m in flow, I know it and it feels good

The results of this rapid flipchart-based team self-assessment (or of more thorough semi-automated sampling) merit some exploration and re-presentation in order to then move on to identifying ways to change.  Broadly speaking, though, if Challenge has already been highlighted in the creative climate assessment it is likely either that some team members feel unprepared for work tasks, or that some feel under-used and under-stimulated by the challenges currently available (or, conceivably, both).

Responding to a feeling of being under-skilled has two potential elements; the feeling, and the skilling.  Dealing with feelings of inadequacy can be a good place to start, as confidence can be more of an issue than actual competence in many cases.  Using peer support to review how abilities are being applied, and manager/leader support to acknowledge and recognise that contribution, are worthwhile solutions to try.  These teamwork basics can be all too easily overlooked when performance pressure climbs or organisational culture gets ‘stuck in a rut’.  Occasionally there are indeed genuine skill issues too; where formal training presents the best solution, be sure to explore budgetary implications with the team leader or senior client before recommending this.  Peer learning or inter-colleague mentoring can also be cost-effective approaches to raising both confidence and competence.

Where a feeling of boredom or under-stimulation becomes evident, regaining a sense of engaging challenge may be crucial to creative flow, and corrective action is often important.  When restructuring so as to provide genuine challenge is feasible, this is the ideal – not least because it usually requires gaining some new skills.  But if new or fresh challenges are not readily available from within the normal hierarchy or chain of command the team may need to be encouraged and assisted to develop its own challenging-yet-achievable goals.  Few management cultures will discourage team-owned efforts to arrive at ‘tough but realistic’ targets, and the scope for teams to identify these with a degree of autonomy (rather than having challenges imposed) can be motivationally useful – ‘we’ve chosen this challenge, so let’s show what we can do’.

In circumstances in which restructuring is not immediately feasible, creating artificial game-like challenges within the team can be useful in increasing the challenge to at least provide a good-enough work experience for creativity to be possible for a while.  Such internal challenge games may be as simple as sweepstakes on who completes a regular task first or as creatively insubordinate as playing buzzword bingo in internal reporting rounds.  Anything which raises the act of surviving the working day to an art is a step in the right direction.

Ultimately, however, nothing beats the satisfaction of a real challenge for which one is prepared; ask any ex-pilot ordered to ‘fly a desk’ about just what they now miss.  In the longer run, more radical restructuring may be required to create the climate which really delivers both creativity and innovation.  Such changes could include building in private concept-development opportunities (especially if ‘idea time’ is also scoring low), or more systematic challenge-building approaches such as establishing a temporary ‘hit-squad’ with a brief to achieve the (apparently) impossible.  Work with the team to identify ways to create challenge afresh, and the organisational leadership to ensure back-up and authority for such changes – bearing in mind that some individuals may decide that the right level of challenge for them will still be in a different role.

- Nothing beats the satisfaction of a real challenge for which team members feel prepared.

- Raise confidence and attend to skills issues.

- Create challenge through formal restructuring and/or informal games.

Building Freedom, Trust and Openness

Why change?

When Archimedes had his Eureka! moment and leapt out of the bath to tell everyone about it, the freedom he enjoyed amounted to far more than liberal attitudes to nudity.  He had the freedom to take time out from everyday work pressures to muse about the rarefied discipline of fluid mechanics in the first place.  He had the trust necessary to test his theory with fellow natural philosophers without fear of going the way of Socrates.  There was enough openness between the minds engaged in the question to diverge enough to find new solutions, and then converge to test whether they worked.

Inhabitants of nineteenth and twentieth century workplaces weren’t always so fortunate – and to be fair, Archimedes would have been one of a small minority in his time too.  This is where a concern with organisational culture becomes very real.  Without an environment which fosters a sense of liberty to dream, experiment, and fail a few times along the way, the flow of innovation vital to competitive advantage is unlikely to spring forth.

If Freedom has scored low in the creative climate questionnaire/tool, it is fairly likely that, in many cases, Trust and Openness will also have scored low.  Deciding which of these dimensions to ‘treat’ may depend upon which has scored lowest, upon the gut feeling of the facilitator, or most likely upon detailed discussion with the ‘client’ or team at the heart of it.  If it looks appropriate, there is nothing wrong with using either or both of the broad approaches outlined in this section.

Freedom is hard to achieve, and hard to engage teams in acting upon, without a model to frame the discussion.  Group conversations about freedom can easily descend into an Orwellian dialogue of the ‘freedom is slavery’ variety, and then you’re only one step away from confirming all the worst stereotypes about consultancy.  A more constructive starting point can be an examination of how far the team/organisation has succeeded in creating a sense of ‘ownership’ – a feeling that an individual and collective search for new methods is not only permitted, but vital.  So a fresh look at culture can be of substantial value at this point.

How to change – with culture

One of the best-known frameworks for reviewing working cultures is Hofstede’s[15] comparison of national differences.   His examination of power-distance and uncertainty avoidance can be valuable if the subject organisation/team is genuinely international in its composition.  But as Hofstede has since made clear, this was really intended to contrast styles at nation-to-nation level.

The Hofstede Centre has developed his thinking into a set of additional dimensions for review of organisational culture, which can be used as the basis for a team self-assessment exercise.  This can work well whether carried out via confidential individual proformas, through physically moving people from one side of the room to another to indicate perceptions, or any point in between these approaches that fits the team’s readiness to participate.

The organisational culture dimensions are:

- Means-oriented vs. goal-oriented

- Internally driven vs. externally driven

- Easy-going work discipline vs. strict work discipline

- Local vs. professional

- Open system vs. closed system

- Employee-oriented vs. work-oriented

- Accepting or sceptical of leadership style

- Degree of identification with the organisation

Means/goal orientation will have a bearing upon how much freedom team members sense to adapt either what they seek to achieve or how they achieve it (and may affect attitudes to risk too).

Internal/external drive relates to who needs to be pleased – the boss or the customer – and the freedom to deliver.  Work discipline is about the level and variety of control and the degree of freedom to improvise and try something new.

Local vs. professional deals with loyalty to the team/organisation on site or allegiance to a profession or vocation which is externally regulated/defined – with associated tendencies to conformity in either direction.

Open/closed system refers to the organisation’s readiness to receive new ideas and/or people, and to give them the freedom to shed fresh light upon how work is done.

Employee-orientation or work-orientation gauges the degree to which staff feel their needs to be a concern of the management (as opposed to work having to happen at all costs), and here could be an indicator of freedom (or otherwise) to meet the ‘lower-order’ requirements of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.[16]

Degree of acceptance of leadership style and identification with the organisation are both likely to have an impact upon feelings of freedom to perform, and freedom to make a difference to how the organisation functions.

Using this adapted Hofstede assessment is in itself potentially adding an additional tier of measurement, but should also serve as the impetus for a culture change.  What that culture change project will need to consist of will inevitably vary from case to case, but may for instance include:

- a planned effort to find new ideas from outside and apply them as a team;

- mentoring managers/leaders in reconnecting and innovating with their team(s);

- working on one of Ekvall’s other creativity dimensions (such as risk-taking, for means/goal orientation) as an oblique angle of entry

How to change – with psychometrics

Where trust and openness appear to be in short supply, again it is likely that freedom will also be an issue, but it is also important to bear in mind how sensitive a territory this is for a team, and especially for its leadership.  To follow the diverge-converge principle which underlies this creative climate change process, it will be important not only to open up discussion and exploration around sources of trust and the meaning of openness, but to sufficiently close these down afterwards for the team to be able to function.  This ‘Pandora’s box’ element requires the facilitator to ensure that there is sufficient time to work-through change, and adequate leadership input to explore cultural and behavioural issues candidly.

If there is buy-in from both the team and management, the use of some form of psychometric profiling tool is worthwhile; at the very least it prevents descent into mutual over-critique and the disharmony this can engender, and there is every likelihood that useful insights will also emerge.

While there are valid arguments for different psychometric profiling tools, the actual choice of which to use in any given scenario tends to be a subjective one, and a matter of palatability and affordability rather than which is objectively ‘best’.  We have used many, including Belbin for team roles, several for ‘Big Five’ traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) tools such as NEO for individuals, and these can all function as effective ways in to exploring how to generate trust and act on openness.  For simplicity, this book covers two (MBTI and KAI) in a little more detail, but the list is not intended to be exclusive, and some of those tools we are unable to cover in detail here are left aside mainly for reasons of space.

The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory[17] occasionally comes under fire from purists for its lack of formal research underpinnings, but this perhaps misses the point here.  The purpose we have in mind is not an academic psychology study but a surfacing of the differences which can either enable or disable team/organisational innovation, and MBTI can fulfil that function.

If time and finances allow, the ideal application of these profiling tools is usually via a trained and accredited practitioner.  However, if resources are tight an informal team/individual self-assessment may often suffice as a starting point, in the case of MBTI looking at each member’s problem-solving preferences along the following axes:

Extraversion – Introversion

Sensing – Intuition

Thinking – Feeling

Judging – Perceiving

While an ‘official’ MBTI assessment will provide a neat four-letter code for each participant, it is not absolutely essential to conduct such an assessment in each case.  MBTI is so widely used that many teams have already undergone profiling, and individuals may have accessed online self-assessment tools; if there are already assessments of thinking-style preferences in place, use them.

For teams without any prior notion of MBTI preferences, a basic facilitated discussion about the characteristics of each dimensions may be adequate.

The focus for subsequent discussion – and crucially, action – should be how the preferences which the profiling tool highlights relate to problem-solving (i.e. how creative ideation is either taken through to innovation, or choked).  For instance, Hirrsch’s emendation[18] (below) of how MBTI preferences pertain to problem-solving allows for identification of blockages arising from what the rock’n’roll world knows as ‘artistic differences’.  This allows the facilitator/consultant to devise, with the leader/manager, new ways for the team to try working.

Extraverts

Communicates, acts and carries it out.

Introverts

Dreams up ideas, reflects in advance and uses concepts.

Sensors

Creates order, practises, forms habits and applies experience.  Gets things into use.

Intuitives

Develops theories, gets things designed, uses hunches and intuition. Applies ingenuity.

Thinkers

Logical, organised, reforming. Creative with impersonal data

Feelers

Stresses values and supplies meaning. Arouses enthusiasm for change. Is creative with personal data

Judgers

Methodological, cautious, plans, seeks closure. Has few inputs.

Perceivers

Fearless adventurer, seeks more data. Has many inputs.

How to change - with adaptors and innovators

Where there is insufficient time for an exploration of thinking preferences to be both opened-up and closed-down, a simpler model may be preferable.  One of the simplest and most useful is KAI, the Kirton Adaptor/Innovator theory.[19]  There is a complex 32-point assessment profile for KAI too, but for our purposes its virtue is in simplicity – briefly put, strong Adaptors much prefer doing things better, Innovators want to do things differently...and most of us are somewhere in between.

When time is tight, a rapid self-assessment by individuals in the team simply by placing Post-it™ notes on a flipchart is often adequate; there does not have to be a perfect distribution of ‘scores’, and the facilitator should only challenge if individuals appear to be adjusting their stated preference in order to ‘fit in’.

KAI is particularly useful in framing discussion about how individuals within a team view and respond to potential change.  Where there are both strong As and Is in the room, communication is by no means impossible but it does take planning.  As a way of creating positive change within the team/organisation itself, challenge participants to modify team habits and customs in order to accommodate those preferences.  If a cell of Adaptors produces a long set of advised product improvements for a strongly Innovator manager, make sure there is a one-page summary about how this creates unique value.  If an organisation with overtly ‘A’ methods has hired a team of ‘I’ people, introduce a creative back-door to the innovation pipeline (e.g. a  ‘skunkworks’).

A brief caveat on all of these profiling approaches, whether Hofstede, Myers-Briggs, Kirton or one of the myriad others available; they are just hooks upon which to hang a conversation.  Don’t get stuck with labels when all that’s needed is something which alters the mood in the room; save time on analysis, and start some climate change.

- Freedom can be approached using an adapted form of Hofstede’s criteria.

- Trust and openness can be approached via psychometric tools (e.g. MBTI).

- Both Adaptors and Innovators benefit from opportunities to engage.

Supporting Ideas

Why change?

Geniuses sometimes prefer to polish their breakthroughs alone, and perhaps that’s their prerogative.  But it doesn’t always work well for them.  Isaac Newton, a clever and original thinker in anyone’s estimation, tarried too long to publish his claimed invention/discovery of integral calculus and ended up in a protracted intellectual property dispute with Leibniz, which as well as a distraction from study diverted attention ‘ad hominem’ rather than towards testing and perfecting mathematical technique.

That use of Latin points to another of Newton’s problems, too.  Although the choice of an ancient tongue perhaps did little to disconcert classically-educated gentlemen of letters at the time of Principia Mathematica,[20] the insistence upon scientific terminology rubbed against the prevailing religious sentiments of the time.  A century later the jurist Lord Monboddo was still challenging Newton’s theories of celestial gravitation on the grounds that it left no role for the hand of God[21] – unaware, perhaps, that Isaac had squandered copious energy upon computing ‘the number of the Beast’.  What other creative insights might Isaac Newton have made available to creators and innovators if he had been just a little more concerned with garnering adequate support for his scientific ideas?  Since this sort of “genius starves while talent wears purple and fine linen”,[22] a business cannot afford such indulgence.

If the organisation or team which you are working with scores low on Idea Support in the Ekvall self-assessment, the chances are that good ideas (or potential innovations) are being lost, and that culture and communication are at the heart of the matter.  Of course this does not mean that change is impossible, but the relevance of everyday behaviours – by both team members and managers – means that some careful further diagnosis may be required before applying a solution.

How to change – by testing the ground

In groups there are often two powerful limiters of free speech; the perception of the managers’ expectations, and the ‘norms’ of the group itself.  These may need to be explored separately at first.  A simple way to explore this with a team (without the manager present, ideally) is to run a brief exercise based broadly on the Appreciative Inquiry[23] model, opening-up identification of pro/contra attributes through a series of exploratory questions such as:

1. As creative people, what feels good about working here?

2. What sort of affirmation or acclaim is attached to formulating/offering new or creative ideas?

3. How do you support each other to develop ideas, test them, and shape them to maximise the scope for applications?

4. What rewards does the organisation provide you with for generating potentially profitable ideas?

In all but the most moribund of groups, this exercise will reveal some positive experiences, and certainly some examples of potential for team members to support each other in ensuring that ideation does not close down prematurely.  These insights can form a fair starting-point for team-level change, but this is more likely with the full support and involvement of managers/leaders.  Providing them with a basis to show leadership is likely to involve some further analysis and exploration still.

How to change – through leadership

The Kirton Adaptor/Innovator inventory[24] (KAI) is again helpful here, in throwing light upon how shared or differing thinking styles can help or hinder.  A rapid team self-analysis (as described in the preceding chapter) should offer a firm launch pad, if the team are engaged in discussion about how individual and team preferences are borne out when responding to new ideas.  It is not unusual, for instance, for a team with dominant Adaptor preferences to prematurely dismiss Innovative proposals as too threatening, or for a strongly Innovator manager to be uninspired by (and therefore unsupportive of) proposals from Adaptor subordinates.  As well as stymieing the free flow of ideas in conversation, this can create immediate difficulties in achieving the right balance of risk; if an Adaptor team mindset goes unchallenged, there may be insufficient fresh innovation to keep the team/organisation alive in the long run.  Likewise, an Innovator at the wheel without a navigator may drive so single-mindedly at taking new products to new markets (the riskiest of Ansoff’s strategies)[25] that the life-support system is cut off even earlier.

Attitudes to risk, like any other aspect of A/I preferences, will not necessarily change overnight, but several varieties of team exercise can help.  If Risk-Taking has itself also scored low, starting with the approaches laid out in that section of the book could be the right way in to developing new team behaviours.  If idea support is a more general difficulty, differing levels of team exercise should be recommended/facilitated depending upon the time and support available.

When a relatively quick and straightforward approach appears necessary, a time-honoured method is well worth considering.  This requires all commentators upon any new or creative idea to say one positive thing about the proposal before making any negative remarks.  When this is applied rigorously with visible participation by a team’s leader/manager, it can generate significant change.  It increases the ‘breathing space’ for potential viable ideas to flourish, and improves the climate in that creative contributions are acknowledged and team members receive the affirmation they deserve for their input.

How to change – with team exercises

Where there is a little more time to develop a team response to A/I issues, a pair of rather more involved team exercises are worth considering.

If Adaptors are concerned about an Innovator proposal (either a real one or a locally-sourced hypothetical case), try negative brainstorming which focuses upon implementation – asking, essentially, “what could possibly go wrong” and then identifying all the possible risks and mitigations.

If Innovators are uninspired by an Adaptor-generated set of proposals, get them to support more provocative negative brainstorming of the “let’s look at how we could really mess this up completely” reversals variety.

Such exercises can allow teams to develop processes and rituals to build into everyday working routines in a way which makes more of an opportunity for active idea support in practice.  They can also be a lot of fun, which is not only permissible in the creative workplace, but vital to the climate being truly conducive to innovation.

Should a team require still more ways to develop routines for fuller idea support, a couple of other tried and tested idea exploration and ‘filtering’ techniques may also be useful to have in reserve.  The first is somewhat formal and may be better suited to teams and organisations which are at least scoring more highly on Idea Time.  This is the Estimate-Discuss-Estimate technique,[26] whereby a team comes to an initial rough calculation of an idea’s likely costs and benefits, subjects these assumptions and calculations to robust (but open) internal challenge, then agrees a working estimate of likely challenges to report upwards.

A second idea exploration technique may be particularly beneficial where the perspectives of As and Is, or of leaders and doers, have become unhelpfully polarised.  This is the Other People’s Viewpoints Exercise,[27] which requires members of the two ‘camps’ (however identified) to swap roles and advocate for each other’s concerns or assess ideas through each others’ lenses.  Both these approaches should be handled with care, and with expert facilitation, so that participants can then come out of role and conclude with what they have gained from the exercise and how (remembering our commitment to double-loop learning).

A consultant/facilitator needs to be mindful of the sensitivities involved in changing how a team or organisation responds to creative ideas, especially as regards the roles of management/leadership.  Even in organisations which espouse a flattened hierarchy, the boss has considerable influence upon assumptions (sometimes unspoken) about what sort of ideas are acceptable.

Where there are deep-seated cultural beliefs about what types of change can or can’t be supported, engaging the manager(s) in climate change will be crucial.  This may be an operational matter of adjusting incentives and internal communications priorities so that there is both recognition and reward for idea generation, including for ideas which don’t subsequently make it to production (and bearing in mind that money will only be a ‘hygiene factor’[28] rather than a strong motivator in and of itself).

If engagement with the team has surfaced any hint of an over-critical (or even ‘bullying’) culture this will have to be broached – obviously, in private – with managers too.  A diplomatic alternative to confronting them head-on with an accusation of bullying or intransigence is to open up a discussion about the informal networks in and around their organisation; the relationships with colleagues, peers, suppliers and customers which can both ‘oil the wheels’ of business on a good day and insidiously obstruct change on a bad one.

How to change – attitudes to failure

To bring team and manager (or organisation and leader) back together following such exercises, some work on failure-tolerance is a good place to conclude.  Team/organisational cultures which are overly averse to some of their ideas not working out can atrophy in spirit – and worse still, they can actively prevent the experimentation which leads to breakthroughs.  Where ways of working need to change to reflect a greater failure-tolerance (and this is often the case), managers may still create and demonstrate value through returning to Kotter’s ‘Heart of Change’ principles.[29]  Managers can tell a compelling story about why creativity, experimentation, and learning from initial fumbles is truly essential to the organisation’s future, and how this will be enabled and rewarded from now on.  Make sure they mean it.

- Start with what does feel good , and complement with “yes, and” – leaders will have to address any bullying tendencies.

- For A vs. I blockages, try negative brainstorming and/or reversals exercises.

- If more formal routines are required, consider Estimate-Discuss-estimate or Other People’s Viewpoints techniques.

Playing Dynamically

Why change?

“Jesters do oft prove prophets” observes Shakespeare in King Lear,[30] and even in the most formal of organisations it would be hard to deny that he had a point.  Jesters, for a start, take upon themselves greater licence to ‘speak truth unto power’, when more traditional subordinates may worry that “it is not easy to find a way of telling kings who are doing silly things that they are wrong”.[31] Providing constructive challenge to management when a creative climate is notable by its absence seems likely to be beneficial in its own right – if somewhat dangerous for a self-appointed jester.  But by strengthening the team or organisation’s ability to learn and create through play, much more can be found than just a palatable way to tell the boss they’re doing it wrong.  Play can untap resources of creativity which will lead to new ways to do it right.

In the (probably rare) circumstances of Dynamism alone scoring low while Playfulness is self-evaluated as adequate, caution is advised.  Feverish activity without a lively link to sources of vibrant creativity may well indicate a team/organisation which in innovation terms is ‘busy doing nothing’.  To get management buy-in for work on Playfulness in these circumstances, engage leaders in discussion about the market-positioning of the organisation’s products and services.  If the operation really is just a ‘cash cow’[32] servicing established products in still-growing markets, then fair enough – keeping the machine well-oiled is going to be the main priority, and the services of a team-building consultant to process-map the value chain of modest, evolutionary improvements to operations may be all that is required.  However, if the leadership has ambitions for the organisation to both survive and thrive, then work on the truly dynamic interplay of Adaptors and Innovators, thinkers and experimenters, will be necessary.  That’s where play starts to become serious business.

This book is about practical, feasible methods to get creativity and innovation happening, so there is no ‘magic secret’ – but if there were, it would probably be something about the power of play, both to generate ideas and test them for applicability.  This is important for many individuals, as well as teams; da Vinci’s flying machines and Einstein’s thought-experiments are well-known examples of divergent creativity and radically-convergent innovation respectively.  If the resultant helicopters and atomic reactions have both beneficial and destructive uses, that doesn’t detract from the efficacy of play in spawning and fledging the ideas behind them.  In all likelihood, however, the consultant or facilitator will need to provide a group-level interaction if a playfulness-enhanced climate is to be the result.

Playfulness, whether from games, sports, verbal dexterity or the myriad brief diversions which humanise the working day, is one of the most frequently recurring sources of Flow experience in Csikszentmihalyi’s research.[33]  So,  the twin prize on offer is a way to reap the full benefits of the team’s innate creativity and make it enjoyable enough to maintain engagement and effort all the way through to innovation.

We will outline some techniques here which can deliver such playful ways of working in a concentrated short intervention – sometimes referred to as a ‘FedEx day’ because it does indeed deliver quickly.  But a caveat is worth attaching at the head of this recommendation, which is that the consultant/facilitator embarking upon such a course must first look to their own credibility.  In more formal, bureaucratic or conservative working cultures, the leftfield ‘out-there’ language occasionally used in enhancing playfulness may well lead to some initial resistance if the concept is introduced without subtlety; the zany, wild elements of the language which some creativity gurus may favour can sound all too like the ‘think the unthinkable’ mantras which have brought ridicule upon management consultants in the past.  If in any doubt as to the readiness to accept a Playfulness intervention, be sure to emphasise that although it should indeed be enjoyable, this is far from being ‘just a bit of fun’.  Make any doubters aware of the firm psychological underpinnings of the intervention, particularly Csikszentmihalyi’s hard science research (summarised in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety) prior to his popular science work Flow.[34]

Having hopefully now gained management permission and team credibility (don’t proceed without them!), there is an opportunity to build a dynamic, playful team ethos embodied in new habits.  By habits, we mean behaviour; in the long run, an annual creative away-day is unlikely to make sufficient difference, but in the short term a consensual team ‘re-programming’ can get change started.  To this end, almost anything which injects a spirit of joyful experimentation into the working environment has potential.  But to get the full advantage all the way through to realised benefits, we recommend a more ordered (but still sufficiently ‘messy’ approach) similar to that summarised previously as Synectics.[35]

How to change – by making play count

Many individual techniques for both divergence and convergence can be built into this approach, so it is intentionally given in outline with some illustrative (not exclusive) examples here.  The likely flow of a one-to-two day event will be along these lines:

1. Prior agreement that the team to be involved have authority to ‘own’ the problem, challenge or question which will be explored as a test case.  If at all possible, the test case should be a real and pressing issue for the organisation; if not possible, offer a bespoke simulacrum of the type of issue the team can face now or will face in the future.

2. Invite an individual ‘problem owner’ to give a brief overview of the problem and how they would like it, ideally, to be resolved.  Have them identify what isn’t right just yet, and what a ‘best of all possible worlds’ outcome might feel like (from the customer’s, the staff member’s or any other stakeholder’s perspectives).

3. Ask the group to reframe the problem-owner’s aspirations imaginatively, without analysis.  Identify broad possible outcomes along the lines of ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could achieve this sort of result...’ and ‘wouldn’t it be a pain if these kind of obstacles sprung up...’.

4. Emphasise further divergence, and active steps to avoid premature convergence.  The techniques employed to find further launching-off points for subsequent exploration can be as varied or as ‘wild’ as the team feels ready for.  Some of our favourite approaches include:

Reversals: brainstorming how, in a nightmare world over-run by the Dark Side, the team could spectacularly sabotage the operation – the more ‘fiendish’ the better.  This deceptively simple exercise not only creates fun (and often laughter), but also releases creative energies which formal work cultures can all too easily repress.  Best of all, when the reversals are themselves reversed, some of the resulting positive ideas might just work – and at this stage, might just is quite good enough.

Metaphor excursions: pick a surprising metaphor for the problem, and explore with the group how the metaphor could be resolved.  Again, this is frequently a lot of fun, and can often nevertheless take participants just far enough out of their comfort zones to release creative thinking.  When beating the competition is reframed as capturing a pirate galleon, it’s amazing how fast the ideas flow.

Random free association: send team members out in pairs or trios for a short walk in a natural environment, with a time limit to find an object which could be a simile for an element of the problem.  There are no ‘wrong’ ideas here; if a participant suggests that a forked twig is a bit like the problem because it branches in several directions, note the idea and add it to the list – all divergent ideation is valuable.

5. Start convergence gently.  From the now extensive list of possible solutions, invite participants to begin identifying those which sound the most interesting and stimulating to explore further.  Clarify as often as necessary that this is not about which ideas look most feasible, least expensive or closest to the boss’s expectations – it’s about what they feel drawn to play with.  If working with metaphor, stay with the metaphor and the solution to it in metaphorical terms, in order to avoid premature convergence.

6. Synthesise the partial or metaphorical solutions into a virtual project-plan, with and through the team.

7. Take the outline solution to the problem owner for a review.  If it appears a worthwhile potential response, table a developed version for management consideration.  If further barriers are perceived, go around the cycle once more (perhaps the next day, to allow for subconscious creativity to go to work).

These dynamically playful approaches will certainly yield fresh creative ideas, and if the team builds parts of the technique into their daily or weekly routines, they will in due course start taking some of these through to innovation.  It’s energetic and enjoyable to facilitate too – and should an occasional nay-sayer protest that it’s nothing like their usual method, King Lear’s own advice says it all: “nothing will come of nothing...speak again”.[36]

- Issues with Dynamism and Playfulness are usually linked.

- Get the team / management’s full backing before attempting work on Play.

- Use an approach like Synectics to show how play is serious business and can deliver workable ideas for innovation.

Debating without Conflict

Why change?

Conflict is the exception in Ekvall’s creative climate questionnaire; redolent with negative, adversarial connotations in English (as is the case for the Swedish equivalent, konflikt),[37] it is hardly surprising that a low score tends to indicate a rather healthy workplace culture in the minds of many people who complete the survey.  Indeed Ekvall himself noted that this was the case in many early uses of the CCQ, with a low score for conflicts corresponding to a high score for debate in many cases.  In Ekvall’s words the distinction is between energy expended unhelpfully in ‘person collisions’ (Conflicts) and positive ‘idea collisions’ (Debates).[38]

So, if Debates are scoring low, there is every likelihood that Conflicts will be scoring high – because those collisions are happening between people rather than between thoughts, and effort is going into generating heat rather than light, arguing ad hominem rather than pro veritas, playing the man rather than the ball.  In other words, office politics is not just making the workplace somewhere unpleasant to be; it’s impeding innovation.  A fractious climate is unlikely to be a creative one.

There are all sorts of sound reasons to deal with dysfunctional office politics which go well beyond the territory of creative climate change (not least as regards productivity and labour relations concerns).  Generic team-building and/or management development (e.g. via coaching/mentoring) may be a necessary preliminary/follow-up bracketing measure in some cases.  But of course, creativity can be part of the answer too; engaging the team and leader in fruitful idea collision can be an excellent opportunity to bring colleagues back together in collaboration towards a common end. Where the ‘person collisions’ have done some harm, shared creativity can be a powerful healing activity,[39] including for the simple reason that, as Daniel Goleman (the author of Emotional Intelligence)[40] points out, developing ideas together is fun – and “the ability to make everyone on a team love what they are doing together is at the heart of team building and team leadership”.[41]

If conflict needs to be reduced, you may need to stage some debates instead.  Debate, including the old-fashioned ‘debating society’ variety, can provide a safe format to play with roles and enjoy idea-collision’ as the classic dialectic; thesis-antithesis-synthesis.  Hegel’s dialectic method[42] can be rather sterile[43] and too ready a route into ‘person collisions’ or even office politics writ large (as the pseudo-Marxian concept of ‘dialectical materialism’ became in the Cold War).   But there are other schools of philosophy with methods of their own and the Greek roots of Western dialectic have plentiful Eastern counterparts, such as the Jain tradition with its tale of the blind men attempting to identify an elephant – and  all failing until they collaborate and compare notes.[44]  Sometimes different perspectives have to be tried, and the ‘victory’ goes not to the person who is right, but the one who draws the strands together.

How to change – with debates

You can stage some debates, and adapt the format to your assessment of the team’s needs.  If excessive conformity or reluctance to challenge the boss is part of the problem, finding an accessible way to get into some role-play (or ‘simulation’) may be crucial.  The time-honoured approach of appointing an ‘advocatus diaboli’ (devil’s advocate) to make a case for crazy, insubordinate and transgressive ideas could be exactly what is needed.  Should the team you are working with fall too often into bipolar adversarial ‘camps’, avoid the traditional model of proposer vs. opposer and have three or four competing ideas, perhaps in the ‘balloon debate’ format (identifying which idea can most readily be dispensed with, in turn until just one is left).

To stimulate fruitful debate which will develop positive ways of working rather than drifting back into conflict, your skills as a consultant/facilitator can make a critical difference.  This may need to start with generating confidence through some ideation to begin with, so that the team has some fresh ideas to collide.  Try the techniques detailed in the preceding section on Playfulness and Dynamism as a quick means of getting started.

For the debating style to become a real team habit, more than one experience of using it will probably be required, so if possible sequence linked or serialised debate exercises over more than one occasion.  Creativity through many iterations has been shown to lead to more viable innovation.[45]  Of course, it still pays to ensure that you and your clients ‘close down’ at the end of debate session so that the diverge/converge ebb and flow remains visible, and each encounter ends with new questions not unresolved rancour.

Occasionally, you may encounter an organisation where the prevailing culture just isn’t ready for peace to break out.  When people have been told for a long time that “we play hard-ball here” and adversarial language and behaviour is the norm, proposing a sudden shift to empathetic role play (for instance) can promote a surprising degree of disharmony.  In these circumstances, there is relatively little likelihood of a creative climate spontaneously coming into being.  Sometimes, that impasse is broken through teams resorting to subversive self-directed creativity, with meetings and experimentation off-site or exploration in private time.  The risks of this can be managed through building-in some authorised ‘bootlegging time’ to working routines as practised at 3M[46] although this can be a long-term change process rather than an opportunity to demonstrate rapid value from your facilitation/change management skills.

Where the culture is really ‘stuck’ with conflictual behaviour and the leaders you are working with are determined to see this change, this can also be an opportunity to amplify the leverage of those leaders (a result which few clients object to, of course).  The detail of the Adaptive Leadership concept[47] is particularly helpful here, especially the injunction to leaders to intentionally ‘cook the conflict’.  Such orchestration of conflict requires skilled and definite facilitative support, both to challenge any tendency to duck the issues and to ensure a constructively-managed conclusion to the argument (having certainly diverged thoroughly, converging becomes all the more important).

If you are considering such a managed constructive conflict, this is probably going to be an Adaptive change indeed and a condensed version of Heifetz et al’s checklist is a sensible guide for approaching the process as a change exercise:

1. Prepare the ground.  Identify the competing ideas and their advocating spokespeople or factions, and use a little Appreciative Inquiry to ascertain what these factional representatives care about as well as the creative idea they wish to promote (e.g. organisational survival, personal ambition, promoting their profession etc.).

2. Put the different perspectives upon the table, exploring all factions’ ideas in the same depth – and if necessary, ensuring that the ‘rebel’ proposal gets equal billing to the ‘official’ concept.

3. Stage-manage debate so that all sides get to explore the other’s concerns, aspirations, and enthusiasms.

4. Arbitrate and negotiate, if possible concluding with a shared commitment to mutual experimentation.

What this is likely to mean in practice is that person-collision Conflict is gradually steered towards idea-collision Debate.  If you can pull that off, you will have made an immense contribution to a creative climate in the organisation.  Less cant, more Kant, you could say.

- The team needs idea collisions, not person collisions.

- Stage some debates, with role play if appropriate, concluding with convergence.

- Sell change to managers as part of adaptive leadership – ‘cooking the conflict’.

Taking Risks

Why change?

The ‘Lady with the Lamp’ should probably be better-known as the Lady with the Pie Charts.  Florence Nightingale’s contributions to health went far beyond the modest innovation of self-illuminated ward rounds, after all.  In our more enlightened age she would have been regarded as a pioneering epidemiologist, and a practical game-changer.  Having identified that more soldiers were dying in field hospitals than in field skirmishes, she created new graphical representations – including an early version of what we now know as the ‘spider chart’ – to convey that ground-breaking finding with the impact it merited.[48]  This didn’t completely revolutionise actual healthcare practice overnight, but she published her work, explained how her presentation bypassed the irrational choice to provide inadequately sterile trauma facilities, and the medical profession as a whole was able to engage in some double-loop learning of its own.

If the negligence towards soldiers wounded in battle looks irrational from our perspective, this may be a helpful clue to how such poor decision-making was driven.  As Robert West has explored in some detail,[49] many of our decisions about change are driven not by cold logic but through a swirling blend of vague plans for the future, thoughts about current action priorities, semi-conscious urges, desires, and evaluations of right and wrong.  To that heady mix add fear – fear of failure.

When Risk-taking scores low, this may well indicate that the climate is limiting creativity through a risk-averse organisational culture, which in turn produces idea-gagging anxiety.  To arrive at innovations which succeed in a competitive marketplace, experimentation with many (divergent) ideas is almost always vitally necessary.

Some of these divergent ideas will inevitably fail, indeed it is essential that they do and that it is learnt from.  But if the crucial necessity of that fail-and-learn dynamic is not reflected and rewarded within team norms and management behaviours, that sense of failure can easily be displaced to individuals.  When office gossip (whether in the kitchen or boardroom) conflates an idea which failed with the individual who had the idea being a failure themselves, there is naturally going to be a problem (and this happens even in the most enlightened of institutions).

So there are perceived risks, and real risks; necessary small failures to learn from, and big organisational failures to avoid at all costs.  A truly creative climate embraces the small risks in order to keep the ‘killer’ organisational risks at bay.

To return to the setting of Florence Nightingale’s break-through, the Crimean War, fear of perceived personal failure notably led to very real strategic and tactical failures.  The fear of appearing weak or overly concerned with ‘Women’s Work’ may have been a contributor to the inattention to hygiene and treatment facilities, and succeeded only in reducing the number of men available for combat on the British side.  A fear of being seen to exhibit ‘failure of nerve’ could also have been a factor in the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade, where not taking the moderate risk of questioning orders led to the suicidal risk of galloping into a firing range.

These are extreme examples, of course, but the comparison to everyday working life is straightforward enough; if we don’t feel safe to share our ideas our creative insights will be lost, and if we don’t feel safe to experiment with creative ideas in the expectation that some will fail then innovation will be stymied.  The organisation that does what it has always done will get the results it has always got... until a competitor introduces a better product.  Not taking those intermediate, learning-opportunity risks can mean accepting a big, fatal, existential risk not far down the line.

How to change – by attending to the interpersonal

What to do about the climate for necessary risk-taking?  Well firstly, don’t panic and don’t let your client panic either.  Overly dramatic responses which seek to change the ‘macroclimate’ of the whole organisation are often doomed to fizzle out, but a bottom-up change to the micro-climate of the team or business division[50]  is usually possible.  You need to deal with the fear.

That fear, or at least anxiety, usually stems from the interpersonal dynamics within the team, or from decision-making processes which are struggling to respond to uncertainty.

If personal factors appear to be a major factor, then your skills as a consultant could make all the difference.  Observe the group dynamics and stage a discreet intervention with the individual(s) blocking appropriate risk-taking, perhaps with the team leader’s involvement in the conversation (unless it’s the team leader holding up the show, which can indeed happen).  Negotiate a way for the individual(s) to model some appropriate risk-taking themselves, either by getting actively behind an experiment, or at least by greeting novel ideas with a “yes, and” response rather than a reflex “that wouldn’t work here”.  Take those gradual modifications to behaviour into a few meetings, coach/mentor to embed them into normal practice, and you may well have done enough to get change started.

How to change – using Herzberg

If response to uncertainty looks like the root issue, then your client team has a genuine climate problem.  There may nevertheless be an overlap with interpersonal factors; the boss will often have a large part to play in setting a culture which normalises either permission-seeking or forgiveness-granting.  Some higher-level management ‘top cover’ in the organisation is likely to be helpful in championing more positive attitudes to risk,  and Herzberg has provided a sturdy hook upon which to hang that conversation.

You may already be familiar with Herzberg’s separation of ‘hygiene’ factors and motivating factors in the relationship between leadership and team members.[51]  To refresh your memory, the first factor draws its name from a metaphor about how we all critique restaurants.  We advise friends to actively avoid an eatery with poor hygiene, but to get a positive recommendation it will need more than good hygiene alone; the quality of food, warmth of service or affordability of pricing will be required as motivators to dine there again.  This can apply to conditions of employment, for instance as regards remuneration; it generally appears to be an important hygiene factor to ensure that salaries do not decrease, but a relatively ineffective motivator for salaries to increase (especially if work is an otherwise unrewarding experience).

Hygiene Factors

Motivation Factors

Supervision

Achievement

Working Conditions

Recognition

Interpersonal relationships

The work itself

Pay and job security

Responsibility

Company policies

Advancement and growth

In responding to a risk-averse climate, you can address both hygiene factors and motivators.  The hygiene factors include supervision, working conditions, interpersonal relationships (as we have already discussed), pay and job security, and the implications of organisational policies.  Motivators include all the good stuff; achievement, recognition, the experience of the work itself, responsibility, advancement and growth.  Not unlike Maslow’s earlier hierarchy of needs, creative self-actualising is unlikely until safety needs have been met, so the hygiene factors are a sensible initial target.

How to change – by attending to hygiene factors

To deal with the hygiene factors, employing a little Appreciative Inquiry[52] is, as ever, a helpful preliminary.  Ask what is good about the team’s own approach, then ask how the organisation and its leadership can support them to either take an experimental risk or ‘fail early’ to eliminate the risk of more expensive failures further along the value chain.  There is much you can then do as a facilitator, for instance by informing the business case for more relaxed supervision, by supporting internal advocacy for improved operating conditions in pilot studies, and by aiding the exploration of potential flexibility to take risks within existing organisational policies.

Where pay and conditions remain an issue, the full range of strategic HR responses are rather beyond the scope of this book, but it can certainly be useful to explore with the client how far positive, appropriate risk-taking is rewarded.  It is not so unusual in some sectors, for instance, for performance-related pay to be neither related to performance, nor a figure which really pays –  and in these ‘unhygienic’ circumstances a timely cut can be a considerable advantage.

How to change – by attending to motivators

As the team which you’re working with starts to make progress on the hygiene factors, you can get into exploring motivators – indeed, this is a fair opportunity to demonstrate your own readiness to take some creative risks.  The earlier Appreciative Inquiry work is likely to have shed light upon what it is that, on a good work day, gets them out of bed in the morning with a smile and a spring in their step.  That’s a good guide; those self-identified criteria, be they recognition, variety, freedom to experiment or intellectual satisfaction, are the motivators.

Work with the team and its leadership to devise and plan working practices which make space for motivating factors to do their work.  Those practices or benign habits may include experimental ‘bootlegging’ time or FedEx days with management blessing, symbolic rewards for devil-may-care experimentation (especially if it leads to early failure which yields learning), and opportunities to share the learning from tactical risk-taking with a genuinely appreciative audience.

Working-through such changes may well take a few weeks or months and it is unlikely to be a ‘quick fix’.  Organisations which have been through such change successfully report that it has altered their ‘corporate DNA’, and this is unlikely to happen overnight.  But then again, we’re still learning the lessons of the Crimea – for consultants (as for historians) there is always interesting, fulfilling, appropriately risky work to be done.

- Your clients need to embrace failure positively, and deal with fear.

- Address hygiene factors first (this is about motivation, Herzberg style).

- Then identify motivators and plan actions to maximise them.

Making Time for Ideas

Why change?

Tempus fugit.  Time flies, and a fly’s time especially so – just try removing one from your kitchen, and it’s amazing just how deftly it will dodge the blow.  But like other smaller animals, the fly exists in a different speed universe, in which it lives a life in a matter of days and our actions seem the epitome of sloth.[53]  Physically, of course, there is no difference in the speed at which time passes, unless the fleeing fly’s velocity is so great that the Theory of Special Relativity[54] can be invoked – and in those circumstances your swatting technique had better be something special indeed.  Nevertheless, the fly experiences reality at a rate other than ours.

Our own, human, experience of time’s passing can vary too, from the veteran looking back upon a distant youth that feels like a moment ago, to the curious slow-motion effect which seems to allow for extra thinking time in a high-speed car crash.  Between those extremes of fast and slow, there are more everyday variations in how the working day feels – and broadly-speaking, when a day at the office seems like wading through treacle, we’re unlikely to be at our creative best.

Flow allows for the inter-connected creativity which  produces real innovation.  One of its characteristics is that  when you’re in Flow time seems to pass deliciously languidly in the moment, but feels like the blink of an eye in retrospect.  As Csikszentmihalyi pointed out in his original research, that can happen almost automatically in dancing, chess or rock-climbing.  But making a climate which nurtures it at work takes some planning – and we do mean planning as a verb, not a set of dusty plans.[55]

It’s all too easy to say “go and make some time”, but it’s harder in practice – and making that time meaningfully idea time can be harder still.  Even the most liberally-inclined boss who frees generous chunks of the company timetable for creativity (whether it’s 3M bootlegging or Atlassian Fed-ex days)[56] will be disappointed unless that time has some hook for ideation activities to be hung upon.  Left entirely unencumbered by purpose, Parkinson’s law often applies – work expands to fill the time available.[57]  So to make idea time flourish when it is scoring low, some structure is required.

The structure for producing idea time does not have to be especially onerous or complex.  It may be true that great art comes from working within constraints, but for our purposes here those constraints are more along the lines of the loose-knit chords of jazz than the formal rules of sonnet or haiku.

One of the most seminal of all jazz recordings, Miles Davis’ classic Kind of Blue, was recorded in two days using seasoned artists who could go beyond set improvisation on a theme and play freely with the scales and modes of each piece.  All Miles and Bill Evans had to do (not that we want to make it sound easy) was sketch out the structure of each track, and the players got to work exploring.[58]

If we were to similarly sketch a creativity incubation process, it might look something like the diagram below – a series of  ‘toned’ steps connected by the blue diamond, which itself indicates relative amounts of ideation time requires for each step.  Note that the need for group time-on-task is often greatest at the junction between ‘diverge’ and ‘converge’.

How to change – through improvisation

Nassim Taleb suggests that "your brain is most intelligent when you don't instruct it on what to do – something people who take showers discover on occasion".[59]  That state of relaxed (in)attention can certainly work well for individual creativity, but teams often need... something to do.

So like the approach favoured by jazz greats, we’d encourage any team requiring more (or better) idea time to try improvising first, using any of the techniques in this book which appeal.  That may mean you as the facilitator initially helping to ‘join the dots’ between the divergent or convergent energies this releases.

But even masters like Miles will sometimes find it tough to know where to start.  For them, Brian Eno’s ‘oblique strategies’ cards[60] offer a more random launching-point, used successfully by the likes of David Bowie (yes, even he could get stuck at the idea-generation stage).

You can, if you feel the team you’re working with would benefit, emulate the oblique strategy effect by opening a book (including this one) at a random page, or indeed by borrowing from the original oblique strategy set.  We won’t print the whole set here, but some of our favourites include:

- Abandon normal instructions

- Ask people to work against their better judgement

- Don't be frightened to display your talents

- Emphasize differences

- First work alone, then work in unusual pairs

- Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place

- How would you explain this to your parents?

- Mechanize something idiosyncratic

- Pay attention to distractions

- Remove a restriction

- Steal a solution.

- Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance

- Turn it upside down

- Use "unqualified" people.

- What most recently impressed you? How is it similar?

- Your mistake was a hidden intention

How to change – singing from set song-sheets

If your clients are scoring low on Idea Time they need to not only make time, but be offered some structured uses for that time so that it is largely productive.

For client team members who have not yet found their own ‘oblique strategy’, here are some simple exercises which can make idea time fruitful as a solo number.

- Exaggeration/reversals

- Dream and image manipulation (in private if it feels too zany)

- Solve it like a superhero (again one for those with a lively ‘inner child’)

- Solve the problem, not the question (what are you not trying to solve?)

- Identifying lessons from history (“how have I seen this screwed-up before?”)

NB do reinforce that introverts do not have to share the wilder details of such flights of fancy with colleagues – but make space for extroverts to do so if they wish.

When a group needs to play in concert (keeping the jazz theme), some different techniques are worth recommending if, again, the team have not yet spontaneously discovered their own ‘oblique strategy’:

- Brain sketching and ‘rich picture’ exercises – drawing a graphical representation of the issue(s), and then either developing this individually[61] or passing around the group to add to.[62]

- ‘Bunches of bananas’ method – identifying quirky or off-beat teasers, posers and jokes to lob in to meetings which get stuck – and timing them for when a bunch of bananas is just what everyone’s waiting for.[63]

- Gallery methods – generating ideas individually or in teams, then posting these as a gallery of summarised thoughts to trigger emulation, collaboration or further development.[64]

- Pin cards – somewhat like gallery methods, but instead of participants touring a gallery of cards, the cards are passed circuitously amongst the team to be added to or commented upon.[65]

- Progressive revelation – the problem is presented only in abstract form at first and then a little more detail is added successively as the group indulges in lateral thinking.[66]

Collectively, such approaches can be labelled as creative problem-solving, design thinking or strategic gaming; different people will have different perspectives and, much as record shops struggled to categorise Miles Davis in his lifetime, it doesn’t matter as long as there’s a chance that those random riffs become a jam worth playing back.  Give the Idea Time enough of a sketch to keep it going until ‘round midnight, and no-one will see you as Freddie Freeloader.

3: Embed the change

How was it for you?

Let’s be honest. You’d probably heard of double-loop learning long before picking up this book, and you’ve probably used the phrase too.  It looks good on bids, tenders and offers of consultancy input, but often completing that second loop is a task which gets forgotten in the rush and bustle of everyday organisational life.  Your client may even feel, at some level, somewhat exposed by needing  your input to generate or regain a creative climate.  When they indicate that your assistance was welcome but it’s time to move on, it’s all too easy to concur, and set the second loop aside in favour of more lucrative or career-enhancing jobs.  But you deserve better, and so do your client’s staff.

As a consultant or as a manager, you already know that you need to learn from each piece of work you do, and learning about how you learn isn’t an optional element of that – it’s a core element of your professional armoury.  You are entitled to share your reflections upon organisational learning with your colleagues and the client, and entitled to expect responses to those reflections too.  If your clients’ managers are champing at the bit to get going with the next task on their to-do lists, remember that their team members need the second loop completed in order that the ‘learning about learning’ has a decent chance to complete the journey towards a truly creative climate (which can take time).  So, you’re arguably even abdicating your duties as a consultant if you don’t find a constructive way to make that challenge and conclude the dialogue.

Having said all that, in the real world it’s not always easy; finding time for reflection and then actually using it is a ‘big ask’ sometimes.  If you have access to professional mentoring or coaching, exploring the second loop is a great way to use it.  If you need to reflect on your own, we’d like to pose a few questions to aid such applied consideration.

1. Applying KAI to your own approach to this piece of work, were you an Adaptor or Innovator?  The mere fact of selling your services as a creativity and innovation consultant does not necessarily mean you always lean towards the Innovator end of Kirton’s continuum; after all, the variety of measures detailed in this book could be seen as a series of Adaptor steps.  How do you see you preference on the KAI scale – and does it match with your clients’ perceptions of your input?

2. How much play do you participate in and benefit from it yourself?  What ideas are you generating or bringing-in to exploration as a result of dreams, flashes of inspiration during creative down-time, off-beat thoughts while building shapes with Lego?  Does sharing such inspiration make you more or less dynamic?

3. Do you model failure-tolerance successfully?  Have you found ways in this project to generate new or more divergent Idea Time?  Can you give examples of where your input has enabled to give ideas perceived as ‘risky’ more Idea Support?

Hopefully, you’ll enjoy using and improving upon the ideas in this book as much as we do.  We’re not sure where creativity sits in Porter’s Five Forces[67] – maybe it’s the missing sixth – but whatever number it comes in at... may the force be with you.

- In closing, review  what has been learnt (and how).

- Review can be qualitative, quantitative, or both.

- Measure, change, measure again – then stop.

When it all comes together: 1

Real life organisational change is messy, but often messy in a good way.  Zak Moore, one of this book’s authors, used the approach laid out here in a global publishing company; an experience they’re pleased to share, and we hope will be added to in future.

The publishing company is now trialling a new approach to strengthen the team’s interpersonal engagement and innovative leaning through a series of “FedEx Days.”  These “FedEx Days” are 24-hour bursts of freedom and creativity geared toward delivering value-creating software (or other products), as described by Daniel Pink in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.[68]  They  also have some similarity with ‘proof of concept’ tests or ‘spikes’.  The value such exercises create may be derived from cash-earning products, process efficiencies, learning or a mix of these benefits.

To gauge the teams’ pre-FedEx Days’ status, the Head of Solutions Development and Delivery commissioned a creativity climate measurement.  The Head’s take on the challenges was that climate is to a team what culture is to an organisation; you can feel the climate differences between teams, so measuring different climate elements within a team would help to identify a team’s climate conditions.

To start, we prepared a questionnaire for the three technical teams to complete.  Before giving it to the teams, Zak called on a strategic VP to provide ‘top cover’ and enthuse the staff as well as help to mitigate any hesitancy by team members.  The VP’s discussion centred around how sometimes you have to take risks and be willing to seek forgiveness rather than permission.  The initial creativity measurement results are shown below.

As is evident from the chart, Dynamism (the pace of change), Idea Time (do you have time to think things through before you have to act?) and Idea Support (are there resources to give new ideas a try?) were the lowest scoring elements.

We chose “FedEx Days” as a way to address the lowest-scoring elements and to encourage staff to use new techniques for creative problem-solving in time-bounded activities.

The initial plan (created in 2013) was to arrange one ‘FedEx Day’ in January, another in March and the final one in June 2014.  The intention was that everyone could work on something in self-organised teams.  In January 2014, another manager picked up responsibility for this initiative and the focus shifted somewhat from that previously envisaged.  Due to budgetary constraints two pilot study days were decided on, rather than a comprehensive set of ‘FedEx Days’.

After understanding and accepting the realpolitik of the new focus, we looked more at product-focused innovation, with the aim being to allow creative thinking and working to come through as a result of the activities chosen.

Once the horse-trading was dealt with and suitable compromises were made, the first ‘FedEx Day’ was scheduled for 24 January 2014.  The initial group of cross-department volunteers were presented with an idea supplied by the Customer Discovery and Innovation team.

The first agreed rule was that hierarchy does not operate in the group.  The managers shifted from command and control to facilitation mode, making sure the team knew that their backs were covered.  The group was encouraged to think creatively and covertly and to operate in ‘guerrilla mode’.  They were provided with several creative problem-solving techniques which are classified below.  Some used them, some did not.

Afterwards the business sponsor said:  “It was the first time, to my mind, that we proved we could turn our primary data into an app which fits our strategic goals to build more value into primary data, which has increasing competition from free data.”

To determine if the proposed climate changes were on track, a detailed questionnaire was completed by all participants.  It focused on the creativity parameters originally identified for improvement as well as two core knowledge management metrics.

Parameter/Metric

Day 1

Day 2

Networking and relationships (total number of new contacts made)

13

0

Communication (relative: based on use of face to face time, phones, social media)

8

3.8

Dynamism (Score: 1 lot worse, 2 worse, 3 same, 4 better, 5 much better)

4

2.9

Idea support (Score: 1 lot worse, 2 worse, 3 same, 4 better, 5 much better)

3.5

3.8

Idea Time (Score: 1 lot worse, 2 worse, 3 same, 4 better, 5 much better)

4

4

The results show that idea support and idea time are improving.  Day 1 was a customer-led pull innovation and Day 2 was technical push innovation.  Better networking and communication is experienced during customer-led innovation.

Two developers subsequently ran a ‘Code Dojo’ to share the tacit knowledge they gained from their ‘FedEx Day’. Following the FedEx Day theme, these are one-hour sessions, intended to be intense and engaging.  It’s a great way to share tacit knowledge among technical teams.

So What?

A number of other ideas are in gestation for potential future ‘FedEx Days’.  It is also time to evaluate the lessons learned, using tools such as the spider chart above.

Once the plan changed away from the initial strategy for the ‘FedEx Days’, it became more difficult to use the initial measures and goals.  Nevertheless, the client did find that there are clear pluses and minuses to taking this approach to improving the culture of innovation.

Pilot study results are encouraging.  The climate measurement will be repeated to determine if there has been a significant shift since the December 2013 benchmark.  Then there will be a department-wide assessment to determine how to carry on the process.

When it all comes together: 2

Comscientia delivered this creative climate change approach at a design agency.

The project was geared to assembling a team to present a bid for a global telecommunications company.  This first involved showing the team how the associated Agile approach works and providing them with confidence to carry out two-hour one-on-one practical sessions with the client organisation.

The project was very short – two weeks – with the Agile ‘sprints’ compressed into daily sessions.

The examples of various team activities provides an insight into the softer side of Agile Development; putting people first allowed the climate measurement tools to generate rapid buy-in to a fast-paced learning process.

Meet the team

We had a culturally diverse team preparing a bid for a multinational telecoms client.  The team consisted of two Product Owners, two Scrum Masters, two QAs, two Testers and two Developers.  If you’re not immediately familiar with these roles, don’t worry – you’re welcome to look up the relevant Agile terminology, but it’s not essential to the story.

This is us having a "chatacino".  It was fun to get out of the office and have the occasional extended stand-up meeting at the coffee shop.

The following sections will look at climate, planning, communication, measurement and retrospectives – and the lessons we learned from the whole exercise.

Shared Mental Models

Comscientia joined the project with most of the team already in place.  On Day One we were introduced to the processes of the company and quietly observed what was happening in the team.  It was quickly evident that there were some sharply opposed viewpoints among team-members.

To ascertain the different viewpoints in the team we facilitated a Magazine Cover session.

The results below show the most different productions.  The first was produced by a pair of developers, and the second by the Product Owners.

With the team now aware that there were varied viewpoints of what we were trying to achieve we had a group vote in what aspects of the learning process they wanted to improve.  Rather than kick off a potentially divisive debate about the merits of one point of view over the other we carried out a climate survey.

Climate

The team was new; most people had not worked together before.  In this case the question is: “What type of climate do you want?”.  We restricted the number of votes per member to focus what they consider their top priorities.  A simple flip-chart listing the Climate parameters was set up and the team dot-voted on an ideal climate.

In this case the team wanted trust and openness, challenge and playfulness with dynamism and idea support.  We took time to discuss the votes and find examples of specific actions the team would like.  In short, they wanted pair-work with different functional members.  This informed the techniques and methods used during the training to break out of an office bound mentality.

Communication

The next day we facilitated a ‘Blind Man Walking' session with the functional pairs split.  This was the turning point in the communication level in the team.  Here is a Product Owner being led by a developer.

Admittedly, not everyone immediately took to the ice breaker approach; two members blind-walked out for a coffee instead!

In general, the closer the members were to the business (Product Owners and QAs), the more they enjoyed the sessions.  The developers found them a little abstract and did not always enjoy being moved out of their comfort zones (see lessons learned below).

The dividends were reaped during the ‘code dojos’.  The increased level of communication made the more hesitant and introspective team members realise that they could contribute to the debates that developed during the dojo.

Measurement and visibility

All teams need to be able to see the progress – and importantly so does the business.  We used a Scrum wall that was updated daily to show tasks moving from the backlog through the phases of work until they were complete.

Retrospectives

Each ‘sprint’ should have a retrospective to generate and share lessons learned; we have seen retrospectives range from an hour to a day in duration, but we find the shorter ones more productive.

Here is a retrospective we facilitated in action, using divergent and convergent techniques

The teams produced force-field and fishbone diagrams to create contrasting viewpoints of various topics that had cropped up during the sprint.  It was the first time that the majority of the team had used such diagrams.  This focused the dialogue and debate with ‘warm’ actions rather than plodding through the same stuffy agenda-and-minutes processes.  They enjoyed the experience.

The retrospective led to another block vote to decide on the topics to address.

This is an example of a self-organising team using double-loop learning to alter its environment, with added benefits in terms of morale and productivity.

Lessons learned

1. Not everybody enjoys being moved out of their comfort zones.  Leadership requires knowing how far individuals can be pushed and when and why to do it.

2. Ice breaker activities lead to better communication – usually.

3. ‘Code dojos’ transfer know-how and are enjoyable.

4. Group normative techniques are extremely useful to include and involve more introverted team members.

5. The realisation of self-organisation is best achieved through double-loop learning where the team can alter its environment by changing variables it controls but may not know exist.

So What?

Some people laughed at some of the methods we employed.  The client, however, was impressed enough at the outcomes to offer repeat business.  Sometimes, that’s all the feedback you need.

It's all about you

Congratulations on getting this far!  We hope that you have found the book useful, and look forward to hearing many tales of how it has been put to use.

In this book we introduced creative climate change. It is a way into the form of complex problem solving often referred to as ‘wicked’.

There are, of course, other aspects of the Wicked Framework that we would like to share with you.

We’d be grateful if you’d take a moment to visit our site, www.comscientia.com, and let us know which area(s) of complex problem solving you would like us to cover next

and us...

Keith Burnett and Zak Moore met while undertaking an Open University MBA. This course featured an excellent module on creativity and innovation, which has informed both of their fields of practice ever since.

Zak is an engineer by training, and over the last few years he has been applying creative problem solving techniques with global teams to great effect (as evidenced by repeat bookings).

Keith read history and politics then trained as a social worker, and now takes creativity methods into the not-for-profit world, including support to teams who wish to introduce ‘innovation by stealth’.

Zak and Keith very much welcome feedback about how you use this book and how you’d like to see it evolve – contact via http://www.comscientia.com.

We thank

Reviewers

Dana Wassarman, David McLoughlin, Dieter Stefanowitz, Elvin Box, Enda Logan, Ewan Mochrie, Geoff Trickey, Horst Kucharczyk, Jim Stevenson, Johannes Waldestein, John Brooker, Joost Willemson, Linda Lawton, Philip Hodson, Pier Lorenzo Paracchini, Rachel Davies, Ray Devaney, Sean Glasgow, Tom Hall

Tool enhancements

Stephen Collier and Tim Lennon refined the tool so that it presents information beautifully.

Notes

1. Kotter, J (2002) The Heart of Change Boston; Harvard Business School Press

2. Snow, T. A. and Couger, J. D. (1996) ‘Creativity improvement in a system development work unit’, Creativity and Innovation Management, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 234–41.

3. Handy, C (1978) Gods of Management: The Changing Work of Organisations London; Souvenir Press

4. Jackson, P.Z. and McKergow, M. (2002) The Solutions Focus Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE Second edition, London, Nicholas Brealey International

5. Block, P (2000) Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, 2nd edition San Francisco; Pfeiffer

6. O’Dell, C., Huber, C. (2011) The New Edge in Knowledge, Hoboken NJ, Wiley

7. Csikszentmihalyi, M (1975) Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, San Francisco; Jossey-Bass

8. Simpson, J (1988). Touching the Void. London; Jonathan Cape.

9. Kirton, M. J. (1984) ‘Adaptors and Innovators – Why New Initiatives Get Blocked’, Long Range Planning, 17, 2, pp. 137–43

10. Henry, J. and Walker, D. (1991) Managing Innovation,

London: Sage.

11. Cooperrider, DL, Whitney, D, Stavros, JM (2008) Appreciative Inquiry Handbook: For Leaders of Change, San Francisco; Berrett-Koehler

12. Leonard-Barton, D. (1998) Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation, Boston, MA, Harvard Business School Press.

13. Nietzsche, F (1872) Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, Leipzig; E.W. Fritzsch

14. Argyris, C.; Schon, D. (1978). Organizational Learning: A theory of action perspective. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley

15. Hofstede, G. (1984) Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values, Beverley Hills CA: Sage.

16. Maslow, A. (1954) Motivation and Personality, New York, Harper.

17. Myers, Isabel Briggs; McCaulley Mary H.; Quenk, Naomi L.; Hammer, Allen L. (1998). MBTI Manual (A guide to the development and use of the Myers Briggs type indicator) p.131. Consulting Psychologists Press; 3rd edition

18. Hirsch, S. K. (1985) Using the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator in Organisations: a resource book, Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.

19. Kirton, op.cit.

20. Newton, I (1687) Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, London: The Royal Society

21. Hobbs, CL (2002) Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity; Vico, Condillac, Monboddo, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press

22. Maugham, S (1949) A Writer’s Notebook London; Heinemann

23. Lewis, J, Passmore, J, Cantore, S (2008)  Appreciative Inquiry For Change Management London; Kogan Page

24. Kirton op.cit.

25. Ansoff, H.I. (1965) Corporate Strategy, New York; McGraw-Hill.

26. Huber, G.P. and Delbecq, A. (1972) ‘Guidelines for combining the judgements of individual members in decision conferences’, Academy of Management Journal, 15, 159–74

27. Henry, J. and Martin, J.N.T. (1997) Creative Problem-solving Guide, B882 Residential School Booklet, The Open University

28. Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., Peterson, R.O. and Capwell, D.F.(1957).Job Attitudes: Review of research and opinion. Pittsburgh: Psychological Service of Pittsburgh.

29. Kotter, J (2002) The Heart of Change Boston; Harvard Business School Press

30. Shakespeare, W (1623) ‘The Tragedie of King Lear’ in Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies London; Jaggard and Blount [reference is to Act 5 Sc3]

31. Corrigan, P (1999) Shakespeare on Management, London; Kogan Page

32. Henderson, B (1970) The Product Portfolio, Boston Consulting Group

33. Csikszentmihalyi (1975) op.cit.

34. Csikszentmihalyi, M (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York; Harper & Row

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36. Shakespeare op.cit, Act 1 Scene 1

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