Creative People Must Be Stopped (9 page)

Unfortunately, similar people are also more likely to share characteristics that inhibit innovation goals, such as generating a wide variety of ideas. They may have overlapping experience bases, social networks, and even problem-solving approaches. By limiting the kinds of input the group generates, the very similarity that helps the members “get along” can drastically reduce the group's information processing power—the very quality we seek in forming a group.

Enforcing a Shared Sense of Meaning

Organizational psychologist Karl Weick (1995) defines
sense
as the meaning that allows members to know
that
they are a group,
why
they are a group, and
what
it is that they intend to accomplish as a group. When answers to these fundamental questions are clear and obvious, groups can be extremely effective and efficient. When there are murky or competing goals, or when the situation changes precipitously and unexpectedly, or when members' behaviors no longer seem logical or reasonable, then members must engage in what Weick calls “sense making.”

Sense making is natural and important to groups. If a group's mission or identity becomes indescribable or chaotic, or if members feel that the group is no longer in control, the loss of sense can threaten the group's cohesion and even its existence. You may have been part of a group that ended up dissolving or gradually fading away because it lost a clear sense of purpose or because the group members felt that its goals were no longer relevant.

Once again, however, the efforts we take to make groups function well may work at cross-purposes with our goal of fostering fresh, creative thinking. What can happen is that members work to increase buy-in and cohesion by adopting an easily shared, often standard definition of the problem they are trying to solve and by using generic, vague, and uncontroversial language to describe their goals and the process for reaching them. These behaviors will have the effect of bridging differences between members, but they can significantly reduce the group's ability to frame its challenge in multiple, paradoxical, and ambiguous ways, something needed to realize true innovation.

Adhering to Traditions and Taboos

As an organizational or group culture takes form, those ideas and activities that are considered sensible and valuable become a shared tradition. In one company, for example, every staff or team meeting begins with a “fun” icebreaking exercise that has nothing to do with the task at hand. Somewhere along the way this practice hardened into a tradition that no one questions, and it is now part of the organization's culture. By the same token, behaviors that are felt to be threatening to the culture become tacitly or openly forbidden. These prohibited practices are known as taboos.

Traditions and taboos help create a sense of group identity and establish familiar ways of working that don't have to be renegotiated with each new interaction. But they can also constrain innovation by reinforcing old ways of looking at problems or by making potential alternative approaches seem off-limits. More subtly, ways of thinking and talking that were valuable in the past may be unable to express today's problems, challenges, and potential solutions or facilitate fresh thinking about them. Although they probably did so for different reasons, the shift by some organizations to refer to their customers as “clients” or their employees as “associates” can force a break and opens new possibilities. In fact, innovation requires us to generate ideas that are as
different
as possible from the ones that have become second nature to us.

Overcoming Culture Constraints

A group culture will develop whether or not anyone consciously tries to influence it. Instead of letting nature take its course, group leaders and members can shape the culture of a team as it develops, in order to maximize the group's capacity to be innovative.

Mix Up Group Membership

In some research on early-stage R&D groups, I found that newly formed groups tended to seek homogeneity as a buffer against the uncertainty of the project's outcome. I find the same thing in teams of MBA students working on projects: by choosing people they know well as teammates, they are unlikely to get surprised by odd behaviors, especially around the time that assignments are due. Yet when projects are complex and don't fit a simple solution paradigm, what we need is a healthy variety of perspectives and skills. Unfortunately, by the time we recognize the need for greater diversity, often the cost of socially integrating new group members and bringing them up to speed seems too high.

Usually we don't like people
because
they are different from us. That is to say, they see the world in ways that aren't ours and know things we don't. That, of course, is why we should deliberately seek them out and invite them into groups working on innovation problems. As a marketing student put it to me recently while turning in a project assignment, “I don't like the attitude that the finance students have around here, but it sure would've been nice to have someone who actually knew how to use Excel.”

You should also stay mindful of the group's composition as the group moves into different phases of its process. Different parts of projects require different skills, which means that some current group members may not have the knowledge or habits of thought they need in order to contribute to the work as productively as they did in earlier phases. Unless they show sufficient ability and willingness to learn and change, in such cases it's best to uninvite them from particular parts of the process. To make this kind of separation less painful for all, you can set the stage by being clear from the start that the makeup of the group may change as the work evolves and by warmly celebrating the contributions of a departing member.

Explore to Learn, Exploit to Produce

Most organizations are designed for efficiency. Whether it's assembling a car more quickly and cheaply or educating schoolkids in bulk, the goal is maximum output for the least amount of input. If routine production is the goal, this approach may work, as it preserves resources and minimizes waste. However, for groups pursuing innovation, valuing efficiency above all else will severely constrain them. In groups dominated by a culture of efficiency, members will want to get any needed learning over with and move toward implementation as quickly as possible.

Common strategies are to use a solution from a problem that we have already mastered or to find an expert who already knows how to do it. Maybe it's not innovative or even ideal, but at least it makes us feel as though things are moving. For one-time projects performed under time pressure or for problems that don't require a new approach—for example, organizing a mailing list or reporting financial performance—these strategies can work well. However, for a group seeking a new approach and desiring to build innovation skills, these tactics don't help. Not only do you lose the actual learning, but you lose out on improving your process of learning as well.

To overcome this tendency, reframe your group's view of learning and progress. Don't think of progress as being a move from ignorance to mastery, and of rapid progress as an even faster move. Rather, consistent with the ideas of James March (1991), consider that your group starts in an
exploration
mode, where you are focused on gathering information, testing relationships, and developing understanding. You are not “ignorant”; you are rigorously exploring the space. Next, you engage an
exploitation
mode, taking advantage of your insights to develop a highly efficient and effective system. You don't end in “mastery”; you develop an effective and efficient way to exploit the ideas and insights you have gained.

Rapid progress is not achieved by getting from the start of the project to the finish as quickly as possible. Rather, it comes from the group's ability to know how and when to move back and forth between these mutually reinforcing modes, as the project requires.

Prize New Problem-Solving Methods over Traditions and Taboos

In the course of a study on R&D teams, I observed as a group of hardware engineers (people who design circuit boards and microprocessors) grappled with a particularly hard problem in the design of a computer. At one point, one of them offered that maybe the problem could be better addressed by software. If the group passed the problem to the software engineers, she proposed, the problem would be solved more efficiently than it would be if the group insisted on solving it using chips and circuits.

The other members of the team just looked at her incredulously. Even though they could see that she was correct, passing problems to “those guys” was obviously not an acceptable solution in the culture of the hardware engineers. She got the message, and the group continued struggling to solve the problem in hardware.

Taboos like this can be good if they prevent bad or dangerous decisions, like the taboo I grew up with against eating the wild mushrooms that my uncle had picked. However, unless you are a fraternity or a gang, when the taboos in the group serve only to reinforce turf claims or become a test of loyalty for members, they do nothing but close down alternative sources of ideas and insights that might apply to your problem.

As any anthropologist will tell you, it is extremely difficult to determine your own group's cultural traditions and taboos, but there are ways you can flush them out. Enlist someone not trained in your field to sit in on a meeting of your group and ask him or her to report some observations afterwards. You can also learn by consciously observing your team at the next meeting with “those guys.” See if you can determine whether any points of conflict that emerge are ones of substance or of tradition and culture.

Once you know the rules, it'll be easy to catch yourself and the team when you fail to think differently. Ask persistently and politely, “Why aren't we considering another way of doing this?”

Environment Constraints: Comfort Versus Collaboration

Many of us find that we are more productive in some environments than in others when tackling specific kinds of tasks. When generating ideas, some people prefer absolute quiet, whereas others do their most creative work in noisy, stimulus-filled places. For individuals, this constraint is usually straightforward to overcome: simply change places. But what about working environments for groups, in which preferences differ and interaction needs to be facilitated? The spaces that groups use are usually chosen by what is available and possibly comfortable to members of the group. Rarely are they chosen or designed so as to enhance the kind of interactions needed during an innovation project. But as we are about to see, a group's working environment can seriously constrain innovation by affecting the way the group processes information and emotion.

Using Spaces That Impede Interaction

Our physical environment shapes interactions in a number of ways. For example, when individuals sit face-to-face across the table, the seating arrangement sets up an implicit competition between them. Studies looking at communication patterns find that the most argumentative and oppositional statements made in a group sitting at a table tend to be directed at the individual seated exactly opposite (e.g., Sillars, Pike, Jones, and Murphy, 1984). Rectangular tables reinforce this dynamic, which is why many “creative design” tables have irregular shapes.

Other aspects of the physical space also affect a group's ability to fulfill its mission. Offices and conference rooms are usually designed for routine work. Recognizing this, many interior designers suggest fashioning a “creative workspace” by omitting walls, lowering cubicles, and encasing conference rooms in glass. Although the end result may look cool, it can become problematic for a group trying to do creative work.

The problem with glass-enclosed conference rooms, for example, is the distractions outside. The knowledge that the group is virtually under surveillance can create social pressure on the group members, encouraging them to restrict their behaviors to those that will seem normal and justifiable to anyone who happens to be passing by (such as the boss). Such behaviors as becoming playful or engaging in healthy conflict are necessary to spur imagination, but they will be suppressed to the extent that they might be perceived as not being real work.

Communicating Using Limited Media

In addition to spatial arrangements or geography, other aspects of the physical environment, such as the tools provided to a group, can powerfully shape its work.

Although it can be nice to have a large screen and a digital projector to illuminate it, these can only be driven from one person's computer at a time. We also default to using programs like PowerPoint or Keynote, which require the content to be developed in advance and make it all but impossible to change the presentation or even capture comments or insights as you go. IT staff and other expert users with access to digitizing tablets or touch screens might bristle at this assertion, suggesting that you can use the “digital ink” feature of these programs for annotating presentations. True, but the feature is limited to one person's input and is clunky at best.

This is not to say that these tools have no value; they are great for sharing information that one person has collected and organized into a “presentation” for the group. However, this is only a small part of an innovation group's work. Beyond perceiving the information, they need to interactively share, debate, and document the insights they develop
as
they develop them. When members lack access to the shared stream of thoughts and the progression of one another's ideas, much of the value of using a group can be lost.

These constraints are not just a function of our digital environments. An organization development consultant recently told me about trying to help a group of administrators at a college brainstorm ways of improving student achievement and faculty satisfaction. She reported that the conference room had one small whiteboard, about two by two feet in size, mounted in an awkward place on the long side of the room, and half the participants had to turn their chairs around to see it. There was one dried-out marker for the board, and it spent the entire morning in the hands of the school's dean. Clearly this was not a context for nurturing collaborative ideation.