We have covered a lot of ground in this book. I’m not asking for you to come up with the equivalent of a Gantt chart. Nor is it necessary for you to construct a top-to-bottom plan. In fact, all you need is one thing. In my executive education courses and consulting, all I ask is that my clients and students simply pick one thing to work on each month. Not ten, not seven, and not even three. Just one. It does not even have to be the most important one. Give it a name so it becomes an entity. Then pull out your calendar or planner and pick out the occasions or situations in which you want to make your intention a reality. That, quite simply, is the first step.

This book will be useful for you if you do just one thing differently next week. So, commit to making one simple change in your behavior next week. For example, “Hey Joe, I know we are having a brainstorming meeting next week. I’ve read some on the subject, and I’m wondering if I could have twenty minutes during the meeting to try an experiment in creativity?” Tell your team what your vision or goal is, how you want to modify yourself to fully commit to that goal, and how they can best help to make it successful. By doing this, you unconsciously empower your team to do the same thing.

When I work with executives in off-site retreats, they are excited about doing things differently. However, it is not enough to simply be excited. They need to write down their plan, and then tell two people about it. They need to specify a timeline. They need to commit. I call it creating your own virus. You need to make your plan go viral. It starts with you and then spreads to your network.

It takes approximately ten to fourteen days for a new behavior to become a habit. This goes for everything: stopping nail-biting, starting to floss, exercising, saying “yes” instead of “yeah,” etc. This means that for ten to fourteen days, you are going to have to consciously think about what you are doing. This takes energy and involves self-reflection. Most of us prefer to operate on automatic pilot and not think about our every action. To change a behavior, you need to observe yourself.

Part of committing to your plan involves identifying your co-conspirators: accomplices are absolutely critical for launching a creative conspiracy. The success of your creative conspiracy hinges on your collaborators. Who are these people? Have you briefed them on the mission?

For each person on your team, indicate how they could sabotage your plan. What would they do? What would they say? People are more likely to work against you when:

• They are not informed: So inform them. Be transparent. Tell them your ultimate goals.
  
• They are fearful: Whatever benefits and perks they are enjoying currently may disappear. Or they might not. Be explicit about how the plan is going to personally benefit the individuals involved.
  
• They see losses: So focus on the gains. Focus on the half-full glass. Point to the higher-order goal.
  

Once you’ve determined the goal and announced it, you need to start collecting data on your change effort. Bottom line: the only way to really improve is to collect data. By this, I mean asking for feedback, measuring things, and being rigorous and unbiased. Unfortunately, most people are seriously feedback-deprived. Other people are reluctant to offer us negative feedback and so they use watered-down language because they are afraid to speak the truth. To make matters worse, we not only don’t seek feedback, we actively avoid it. Seeking feedback in our organizations is like stepping on a bathroom scale. It often delivers unpleasant news and worst of all, it does not lie.

Unfortunately, dieting is easier than starting a creative conspiracy. The would-be dieter may avoid the bathroom scale, but there are other undeniable indicators that still offer feedback: the pants that don’t fit, the mirror, and the way that leftover cake disappeared in one sitting. However, unaware leaders in organizations can often go for years without getting real feedback. Whether we realize it or not, we unconsciously signal to others whether we are open to feedback or conversely, that we don’t want to hear anything negative. Feedback does not come to us; we need to invite it, and this means we need to signal we are working on improving our behavior. So, take notes, record dates, monitor progress. You are a role model for your team! A field study of feedback-seeking behavior of 387 managers as observed by their superiors, subordinates, and peers revealed that managers who sought negative feedback increased their accuracy of how people evaluated their work, and most important, received better evaluations of their overall performance by their managers. Conversely, those who sought positive feedback decreased their constituents’ opinions of their managerial effectiveness.

Feedback is essential for the continuous improvement of any system. Unfortunately, meaningful feedback is not easy to come by, because organizations often measure the wrong things—or they don’t measure anything at all. And people often distort information. In fact, studies of the ability of leaders and managers to make wise decisions have yielded relatively depressing results. The ability of decision makers to improve their judgments over time (even when they are deeply flawed) is remarkably difficult to do. People are often unwilling to look at relevant data and instead, prefer to seek data that simply confirms a rather flattering view of themselves.

So, decide in advance what behaviors and outputs you want to change and modify. Then, make sure to keep a log or journal and write down what you did, when you did it, and what the result was. Be clear and make it as scientific as possible. For example, suppose you are concerned that you are monopolizing meetings too much, cutting off others, and discouraging them from contributing. You might keep track of how often and how long you talk in meetings. Compare that to an ideal.

With regard to collecting data, keep in mind the BAT principle:

• Benchmarks: Ask for best-in-class examples. Who’s really a shining example of a certain behavior? Is there a team in the organization that sets the standard for others?
  
• Actionable: Focus on what you can change, not what you can’t change.
  
• Timing: Don’t wait a month or even a week for feedback; get it the same day or the same hour.
  

The most important data will come from the “enemy”—the people who are opposed to your plan. So, the creative conspirator must collect evidence from the critics. I used to have a professor who would admonish, “Your enemy is your best friend.” What Professor Tom Cook of Northwestern University was saying to us is that the people who are the most critical of your work are the people who can ultimately help you the most. I later came to realize that it is a gift when people take their time to criticize you and a curse when nobody bothers to read your work or comment on your performance. Professor Cook helped us all realize that being criticized at least means your ideas are important enough to be under discussion, rather than simply ignored.

My own experience with learning from the critics came from my own students. I was teaching a course that included an experimental new assignment, which I was quite confident would captivate students. It didn’t. As a matter of fact, they hated it and started to hate everything about the class. I suppose I should not have been surprised to see my abysmal teaching ratings! After sulking for about four days, I decided to treat my failed experiment like a failed product launch. So, I sent an e-mail to several of the most outspoken students in the class inviting them to lunch and what I described as a “focus group.” During lunch, I took out a large pad of paper and asked them to provide feedback on everything that should be changed about the assignment and the class. I listened and took notes. They came up with fantastic ideas, and the session was a success in brainstorming. I implemented those changes in the next term and received a completely different reaction from the students!

In 1993, psychologists Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer published research indicating that no one becomes an expert until they have studied and practiced about ten thousand hours, or approximately ten years of concentrated study. Remarkably, that seems to be true for chess players, tennis pros, business executives, and computer programmers. This looks daunting, right? However, anyone who has worked in the business world for at least five years (assuming a forty-hour workweek) has potentially accumulated enough hours to be an expert! If you consider a forty-year-old businessperson who took his first job at, say, age twenty-five and has worked eight-hour days for fifteen years, the time adds up to well over ten thousand hours. The question is: are you using the ten thousand hours of experience you have gained on the job to learn? The challenge is to start making expert sense of your business experience!

As strange as it sounds, it’s very hard for us to learn from our own experience. When you are an expert in your own domain, it is sometimes hard to see a forest when each tree is absorbing your attention. Biochemistry scientists are no exception. For years, solving protein structures remained one of the most challenging problems in science. Proteins take shape from a strand of building blocks, in the form of amino acids. Genes inform the cell’s protein-making machinery—the order for assembling the building blocks in a long, organized strand. When a complex protein, such as an HIV protease, comes off the assembly line, it coils and folds to form an intricate molecular machine. Unfortunately, even the most advanced computers can’t predict the structure of such large proteins, because there are simply too many possible horizons. It is a bit like figuring out all possible outcomes of a chess game. So, the researchers at University of Washington did the unthinkable. They developed an online game called Foldit that embodied the protein problem and invited nonscientist gamers to play it. Within three weeks, the gamers came up with an accurate model of the protease molecule. The biochemists had been trying to create a model for more than a decade!

This example reveals that sometimes stepping outside of our domain and looking at a problem from a totally different vantage point can bring insights. We use analogical reasoning any time we use an idea from one domain to help us understand a problem in a different domain. For example, the gamers used knowledge from their own domain (gaming) to help solve a problem in a different domain (biochemistry). Unfortunately, for most of us, it is not only challenging to think outside of our own domain, it is downright inconvenient. For this reason, I applaud the biochemists for going outside their domain to get insights about their problem.

I tell my clients to read their favorite books and magazines with a specific purpose in mind; similarly, I tell my doctoral students to read journal articles with the goal of thinking about how the theory and findings influence their research. I also tell my PhD students that everything they write should be done with the goal of getting published. Another way of learning actively is to say it, communicate it, explain it, and use it. In other words, when you read an interesting book or hear of a good idea, put it into your own words and tell somebody about it. Learn to answer that person’s questions. This creates a learning orientation. Giles Hirst and his colleagues studied twenty-five R&D teams in a pharmaceutical company and measured their learning orientation and their creativity. On average, employees had worked for the company for three years and were responsible for developing new and creative therapeutic treatments and technology initiatives. The individual employees completed a survey regarding their work in detail, and each employee’s direct supervisor was asked to complete a different survey that rated each R&D team’s creativity based on the tasks the employees were hired to do. Hirst found that teams with a strong learning orientation were more creative.

It is a scientific fact that people remember narrative more than facts. We grow up hearing stories, remembering stories, and enjoying stories, but most of us are lousy at telling our own stories. We need to work on that. People remember stories much longer than they remember information delivered in a boring, factual way. For example, entrepreneurs construct meaning during the early stages of a new venture by using analogical and metaphorical reasoning. So, when learning a new idea or concept, think of at least two examples or stories that illustrate the idea. Then compare them and derive the core idea. In one of my studies, my colleagues and I experimented with giving people one versus two stories to illustrate a point, and the effects were dramatic. Namely, people who had read two stories were able to derive a key theme or idea. Their learning trace—their own mental take-away from reading the stories—was deeper and contained the critical core of the idea. In contrast, those who had only read one story had a weaker learning trace that contained a lot of irrelevant facts. We also examined whether just giving students the essence of a story—i.e., the takeaway point—would be effective in increasing knowledge transfer. It wasn’t. Rather, we found that the key to long-term knowledge transfer is to have the student, manager, team member—the learner—do the mental work of deriving the core principle. For this reason, I ask my students to recall the best lecture they ever attended—in college, grad school, company training session, and so on. Then I ask them what they remember that made it so great. Inevitably, it was a story told by the speaker that illustrated a point that profoundly connected with the life of that student.

Your meeting today with the new chairperson reminded you of what? Your brainstorming session today was similar to what? Use multiple examples to make sense of everything you learn. Don’t file away facts by remembering one situation, think of two (or more) and then pull out the common denominator. This leads to deep learning as opposed to superficial learning.

Each one of us is a work in progress, and we will never arrive at a final point of completion. In short, you will never be perfect. Neither will I. But we will have tried, and, in trying, we will have been part of the largest conspiracy in our lives: the conspiracy of how to improve ourselves. We all need to work on how to improve ourselves every day. Having a goal of self-improvement gives each day a purpose. Each one of us needs to be working on how to improve ourselves; we cannot stay in place while our team improves.

You are in a unique position to either be the greatest champion for your plan or its biggest saboteur. As a start, think about a recent team experience in which you tried to do something you thought would help the team, but—alas—it backfired, failed, or simply did not catch on. If you have to pinpoint one reason why your change effort was not successful, what would you say? Be specific. If you are like most people, you said something like, “The personalities on my team are dysfunctional” or “Certain team members never want to listen to me” or “I ran out of time” or “I did not have a sufficient budget” or “The client was difficult to work with.” There is a common thread among these explanations that can be simply summed up in the sentence, “It is not my fault that I did not succeed.” All of these explanations are what psychologists label external attributions, precisely because we are blaming something or somebody other than ourselves. When we externalize, we essentially give up. When we give up on our team, we give up on ourselves. The depressing reality is that 95 percent of managers make external attributions when they attempt to determine the cause of poor team performance.

Interestingly, when we flip the question and ask managers to think of a team experience that was highly successful, 95 percent of these same people cite internal factors—“I’m a great leader” they often say, or “My instincts are very good” or “I have good people skills.” Blaming away failures and taking credit for success is a highly self-congratulatory pattern. Psychologists call it an egocentric pattern.

Let’s look more carefully at these patterns. Not surprisingly, they impact mood and well-being: depressed people are less likely to externalize. So, there is some psychological benefit to blaming others, but it comes at a potentially serious cost—namely, the big problem is that our ability to learn and adapt is severely curtailed when we externalize our shortcomings.

In one famous experiment, teachers were told that certain children in their class would blossom intellectually over the academic year, whereas certain other children would show a normal developmental pattern in the classroom. During the course of the year, the children who were expected to bloom in fact did! Their test scores and performance were markedly higher than the others. Not surprising, right? Well, not unless it was completely random which children were described as bloomers. In fact, there were no discernible differences among the children at the beginning of the year, but the teachers were led to believe that certain children would bloom. This led to a self-fulfilling chain of events, which ultimately led to a random group of children truly improving—all because of a belief on the part of the teacher.

Let’s go back to our example of the failed team intervention. Suppose the leader decides that it is the dysfunctional personalities of two team members that have caused the team to fail. To be specific, the leader regards these people as ego-driven, controlling, and opposed to change. Further, our leader has suspected this for quite some time—years, in fact—and has been casually collecting data on these team members’ deplorable behavior. The conclusion? The leader had developed a personal theory that conveniently explained the team’s failure and was not open to testing the accuracy of that theory. In fact, even when presented with evidence that his explanation for the problem team members was most likely in error, the leader turned a blind eye.

One study illustrates how powerful our perceptions are in changing reality. In this investigation, men were instructed to have phone conversations with women. The theory being tested was the self-fulfilling prophecy—if men believed they were talking to a gorgeous woman, the two would hit it off, so to speak, and would be likely to go on a date. Men were given photos of the women they were allegedly speaking with. Some photos were of “attractive” women; some “plain”—based on ratings made beforehand by a separate sample of people. (Of course, the photos men were given were not actually the person with whom they were talking to on the phone.) The conversations engaged in by men who thought they were speaking with a particularly attractive woman were fundamentally different from those of men who thought they were speaking with a plain woman. Even more surprisingly, the women began to act in fundamentally different ways as a function of how they were being conversed with—despite the fact that they all were judged by outsiders to be equally attractive! Women who spoke to men who believed they were beautiful began to converse more fluently, laugh more, and in general exhibit better social skills. This study and countless others reveal how we can create our own reality by unconsciously treating others as we expect them to behave. Perhaps it is for this reason that creative people are more open to the possibility that people can change, and they often describe the behavior of others as not due so much to dysfunctional personality traits, but rather, situational pressures. Creative people are not universalists—rather, they are situationists. This is hugely important because you can’t change someone’s personality, but you can change the situation.

Incidentally, the same goes when we are attempting to explain the causes of our own behavior. The data are in: people who feel that they are able to improve potential failure are more creative than people who don’t think they can improve.

If you put a dog in a green room and give it electric shocks, the dog quickly learns to avoid that room. But what if the green room is your action plan for creative collaboration and people are so afraid of past experiences that they won’t try anything new? Worse yet, what if you are the dog in the green room?

We all know that dogs are smart, or at least adaptive. Once they are shocked (punished) for doing something new, they will continue to avoid new behaviors, even when the shock is totally removed. So, if you’ve been punished in the past for trying something new, then how do you get past those negative experiences and commit yourself to change? According to management scientist guru Edgar Schein, for change to happen, your type 2 anxiety needs to be greater than your type 1 anxiety. Think of type 1 anxiety as the anxiety you feel when you are asked to learn something new or try something different. For example, remember that vacation when someone asked you to try paragliding, and you were intrigued, but also anxious? Type 1 anxiety is the feeling associated with an inability or unwillingness to learn something new because it appears too difficult, disruptive, or risky. It is what leads people to fear change.

Type 2 anxiety is different. Think of it as the haunting feeling that whatever you are doing now is just not good enough or won’t work in the long term. Type 2 anxiety is the feeling that your current way of doing things is not enough, no longer working, or just not satisfying. The opposite of type 2 anxiety is complacency. Actually, I hope that after reading this book, you are feeling a certain amount of anxiety—about how the current state of affairs is not quite optimal and how there are clear and concrete best practices you can introduce to improve the performance of your team. That type of restlessness—type 2 anxiety—is the ideal fuel for change.

Chapter Capstone

The creative conspiracy begins with one simple idea, followed by a commitment that the next meeting with your team will be different. There is a very good chance the meeting will be more productive as a result of your intervention. It is unlikely that what you do at that meeting will negatively affect your team in the long run. If your plan does backfire, tell the team what your intention was and ask how that goal might have been better accomplished. In fact, groups that reflect on how they work, what they do wrong, and what they do right perform better than groups who don’t reflect. Thus, by orchestrating such a conversation, your team is now part of the conspiracy. Ask your team if you—or, for that matter, anyone else—can have a hand in organizing the next week’s meeting.

A creative conspiracy begins with one person—hopefully, you—thinking perceptively about how to ignite your team. Think of your goal as an operation—a mission—that you have been asked to do. You can’t abandon the mission. But you can change how you get there.

There will be clues and signs and keys hidden in your organization that you must decode. What looks to be a lazy team member is actually a person who is dying to be put on assignment. The boring white wall in the seminar room can be temporarily transformed into a hotbed of activity via sticky notes, smelly pens, and some hoopla. The negative response you received from the governing body regarding your team’s proposal can be viewed as a message to be decoded and acted on in a different, clandestine fashion. If you have just taken on your first job or first leadership role, great. And for those of us wondering what we’ve been doing for the last decade and how we can possibly jump into action at this point, consider the creative conspiracy your second act. You are being called to set the stage.