The focus of this chapter is helping people to find solutions to their most intractable problems by asking different questions, finding ways to really share and value all ideas and looking for solutions in unexpected places. As a team leader, you need to inspire your team to plug their existing knowledge together in ways that produce breakthrough possibilities. When you are faced with a gap in your knowledge you will commonly seek the assistance of someone more experienced who works in exactly the same domain as yourself, but often the greatest insight can be found from people who, at first glance, don’t appear to be anything like you or engaged in the same endeavours as you are.⁵ This chapter will show you ways in which you can start to tap into wells of much greater knowledge and insight.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

It is common to presume that innovation is always the result of a bright idea and that such bright ideas only occur inside the heads of seriously clever people, people who are not in any way like us, people who are collected together in a special department, often called ‘research and development’.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Increasingly, we see innovation not as something that occurs inside the heads of smart people, but rather as something that happens in the spaces between inquisitive people.

Innovation is not the same as creativity; the focus is not on conjuring up something amazing out of nothing, but rather on finding new ways of plugging together existing knowledge to deliver new and exciting outcomes.

We often hear people say ‘Oh, I’m not a creative person’, or ‘I’m no good at thinking strategically’, or ‘I’ve never had an original idea’. The manager’s job is to help people to rise above such self-limiting statements of personal inadequacy. We are all innovators in our own way, and when we engage constructively with people who see the world in a slightly different light from ourselves, we open up the possibility of producing great new insights and new ways of working.

THE IMPACT OF THE ISSUE

Our organisations face many challenges: doing more with fewer resources, changing demographics, skills shortages, environmental pressures, evolving legislative structures and financial pressures, to name but a few. One thing is for sure, doing more of the same, or just focusing on getting better at what you can already do well, is not a sustainable model. This is not a new phenomenon and is captured nicely by one of the greatest thinkers of our time:

Or, to put it in the form of a mantra increasingly popular with senior leaders:

MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL

Being great at innovation is not a matter of luck. Organisations and teams that are good at innovating tend to have a characteristic culture, a culture that values constructive questioning, healthy co-operation and an openness to new experiences and ways of thinking. Innovations are most likely to happen when a team has:

• A shared purpose that inspires them and ignites action. Interestingly, such a purpose is seldom created as a result of a top-down edict; it comes through curiosity, questioning and challenging each other to achieve something special.
• A willingness to truly co-operate, to give freely of personal resources to help others to develop and test their ideas. This requires an emphasis on the greater good, rather than on local or short-term gains, and it involves collaboration and a preparedness to compromise on individual interests in order to achieve the best overall result.
• An openness to engage with people who think and see the world differently. You will often ignore things that are right in front of your eyes because you have long considered them to be irrelevant, but someone new to a situation sees everything for the first time and sees with a mind that has different values and experiences.

You will increase your chance of seeing anew when you cross organisational or industry boundaries – innovations nearly always come by applying something from one field or scientific discipline to another field or scientific discipline. People who can span boundaries are critical to increasing innovation.

Innovation also needs to be managed differently from business as usual. In business as usual, the emphasis has to be on right first time and every time. However, in order to innovate you must experiment and when you experiment you must expect to fail. So, managing for an innovative culture means that you must strive for ultimate success while embracing the possibility of many small failures along the way. You should embrace those failures and view them as a learning opportunity.

IT people frequently strive to perfect what they already know. By contrast, innovation usually involves grappling with unknown quantities and unpredictable consequences; under these circumstances, hitting the jackpot first time is unlikely and perfection is well downstream.

For innovation to thrive, you need to cultivate a culture that values people who try, however imperfectly, to seize the unknown. Figure 4.1 depicts the three pillars of an innovative culture built upon the solid foundations of a highly tuned productive capacity.

Figure 4.1 Three pillars of capability

The three core capabilities that underpin innovation are:

• Questions that open up possibilities. Every innovation starts with a question, and the very best innovations emerge when you ask questions that challenge conventional wisdom and open the possibility of being different. The problem is that, most of the time, most of us are not very good at asking questions. Or, when we do ask questions, we use our questions as a weapon to put people down rather than as a mechanism to lift people up. Consider the following points:

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Research shows⁶ that poorly performing teams tend to ask 1 question for every 20 statements. High-performing teams have a ratio much closer to 1 to 1.

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A good question can act as an igniting catalyst for a team and challenge and inspire them; a bad question can debilitate them and freeze them into inactivity.

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The best questions are future-focused and challenge existing thinking, collective wisdom and organisational or industry paradigms; they may shake deeply held personal values or beliefs.

• Collaborative mindset and working practices. To collaborate means to work with others on a joint project. To co-operate means to be of assistance or willing to assist. In order to stimulate innovation, collaboration has to be much more than just working together; it must embrace a sense of shared purpose, mutual responsibility and commitment to achieve win–win outcomes. Too much of our organisational behaviour is based on advocacy – this leads to a feeling that in order to win, others must lose. Being collaborative doesn’t mean going with the flow or being unwilling to challenge what is expected. Collaboration works best when you listen respectfully, value and build on the ideas of others, and be willing to back winning ideas even when to do so may require personal courage and commitment. You show your desire to collaborate when you start using the word ‘and’, rather than the word ‘but’, when discussing new ideas. People collaborate most effectively when there is a common work product and a shared pride in the outcome. You need to be willing and prepared to volunteer and to give of your own scarce resources for the good of someone else’s idea.

• Working with people across organisational boundaries. The world’s truly great innovations usually came about when people suddenly found a new way of seeing something that had always been there in front of them. You may see something being used for one purpose and start to ask the question of how that idea could be adapted to serve a completely different purpose. In order to increase the probability of this sort of breakthrough, you need to increase the amount of time that you spend with people who have a totally different experience from your own, and therefore interpret situations differently and see the world with different eyes. In short, you need to get out of your comfort zone and spend less time surrounded by people who think and act just like you. Think about the following two observations. First, a great organisational paradox is that breakthrough innovations and novel combinations are most likely to occur when you put people together who bring ideas from different sectors or disciplines. Yet organisations group similar people together, so that they are surrounded by people who think and act just like them. Second, people who see or experience something for the first time are likely to ask apparently facile questions that lead to great new insights.

Too often people ignore insights from passing acquaintances or those lower down the organisational totem pole, or from others without their knowledge or with fewer qualifications.

PRACTICAL ADVICE

We will split our practical advice into three sections to reflect the three distinct capabilities that are so important for stimulating innovation. Let’s start with ways to stimulate questions that open up possibilities:

1.

Think of questions as a way to kick-start thinking and learning. Ask open, non-leading questions and phrase them in the future tense. Look for questions that challenge deeply held beliefs.

2.

Rather than telling people what to do, try describing an outcome that you would like to achieve and then ask questions like:

a.

What would it feel like to work in that kind of environment?

b.

If we had this in place, what would we be able to do that we can’t do now?

c.

What do we need to put in place now to start moving in this direction?

d.

What can you do individually that could support us all in this change?

3.

Ask your team what one thing they could do that would transform the service they give to their customers:⁷

a.

Get your team to prioritise the ideas.

b.

Get them to work up some of the ideas into a practicable proposal.

c.

Get them to vote on which of the ideas are the most likely to be successful.

d.

See if you can start an experiment to check out the validity of the most popular idea – see how many people are prepared to invest some of their own spare time on the project.

e.

Once you have a working hypothesis, get the team to present it to management and see if you can get funding to take it further. Treat it like making a pitch to the bank manager for funding to start a new business.

Now let’s look at some things you can do to create or support a collaborative mindset and collaborative working practices. The first thing to realise is that stimulating collaboration starts with your recruitment and induction processes.

Recruiting – When recruiting, we tend to look for people who can do the things we do and appear to be enthusiastic about how we do it. We are attracted to people who think like we do and hold similar values to ourselves. The problem with this is that we run the risk of hiring a bunch of people just like us; this is commonly referred to as the ‘comfortable clone syndrome’. When we recruit, we have an opportunity to bring in fresh ideas and new thinking, so actively look for:

• people who ask you why you do things the way you do and look unimpressed when you explain why;
• people who have a passion for something and are looking for an opportunity to try it out in your company;
• people who ask you challenging questions during the interview; if they are confident enough to question you in an interview situation, the chances are they will continue to question you and everything once they are on the team. People who ask constructive questions are worth their weight in gold.

Induction processes – Our induction processes tend to focus on getting people to understand our processes, systems, values and beliefs. The idea is that the quicker we can get people to be just like us, the better. Actually, while we want new recruits to understand what we are trying to achieve, we should be slightly more wary about indoctrinating them into our ways, especially when a key element of their role is to be innovative in the solutions they produce. Try some of the following:

• Don’t be too concerned if people appear to be slow at learning your processes or reluctant to embrace your ways. Instead of pushing harder to make them conform, ask them questions to understand their concerns and reservations.
• Focus on introducing new team members to peers who have a track record of questioning and producing good ideas.
• After two to three weeks, ask your new people what one process or practice they find most frustrating and why. Allow them to suggest better ways to achieve the same objectives. Get them to run a short workshop with a handful of your best thinkers to discuss the process or practice and how it could be better.
• Try to create a peer-to-peer network that spans all sections of the business and arrange regular meetings and encourage people to freely discuss the issues they are facing. Try to get informal groups to work together to develop and test new ideas in action.

Collaboration – Collaboration is not about meekly doing what you are asked to do and joining in. It is about volunteering for a task because you are inspired by the possibility of producing a new level of service or a previously unimagined product. Before people can volunteer, they need to know what is going on and they need to be engaged. Try some of the following ideas:

• Create an intranet site or collaboration space (this could be a physical space like a white board or office wall) where your team members can post their ideas, ideally anonymously. Build in a mechanism for the team to expand upon or supplement ideas or even suggest ways in which they could be developed into products or services. Establish a process where they can vote for the ideas they think are the best.
• Allow your team members to volunteer their services to develop the ideas that are top of the list.
• Encourage your team members to always ask ‘Why?’

Finally, let’s look at some of the things you can do to stimulate working across organisational boundaries and bringing ideas in from the outside:

• Get some magazines and journals from completely different disciplines – if you are a software developer, perhaps you could get professional journals on medicine, the biotech industry, oil exploration, toys and gaming, furniture design, geology, photography and so on. Encourage your team members to look through the articles and each month organise a 30-minute discussion around the article that people found most fascinating. Get them to work up three things that made this story so compelling; then challenge them to think of ways in which you could apply similar insight to your own industry.
• Arrange a short-term transfer for one of your team into a completely different role in another part of the organisation. When they come back, get them to brief your team on their experience. Suggest that they focus most on:

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How are the people in the other role different?

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What are their main priorities?

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What are the big assumptions that appear to underpin their decision-making?

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What do they worry about most?

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What do they consider to be their biggest success in the last 12 months and why are they so proud of it?

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What three things do they do that our team should try to copy?

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What three things do they do that our team should try to avoid doing ourselves?

• Find opportunities for you to visit different industries and see how they do things. Think of it as a benchmarking exercise where the aim is to see how people work collaboratively, rather than trying to copy their process. Focus on the following areas:

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How does someone with a good idea bring it to the attention of the management?

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What percentage of the ideas that they are working on came from outside their organisation (a process increasingly known as open innovation)?

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When they have a problem they can’t solve, how do they look for potential solution providers? Some organisations call this process scouting, i.e. looking for third-party providers who can bring new insight to an existing problem.

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What is their process for assessing the potential value of new ideas?

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Who decides who works on the key projects? What potential is there for people to volunteer their services or get involved with things that interest them?

THINGS FOR YOU TO WORK ON NOW

A strong focus of this chapter has been expanding your powers of perception by asking different questions and truly valuing ideas that come from external sources. Start by using the questions below to conduct an audit of how open you currently are to gathering external ideas. And once you have found new knowledge, how open are you to sharing and working collaboratively and how well do you model behaviours that encourage sharing and experimentation?

Now use the techniques we have discussed to start to plan how you will manage the performance of your team differently. We suggest you start by focusing on the effect of your own language, specifically the way you frame challenges and the questions you ask of yourself and of your team. Your focus should be to use questions as a way of liberating your team to think rather than using questions as a weapon that drives people into their shells for fear of failing or looking stupid. As a first step try some of the things set out below.

FURTHER FOOD FOR THE CURIOUS

• Vullings, R. and Heleven, M. (2015) Not Invented Here: Cross-industry Innovation. BIS Publishers, Amsterdam:

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A book full of fascinating examples of ideas crossing boundaries to drive new innovation.

• Johnson, S. (2010) Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Allen Lane, London, a division of Penguin:

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A fascinating read that charts the genesis of many great innovations and points to five key principles that underpin the development of all great ideas.

• Gratton, L. (2007) Hot Spots: Why Some Companies Buzz with Energy and Innovation and Others Don’t. FT Prentice Hall, London:

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This book points to four conditions that increase the likelihood that spontaneous innovation will flourish in organisations.

• Berger, W. (2014) A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas. Bloomsbury USA, New York:

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A great read with many real-world examples of how asking different sorts of questions opens up amazing possibilities.

• Poetz, M., Franke, N. and Schreier, M. (2014) ‘Sometimes the Best Ideas Come from Outside Your Industry’. Harvard Business Review, November. Available from https://hbr.org/2014/11/sometimes-the-best-ideas-come-from-outside-your-industry [3 November 2017]:

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A short and interesting article that points to practical ways in which you can search analogous or distant analogous fields to find solutions to the intractable problems that you face today.

⁵ Many great innovations came about by adapting or building upon ideas from one industry to solve problems in another. For a range of great examples of this phenomenon see Ramon Vullings and Marc Heleven’s book Not Invented Here: Cross-industry Innovation (2015).

⁶ Marcial Losada and Emily Heaphy in 2004 conducted one of the most comprehensive studies on the role of connectivity in the performance of business teams (The Role of Positivity and Connectivity in the Performance of Business Teams.

⁷ Some staff may come from a culture or environment where they were not expected or allowed to put forward ideas and this can make them reluctant to share their thoughts. In such cases trust and continual encouragement need to be built up over time through inclusion, active listening, positive feedback and respect.