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Skills for Being Innovative

Acting with Creativity

The third Total Leadership principle is to be innovative—to act with creativity by continually experimenting with ways to get things done. Innovation here means strengthening your ability to see and pursue more four-way wins; to create changes that are sustainable because they work not only for you but also for your family, your community, and your job or career.

Skill: Focus on Results

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

To lead the life you truly want to lead, you have to believe in your cause and attend laserlike to the aim. Eric Greitens demonstrates powerfully that you must have your purpose in mind wvhile, at the same time, moving, always moving, with your feet on the ground, sidestepping boulders and seeking the best route forward. Here are two activities you might try to practice your version of this march: imagining alternative scenarios and identifying useful metrics for success.

Exercise: Scenarios

Identify a goal in any part of your life, and describe in a sentence the results you want to achieve. Be as specific as you can in describing what success will look like. Then identify three alternative courses of action available to you that would achieve the same results. For each potential path, list the following:

• Resources you will need

• People whose help you’ll draw on

• How much of a stretch beyond your comfort zone this would be for you

By taking time to think through different options, you increase the flexibility of your thinking. Brainstorming about creative possibilities puts your focus on the goal, or results, rather than on one way to get there.

A variation: mess with a pattern of behavior that you already use by, just once, doing that activity at a new time or in a different place. It could be something as simple as shaving at the gym instead of at home to cut several minutes out of your daily routine, or practicing your trumpet at the office after hours rather than disturbing your neighbors at home. What fears or concerns did you have about making this change? What were the pros and cons of switching up your routine? How did it affect your results? Although it might be disruptive, practicing this form of experimentation can strengthen your ability to generate alternative means to achieving goals.

Exercise: Metrics for Success

As famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.” Think about an important goal, and write down the metrics (or measures) that you will use to judge whether you have been successful in achieving it. Metrics can be objective (something you can weigh or count, such as money you want to earn, pages you want to write, sales calls you want to make, or pounds you want to shed) or subjective (whether coworkers perceive you as less grumpy or more approachable, or how your children feel about the quality of your relationship with them).

Review your metrics and consider whether they measure results you hope to achieve, or whether instead they address the method you used or the amount of time you put in to your pursuit of the goal. Run these by a trusted friend or colleague to get another perspective. How do your metrics affect how you approach the goal? Refine them so that they measure results.

Reframing how you define success may enable you to adopt a more results-oriented approach—keeping your eyes on the prize—instead of one that emphasizes, and narrowly restricts your thinking about, the where, when, and how.

Skill: Resolve Conflicts among Domains

Think left and think right and think low and think high.
Oh, the things you can think up if only you try.

—DR. SEUSS

Resolving conflicts among the domains of your life requires, first and foremost, a flexible approach. This critical skill—which Sheryl Sandberg articulates well and which undergirds her success—comes down to how you think about what’s possible. Research on cognitive bias and decision making shows that we react differently to choices depending on whether the options we face are perceived as losses or as gains.¹ How we frame options, therefore, becomes an important part of being able to find creative solutions that yield benefits, rather than harm, to the different parts of our lives.

To enlarge your own cognitive capacity, which is what this is, imagine that all the things that call for your attention are nourishment. Then do what I call “four-way thinking” about yourself, your family, your work, and your community, seeking ways for your home life to energize your work life, your community involvement to extend your professional calling, your private time to feed your public time.

The following exercises are designed to help you discover new approaches that make sense for your life and your specific situation. They will help you assess the impact of one aspect of your life on others, and they will enhance your ability to find mutual enrichment in the different areas of your life.

Exercise: Allies Not Enemies

Identify a conflict that exists between two (or more) domains; for example, find a situation in which work and family are at war. Consider for a moment how you might change your behavior to satisfy your needs in both competing domains. Are there specific activities—small or large—that could change the dynamic? What action within your control might create a benefit where now there is a cost? Suppose your teenage children perceive you to be a heartless corporate tool. You might talk with one or two of your employees about how you can help them solve problems they’re having beyond their jobs. Then, when the opportunity arises, you might tell your kids about your efforts. This is an example of what psychologists call job crafting: the process of molding your work tasks and relationships to better fit your life.²

Is there a different perspective, or way of thinking, that you can adopt that might eliminate tension resulting from conflict? How might you look at the situation differently so that, instead of focusing on the conflict, you imagine alternative scenarios in which the domains are useful to each other? For example, work might force you to be physically separated from your family. Now consider how it both provides you with financial resources and enhanced self-esteem—which, in turn, make you a better parent—and brings a useful service to people and makes the world a better place.

Another way to see things from the point of view of mutual gains is to imagine a couple of simple ways to improve one aspect of your life: your work, family, community, or private self. Write down ways that this change will positively affect the other three areas, especially for the people who matter most to you. Will any of these things produce demonstrable gains in all four areas, either directly or indirectly, through a kind of ripple effect (what organizational psychologists call “positive spillover”)? This activity helps you see that changes in one part of life can produce benefits in other parts; it isn’t always a matter of sacrificing one part for another.

The more you think in this way, the more likely it is that you will devote your attention to actions that reduce your sense of conflict between work and the rest of life. All kinds of possibilities abound: taking a yoga class with your spouse, starting a book club with friends and coworkers, painting murals on your town’s walls with customers, bringing the results of new recipes to colleagues, keeping sacrosanct a weekly lunch with your kids at your place of work. Small steps matter when it comes to improving all the different parts of your life without having to trade one for the others. And the more you try taking small steps, whether or not you get the results you want in the short run, the more possibilities you’ll be able to imagine, and move forward on, in the days to come.

Exercise: Energizing Yourself

Many people think that they don’t have enough time to take care of themselves. Or they feel guilty about doing so. However, setting aside time for energizing behaviors can actually enhance the efficiency you bring to all the things you want to do in all the different parts of life—and not only for you, but also for the people who matter to you.³

This exercise asks you to take care of your mind, body, and spirit. First, identify a behavior that makes you feel healthy, such as eating a nutritious snack, taking a nap, walking briskly, or meditating. Now do it, even if very briefly. How did you feel after that activity, and for the rest of the day? Did taking time out for that behavior give you less energy, or more? This practice can persuade you that what might seem like a conflict—trading time working for time energizing—is actually a benefit to your mind and body as well as to your work.

Skill: Challenge the Status Quo

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways.
The point, however, is to change it.

—KARL MARX

Challenging assumptions, as Julie Foudy did, is hard, for when you do so you encounter resistance, either from within or from without. But you can improve this skill for being innovative. The more you are able to understand what traditional assumptions are, the more effectively you can overcome them as mere sources of constraint.

Exercise: In the Lab

Just as a scientist keeps a roster of ideas for experiments, try keeping a journal or log for a few days. Record any hypotheses that occur to you for new ways of getting things done, especially if they would benefit different parts of your life and help you design the kind of life you want to lead in the future. Think of these as experiments; you are a scientist, with your life as your laboratory. Don’t judge your ideas. Use this opportunity to come up with options for things you might do differently.

Now choose one such idea to implement. It could involve doing a new activity, such as getting feedback from end users of a prototype you’re developing. It could also mean stopping or reducing something you’re already doing, such as checking your social media accounts fifteen times a day. What assumptions about the way things are now would you have to challenge in order to move forward on these actions? Who could you talk to about your thinking? Who can help you understand your assumptions and implement the idea successfully? Perhaps you’re anxious about getting feedback on that prototype. You decide to talk it over with a friend. He persuades you to see that your fear of discovering that it’s all a big waste of time is misguided and that any critique of your model will give you what you need to improve it.

This might seem like a far cry from Foudy’s challenging the Title IX commission, but as studies on the theory of “small wins” have shown, thinking about our assumptions and then designing incremental steps to create change can give us greater confidence to question the status quo.⁴

Exercise: My Problem = Our Problem

Think of a dilemma with which you are currently grappling. Gather a small group of people who are affected by this dilemma. Describe how you see the problem, especially how it affects them. Ask the group to come up with ideas for potential solutions, and record them, no matter how impractical they might seem. Once you have exhausted the creativity of your group, review each possible solution. First, let each person do so separately (to encourage independent thinking and reduce bias from social pressure). Then, as a group, draw on the wisdom of different viewpoints. Discuss the pros and cons of each, including the underlying assumptions about how each one might affect members of the group and others who might have a stake.

Identify the best, second-best, and third-best options. Then identify the next action you can take on your first-choice solution, with the understanding that if it fails, then you’ll adjust or pursue the second or third choices. This exercise should bolster your ability to think critically and test assumptions, thereby enabling you to be more innovative as a leader.⁵

Skill: See New Ways of Doing Things

My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

—DIANE ARBUS

You can see from Tom Tierney’s example that it’s possible to exercise your innovation muscles by developing the skill of seeing new ways of doing things. He foresaw the idea of what was to become Bridgespan in his early imaginings about a “Make a Difference Company.” What desired future—over the long haul or in the day-to-day—can you foresee more clearly?

Exercise: Crowd-Source Solutions

Social scientists I-Shou Chen and Jui-Kuei Chen explain that not all people are creative and that some personalities in particular have difficulty becoming more creative.⁶ Enlisting others in discovering creative solutions can help overcome those personality barriers. Want to become more open to fresh perspectives? Ask your most creative friends to lunch.

Before that lunch, start the process of change by taking five minutes to write about a pattern of behavior that is no longer working for you. How is it preventing you from living the life you want? (Identifying unhelpful habits is a natural starting point for change.) Contact people in your life who are related somehow to this bad habit. Describe the problem and your wish to solve it. Then ask for ideas about potential solutions, and record what you hear. Adopt the one you think wisest, drafting a plan and trying to make it happen. Stay in touch with the people who helped you think about it, at least weekly. After a month or so, review your results with them, even if the plan didn’t work, to explore what happened and what you learned about trying to produce a change.

If it didn’t work, or if you need more time to solve the problem, craft a revised plan of action using other ideas that you heard and drawing on what you learned from your first try. Keep innovating; not every experiment clicks. Thoughtfully trying something new can help you realize, in concrete terms, that you don’t have to stay in the same rut. And it strengthens your confidence in your creative skills.

Exercise: Picture Your Idea Web

Creating visual images (some call them mind maps) of the connections among different strands of an idea forces you to use a range of cognitive tools. Mind maps are graphic representations that allow an individual to look at a large amount of information about a subject on one page in a holistic, nonlinear way.⁷ Think of a specific goal in your life, or perhaps a problem that needs to be solved. Gather a few large pieces of blank artist’s paper and various colored markers. Find a quiet spot and give yourself time to relax. Choose a word or image that represents the goal or problem, and write it down or draw it on the center of the page. (Suspend judgment about your drawing skills, and use images whenever possible.) For example, if your goal is be a valued member of a nonprofit board, then draw a picture of you in a meeting of such a group (or just a picture of the table around which you meet) in the center of the page.

Next, create different-colored branches of ideas relating to your central goal, using either an image or a few words to describe each related concept. In the example, you might draw the following branches: prestige, network connections, learning, and self-esteem. Write down any thoughts, even those that may seem obscure in the moment. Draw sub-branches from each branch to further expand on your ideas until you can’t think of any more. Draw boxes around the most important information. Edit, regroup as you wish, and draw a final version on a fresh sheet of paper. Once you have completed your final version, ask yourself, What did I discover, and how is what I learned important to my values and goals? How can I actually use what I’ve designed in this picture?

Studies show that mind mapping encourages whole-brain thinking.⁸ It enhances creativity and productivity, as well as efficiency. It allows you to make connections between ideas and to be flexible in their application. As you play with mind maps and find ways to use them, your ability to act creatively will blossom.

Skill: Embrace Change Courageously

Only those who keep changing remain akin to me.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Learning to try new things can be rife with trepidation and fear. To fortify your courage, follow Michelle Obama’s example: weigh the worst-case result and the best-case result for an upcoming change, and challenge your beliefs about what it might mean for you as well as the people who matter most to you. These activities can help you overcome inhibitions, accomplish more, and feel better about the life you lead.

Exercise: Worst Case/Best Case

Think of an upcoming change that you are worried about; maybe it’s a geographic move, a switch in jobs or companies, a child leaving home, a divorce, or surgery. Envision the worst possible outcomes that could occur. Now visualize the best possible outcomes that could occur. Which is more likely, and why? Estimate the likelihood that each one of those outcomes will happen—one in a million, 75 percent chance, somewhere in the middle?—and write down those odds for both the worst and the best possible outcomes.

Then consider the effects each outcome would have on the people around you. Further, note the one or two most critical effects of not taking any action. It boils down to this: which would be better—the status quo or change? Talk over your forecasts with a friend or two, and get their read on the outcomes you imagine.

Taking the most likely outcomes into consideration (naturally, those likely will fall somewhere between the worst and best cases), draft a simple plan for the next action step you can take to create the change. When people approach changes that will improve their lives or their impact, they sometimes spend time thinking only about the bad things that might happen. It is crucial to devote attention to imagining the best case, too. It’s often more likely than the worst.

Exercise: Challenging Your Beliefs

Some research shows that an individual’s beliefs about change either enhance or inhibit that change. In other words, your outlook influences your ability to make change succeed.⁹ When you fear change it’s useful to think about the reasons for your dread. (Apprehension is linked to your beliefs.) Write down, in detail, your beliefs. For each one, ask yourself whether it is accurate. Research it to find expert advice. Challenge your current thinking; differentiate realistic concerns from the unrealistic ones that crop up as a result of bias, ignorance, or past experiences. (Misinformation and irrational thinking can make us resist change.)¹⁰ Can you address the realistic concerns you have as you embark on a new path? You have more control over the outcomes than you may now believe.

Poor self-esteem can make us resistant to change; confidence and resilience allow us to change and grow. Talk over your ideas with a friend, asking him to ask you (to borrow a phrase from Sheryl Sandberg), what would it be like if you weren’t afraid?¹¹

If fear or anxiety about change is preventing you from taking the steps necessary to achieve important goals, try exploring techniques for anxiety management. Investigate different approaches: quick breathing exercises, weekly yoga, visualization, fifteen-minute meditation, physical exercise, talking to a trusted friend about your fears, or psychological therapy. Pick an approach appropriate for you. If making the change is important enough to you, then it’s probably a good idea to tackle directly the anxiety that prevents you from moving forward.

Skill: Create Cultures of Innovation

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Anyone’s mind can open more. Bruce Springsteen’s life and work are a certain testament to this idea. Research shows that when you display openness to discovery you inspire others to learn, too.¹² You can demonstrate your own eagerness to learn by letting others know you want to learn from them and also by teaching. Encouraging others to pursue new knowledge about their work and their lives beyond work can enhance your own ability to be innovative.

Exercise: Another Perspective

Becoming an individual with multiple facets to his life was not easy for Bruce Springsteen. Therapy helped him wrestle with his inner demons and free up his hopes for the future. Although you may or may not benefit from having your own psychotherapist, everyone can benefit from gaining another perspective. There are countless ways of seeking it. When others see you appreciate alternative points of view, they are more likely to offer them.

At a certain point in the creation of Born to Run, Springsteen risked carrying his perfectionism too far by setting such extremely high standards that the album almost got canned because of delays. Only his manager’s pragmatism (releasing a single while waiting for the whole album) saved Springsteen from never getting it done. On whom do you rely to rein in your excesses with a healthy dose of practicality? Whom do you talk to when there are indicators that you have gone too far in pursuing a dream by, for example, ignoring quality for the sake of timetables or by toiling on a product for so long that it loses relevance? Observe others, ask open-ended questions of them, and learn from them.

You might make what researchers call an appreciative inquiry.Bring together a few people who can play a role in the realization of one of your goals. At work, for example, this might include executives, middle managers, and customers. At home, it might be members of your family. Identify your goal in positive terms—to become world class in customer service or a more tight-knit, loving family. Next, ask people to share their stories about real successes within the group that reflect your goal. For example, someone might recount the time when Sue’s customer e-mailed the CEO to rave about her experience in buying a car, or the time when your brother generously donated his time to a charity you started. Once you have shared your successes as a group, identify the possibilities of what could be. What is the group’s vision of success, and what does that look like? Considering both your real successes and your vision for the future, write a simple purpose statement that is realistic and inspiring to you and to them. Then spend a few minutes listing ideas for ways to pursue this vision and carry out your purpose.¹³

Exercise: Teach

Think of a skill that you could teach to someone—for example, showing your octogenarian aunt how to use some new technology or teaching a coworker how to use the coffee maker. Now ask that person if she would like to learn the new skill. If the answer is yes, go for it. If no, move on and find something to teach someone else. Then ask yourself, how did you feel in your role as teacher? Simply taking opportunities to practice sharing your knowledge and skills with others will enhance your ability to cultivate a learning environment wherever you go.

Or think about something that you’ve accomplished recently about which you are particularly proud—finishing a major report, being admitted to a new association, or completing a big financial deal. Now, tell someone (someone you wouldn’t normally tell) about how significant this was for you, emphasizing not so much the achievement as what you had to learn—and how you learned it—to get there.

How did you feel telling others about what you did, what it took, and what it means to you? Were you uncomfortable crowing, or did it feel natural? How did the other person react? Although people sometimes feel uncomfortable sharing their successes, showing with your example what’s possible and sharing how you did it, as long as you’re willing to take the risk of stretching yourself, creates opportunities for others to try new things.