Chapter 3. The Creativity and Commitment Connection
Amarjit Chopra
Unblocking Innovation
Some people are good at implementing new ways of doing things, regardless of whether or not they work in a place where the culture is "innovation friendly." The ones I've worked with are different from each other in many ways, but they all have one thing in common: the ability to create the right kind of buy-in for new ideas. By "right kind" I mean buy-in that transcends turf issues and that motivates people to put in the extra effort almost always needed to implement a new or better way of doing something.
Why do they all share this ability? Because in any organization with more than a few dozen people—with the possible exception of startups—it's a lack of this kind of buy-in that usually blocks innovation, not a lack of good ideas.
The Three Strategies for Creating Buy-in
It takes more work to launch a new product, service, or process than it does to keep doing things the old way. And the launch usually requires ancillary changes—in policies, or work habits, or mindsets. These also consume time and energy. No wonder people resist new ideas. Who needs more work, especially in today's lean organizations?
A lot of people will, of course, do almost anything if you pay them enough to do it. But if you can't or don't want to play the money card, you're left with three strategies:
- A. Order them to do it. If you have the power, you can simply say, "You will do this" (and convey, without saying it, "or else").
- B. Persuade them. Try to sell them the benefits (to the organization, to them, to the world) of doing it; appeal to their reason or emotions in other ways ("We're counting on you." "You're the only one who can pull this off." "You owe me one.").
- C. Make them co-inventors. Make them your partners in the thinking that produces the new idea or the action plan for implementing it.
Which of these strategies do you find yourself using most of the time, and why? I've asked a wide range of managers and executives these questions. I can't recall anyone saying Strategy A, except as a back up. You can get compliance this way, they say, but not wholehearted commitment.
I also can't remember anyone not agreeing that, done right, Strategy C is the one that's most likely of the three to succeed in getting people behind a new idea, mind and heart. In theory.
In practice, people say, the strategy they use most often is B. And by this they mean that they try to sell people the idea after the fact—after the thinking that produced it is largely done. And if this doesn't work, they fall back on strategy A (usually by getting someone higher up to do the ordering).
Why do people rely primarily on strategy B when they know that C could be more effective? Two reasons mentioned often are
- A lot of the ideas you get are not usable, and it's better to not ask for them than to ask for and then have to reject the ideas.
- It's hard to do creative thinking in groups, in a way that's productive.
Though most people run into these difficulties, there are some—perhaps 1 in 20—who avoid them. Not always, but enough of the time to make strategy C their first choice. I think of these people as "naturals," because most of them make the strategy work without being clear about exactly how they do it. If you work with enough of them, you see that the key is their intuitive understanding of how the mind makes good ideas. By "good" I mean ones that are both practical and better in some way than your current ideas.
The Power of Bad Ideas
Most good ideas are born bad. They are the end product of a process of evolution that usually starts with ideas that are impractical, half-baked, or even absurd. I see this again and again in my work with teams looking for innovative ideas for a wide range of problems (including technical, marketing, strategic, and people issues). You can also see it in many stories about well-known inventions. Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid instant camera, says the thought process that led to it started with an idea that was a joke.
He was explaining to a child why she couldn't see right away the pictures he was taking with a conventional camera. When he was done, he found himself saying "And that's that, unless I could put the dark room in the camera for you." This playful aside set off a train of thought that eventually led to a practical way to develop film inside a camera.
I'm convinced good ideas are born "bad" because the creative side of the mind produces raw material, not finished product—ore, if you will, and not the metal in a useable form. What's usually missing from the "ore" is practicality.
We all have our share of good ideas, so at some level we all know how to process the ore. But if you aren't aware of how you do it, then, unless you are a natural, it's easy to pick up thinking habits that interfere with this process and make it hard to tap both your own and other people's creativity.
So how do you convert this raw material into something more useable? The process itself is simple, almost obvious once you stop to think about it. But it's not always easy to use, because it requires a change in the way we habitually respond to ideas.
A Quick Overview of the Process
You evolve or "grow" a bad idea by focusing first on its nonobvious side—on what's good about it. You assure the part of your mind that goes instantly to the idea's negatives that you aren't going to forget about them, you aren't going to implement the idea as it stands. But, if you did, what might be the advantages of that way of trying to solve the problem? You focus on these plusses first, because without them, you don't have a foundation for building on the idea.
One or two positives usually come to mind easily. It's important to push yourself to find at least one that feels like an "aha." The most valuable part of the ore is seldom obvious.
You then focus on what the idea lacks—on why you wouldn't or couldn't implement it. You don't use these negatives as counterweights to the plusses, because you are not trying to decide whether or not to say yes to the idea as it stands. You already know the answer is no. Instead, you use the negatives to tell you how to grow the idea. You do this by changing the idea so you keep the plusses but not the negatives.
Here's an example that illustrates and elaborates on this process.
The Problem
Ed, the COO of a division of a large financial services company, is meeting with some of his direct reports: Roger, Sally, and Bill, who head the division's three business units, and Joan, who is in charge of new product development. They are talking about a team they formed a few months ago to promote cross-selling. Ed believes there is a significant chunk of additional business to be had from their existing customers if people in the business units did more cross-selling, Joan agrees with him. The others aren't sure there's enough of that business to justify giving the activity a higher priority than they give it.
The team's task is to identify cross-selling opportunities and to coordinate efforts to go after them. It hasn't had any trouble spotting opportunities. Where it has run into problems is in getting others to put in the time and effort needed to pursue them. Say the team finds that a customer of unit A is a good candidate for unit B's products. To make any sales, the team has to get the "owners" of the customer—the sales, marketing, and customer-service folks in unit A—to give more than a token amount of time and energy to the undertaking. But few people are willing to give it. They have their regular jobs to do, and those come first.
"We can't really blame them," says Bill. "The way we're set up encourages parochial thinking. What's in it for people in one unit to make a big effort to get business that's going to show up on another unit's bottom line? It doesn't do much for them, given the way we measure their performance—and ours."
"We've talked about changing performance measures," says Roger, "but we said it would take a lot of work and be disruptive. That wouldn't stop us, though, if we were convinced that cross-selling would get us a lot more business."
"The only thing that's going to convince me," says Sally, "is not more debate but some hard data."
"That's what I thought this team was going to get for us," says Joan. "But it seems we've put it in a double bind. They can't convince us there's more business out there than we think there is if we don't give them the resources they need to really go after it. But we don't give them the resources because we aren't convinced the business is there."
"Well put," says Ed. "So how could we give them a fair shot at it? I think we could use some fresh ideas. Anyone have any, including wild ones?"
"A little brainstorming. Okay," says Bill, "so here's a crazy idea."
The Idea and Its Evolution
"Why don't we," Bill says, "make the three people on the team VP's, same level as us, with the right to draw on any resources they want. But only for six months. If they don't surprise us by then, they go back to where they were. And we quit arguing about the priority we should give to cross-selling."
"Yeah, sure," says Sally. "You guys are VP's, and I don't give you a free shot at my people. Why would I give it to them? And I can't think of a better way to de-motivate people than to first promote and then demote them."
(We're trained to go straight for what's wrong with ideas, so our first reaction to "ore" is negative. Ed knows it's critical, in invention, to get past this initial reaction and focus on the idea's other side. Note how he does this, and does it without slapping Sally's hand for being negative. Instead, he acknowledges the validity of her concerns, here and again later.)
"You're right, of course," says Ed, "but that's only part of the story. Let's see what else there is to it, and what other ideas it can lead us to."
He gets up and goes to the coffee table by the wall and pours himself a refill. "Here's what it made me think of," he says as he returns to his chair.
"I thought, all right, we're not going to do this, but if we did, what would it do for us? One plus is that we'd be setting up an experiment that has a chance to show us the full potential of this business. A second is that it may help the team to spot more opportunities, because from a business head level, they would think about cross-selling more strategically—they'd take a longer term and I would hope a less parochial look at it.
"But also—and this was a bit of sideways thinking—they would get access to our customers at a higher level. The higher that level, the more those customers will look beyond their own functions to see if there's a need in their organizations for products of ours they are not now using.
"How might we keep these aspects of the idea, I wondered, in a practical way that would get around the issues Sally raised?"
What came to mind, Ed says, was the thought of treating cross-selling like a new product.
"Joan's testing some financial planning products, a business we're not in now," he continues. "If we decide to get into it, we would set up another business unit with its own people and books and VP. What if we created a mini-business unit for cross-selling and gave it six months to demonstrate potential? The idea isn't all there yet; it needs some more work."
"Okay, it's not as crazy as the idea you started with," says Sally, "but how would you staff this unit, where would the people come from? I'd say it would need, at a minimum, one full-time person plus three half-time. That's a core. They would also need another person's worth of time from each of our three units."
"Sounds about right," says Roger, "assuming the people in the core are competent and experienced. The very kind of people I'd be hard put to let go, even for six months. And I think if we do it, we should give it more time than that."
"Good points," says Ed to Sally and Roger. "Those are the holes in the idea that need to be filled."
"What about retirees?" asks Joan. "They've got the experience. There are several in the area, and I think some of them would be interested in this project. We don't have to hire them, just bring them in as consultants."
"I like that," says Roger. "If we can get them, it would give us flexibility. We could use more or less of their time as needed. But I think the full-time person should be internal. Someone who would see this as an opportunity to show some leadership potential."
"I've got someone like that," Bill says. "She's got the drive and I think the ability. I'd be willing to lend her to this experiment if I can get some of that retiree time to fill the gap. The only problem is that she's a bit young and may have trouble butting heads with us, as the leader of this mini-unit is going to have to do from time to time"
"That may not be a problem if she reports directly to me for the duration," say Ed. "But keeping in mind what Sally said earlier, we need to set this up so it's a positive experience for the people involved, no matter how it turns out."
They agree the idea should be pursued further.
"Our first step should be to see whether we can get the kind of retiree time we would need," says Sally.
Joan volunteers to look into retiree availability. Ed will think more about how to set up the experiment. Bill, Roger, and Sally will think about who of their people they'd be willing to assign to the effort. They'll meet again in 2 weeks to make a final go or no-go decision about it.
The Morals of the Story
Did It Work?
Whenever I tell a story like the one above, someone will ask, "So, did they do it? And was the idea a winner?"
It's appropriate, of course, to ask how effective the idea was in dealing with the problem it was designed to address. But that is only one way to judge the value of the idea-growing process that produced it. If you focus too much on this one criterion, you can lose sight of the fact that the idea is only one thing you get from the process, and it's often not the most important thing.
Okay, but before we talk about the other thing, was the idea itself a winner? The answer is yes and no. Yes, it was implemented—they formed a mini-unit, and set it up right. No, it didn't uncover enough cross-sell business to justify its existence beyond the 9 months they gave it. But yes, it did uncover enough to convince Bill, Sally, and Roger to give the activity a higher priority than they gave to it before.
On to the other thing that you get from the process: It enables you to tap some powerful sources of motivation, not just to help you implement a specific idea, but to help you get things done in general.
Ownership
Bill gave the initial idea. Ed transformed this ore into metal the group could work with. Sally contributed mostly concerns, but without these the final idea would not have taken the shape it took. Joan, Bill, and Roger helped to fill the holes in the transformed idea and to put flesh on it. So at the end, whose idea was it?
The idea-growing process creates room for ownership of an idea by more than one person. Each of the people in the discussion could rightly feel he or she owned a piece of it. Some may have felt a greater sense of ownership in it than others, but all of them felt enough of it to want to move the idea further.
Action plans for most problems include not just one but a cluster of ideas, some having to do with what you are going to do, others with how. In such cases it isn't necessary for each team member to own a piece of every idea. All you need is for all of them to feel they have enough ownership in the cluster as a whole.
Feeling Valued
When someone gives you a flawed idea, you can respond to it in one of two ways. You can reject it, which is the usual response (ignoring it is a way of rejecting it). Or you can grow it. We've just seen that if you grow it, you get an idea you can use and the other person gets a piece of ownership in any action plan in which the idea is included. But creating this sense of ownership is not the only way you increase that person's motivation to help you implement that plan.
The idea-growing process is essentially one in which you look for and build on the value hidden in another's idea. But when you say to that person, in effect, "I see some value in your idea," you send a second message as well, whether or not that is your intention. Because people identify strongly with their ideas, that message is: "I find you valuable."
If you make growing team members' ideas your normal response, you send this message to them again and again. The effect is cumulative. Over time you increase their motivation to help you get things done in general, not only those things that include their ideas. This doesn't mean that you have to grow every idea you get. People will understand that you don't have time to process all the ore they give you.
The "I value you" message is most powerful when it's most credible. It's most credible when your purpose in growing ideas is selfish: to get good ideas you can use.
Affirmation of Self-Worth
You make people feel valued when you grow their ideas, regardless of whether the ideas are "far out" ones, as Bill's was, or ones that are more down to earth but still flawed enough to be unacceptable as they stand. But there is an additional source of motivation you tap more deeply when you work with ones that are more far out.
Asking for and working with far out ideas is a way of engaging the other person's creative side. The creative side, if you recall, produces raw material that lacks practicality. When you ask for "wild" ideas you are saying, in effect, "Don't worry about practicality at this point." This gives the other person's creative side a green light.
But it isn't enough to just solicit wild ideas. You have to go beyond brainstorming and convert some of the ore you get into more usable ideas. When you do this, you release a lot of goodwill, not just towards those ideas, but toward you. Exercising their creativity in a productive way enhances people's sense of self-worth, and makes them feel good about themselves. If you enable them to have this experience, they will want to be on your team.
The Real Winner
The real winner in this story is Ed, not the idea. There are more innovative ideas where that one came from, and Ed knows how to get them—And to do this in a way that motivates people to help him get things done.
For a more in-depth discussion of how to make people your "partners in thinking," see Amarjit Chopra's book Managing the People Side of Innovation (ISBN 1-56549-098-3).