New year, new creativity?

I don’t know about you, but I usually come back from the break feeling refreshed and optimistic, with ideas for things that I want to try in the coming year. I don’t make resolutions, but I always have that feeling of a fresh start.

Perhaps you’ve come back to work looking for a bit of a fresh start too. No matter how much the holiday season is for friends and family, I always find a few work reflections sneaking in there too. Which is no back thing – standing ‘on the balcony’ and surveying the scene is a really helpful thing to do.

In my last blog I recommended a book: The Innovators: How a bunch of hackers, geniuses and geeks created the Digital Revolution, by Walter Isaacson. In this article I’m going to highlight some practical changes you can make to adopt his findings that:

1. Innovation is a group endeavour
2. Innovation succeeds best with diverse teams.

So, what practical steps can we take?

Establish innovation and creative problem-solving as a group, rather than an individual, responsibility

Rather than rewarding the lone genius, recognise and reward team behaviours: knowledge sharing, collaboration and networking. The individualistic ‘knowledge is power’ culture that I saw in that venerable financial institution mentioned in my November post has no place in an innovation culture

Actively build diversity into your teams

Gender and ethnic diversity are important, and the link between diversity and innovation is proven (for a brief summary of recent compelling research, see https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation) However, from Isaacson’s findings, there are other forms of diversity we need to be thinking about too:

• A mix of personality types and personal preferences: many successful teams that Isaacson describes have at their heart an introvert (a reflective thinker); an extrovert (a networker and “joiner up” of many sources of knowledge); and someone with a hard business focus (how do we make this commercially successful?).
• Different skillsets and experience. Too many teams are all ‘of a type’ in terms of their career trajectories and specialisms. You may be building IT solutions, but bring in perspectives from organisational change, user experience and commercial. You may work for a bank and have a team full of deep finance expertise. But does the finance sector have the best solutions for your challenges? Cross-fertilisation from other market sectors may bring the fresh perspectives that you need. And, if you’ve all worked for the same organisation for a long time, it’s really time to mix it up with some newer recruits with experience from different places.

Create an environment that enables the cross-fertilisation of ideas

Bell Labs in the 1930s created the archetypal creative environment that hugely influenced the campus style of Google et al. You’re unlikely to have the luxury of commissioning a new campus, but you can think about which teams sit where, and how you design your ‘traffic’ and social spaces. If all your IT colleagues sit in one dead-end wing that no-one else passes through, then the opportunities for chance encounters and new discussions are few. Some ideas:

• Identify which of your teams most need to be innovating in cross-functional ways. Think about where they are located to maximise the opportunities for chance encounters with other, different people, and the resulting sparking of ideas
• Where people mix, create opportunities to linger. I worked in one organisation with a big social space right outside the café. It was full of sofas and comfy seats, and always full of the buzz of ideas and connections
• Timetable opportunities for different teams to mix and discuss what they’re focused on and the problems they’re trying to solve. Fun and informal is a nice way to go: I worked with one group that had a regular Friday morning slot where anyone could put a topic on the agenda to get group insight. It was informal and peer-led with little managerial direction
• If your people are spread across lots of working locations, then think about technology-enabled collaboration events too – WebEx and the like. But in my own experience, nothing beats getting groups together face to face, so schedule some all-staff workshops and conferences too – and get out of your offices to do so! 

Get the year off to a good start by mixing things up a bit at work. And watch what happens: when people are connecting, sharing ideas, collaborating and innovating you can see it and hear it – the buzz will be in the air!

P.S. If you missed my review of The Innovators, check out my last post “Are you ‘getting what you always got’?” linked to below…