Creativity & Innovation chapter - Meetupfiles.meetup.com/19444942/Creativity & Innovation_chapter-low.pdfclockwork. The challenge between the two teams was to make the whole process

Management 3.0 Workout © 2016 Happy Melly Version 4

‘I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.’ – JG Ballard, Novelist, United Kingdom

After reading countless books and articles on the subject of creativity and innovation, I was propelled to explore the foundations that encourage both in the modern-day organization. In this chapter we explore seven principles that when mixed, shaken and stirred by a good Creativity Manager will coax the hidden designers, scientists and artists within your team to rise up and innovate. After all, who wants a team of ‘yes’ people , when you can bui ld a team of in t rapreneurs , mot iva ted to dr ive your organization into the future?

Creativity & Innovation ♦ 1


My friend Erik Gille, a copywriter, was invited to visit an instant soup factory. During the tour, the factory manager explained that there were two types of workers in his factory: Spice Blenders and Production Line Operators, oh and one lucky soup taster. But as Erik looked down the line all he saw were white coats and hair nets. It seemed to him that this was not an environment where creativity or innovation could thrive. He was wrong.

The manager explained that there was a big difference between the two types of worker. The Spice Blenders like to make up their own tempo, they tend to get really creative with their blending in the morning and slow down the tempo in the afternoon. Although it wasn’t possible for the Production Line Operators to do that, they had spent two years adjusting the production line, so that it worked like absolute clockwork.

The challenge between the two teams was to make the whole process as streamlined as possible and together the teams had perfected the process, using their own ideas and innovation. As one of the Research & Development team told Erik, “Those guys work with our products every day, they are the ones to know if things can be done better.” The moral of this story? It doesn’t matter where we work, what our job role is, we can all be creative workers. The other moral of this story? Employees hold the key to innovation.



Innovation, through exploration

In today’s highly competitive world, success in business depends less on knowledge of what exists and increasingly on one’s ability to innovate; to champion creative hubs of excellence, where we can create the unimaginable.

There are many ways to be innovative in the workplace. One is to take two great ideas and blend them together, to make one awesome idea: lamb + mint, duck + orange (Hey, kitchens are workplaces too!) What I want to say is every day, someone, somewhere is blending together two ideas, to make one great one. Take the practices found in #Workout. Many of these came from blending one great management practice with another and coming up with something even better. Innovators will simply believe that if there is a way to do something better, they will find it.

“Innovation is creativity with a job to do” John Emmerling

Switch now to some of the most innovative companies in the world, how do they maximize their innovative capability? Fast Company published an article on the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World. I don’t have room in this chapter to mention them all, but some case studies merit highlighting.

Fast Company quoted the Chinese ecommerce giant, Alibaba, as being an innovative company for helping consumers save, spend, and be entertained. The company flipped its business model on the head, from a wholesale global depot, to offering the exact same goods, direct to consumers at near wholesale prices. And why not?



Another excellent example of forward-thinking innovation can be found at the Guardian Newspaper. When the publisher embarked on a redesign of its US website, it reached out to its readers to help with creating a new design that worked for them. They took on board 40,000 comments and over the course of nine months transformed the site into something that readers wanted to visit.

Fact: In one of the hottest countries in the world, most inhabitants can’t afford a fridge. Hmmm… not good I hear you say. That’s exactly what Indian refrigeration manufacturer, Godrej & Boyce thought when they found out this statistic. So they broke moulds to create a low maintenance, low-cost refrigerator that was affordable for even the lowest income households. The Chotukool is more like a cooler box, than a refrigerator, but the innovative approach has given millions of households the opportunity to keep their food cool and last longer.

Of course there are the usual suspects in innovation: Google, Apple, Ikea and Samsung, to name a few. Yet innovation comes in all forms and not just from industry giants. In many cases, the most innovative and ingenious ideas come from employees, not managers.

“Innovation is not a practice reserved for ‘the creative’ or ‘the experts’. We innovate all the time…”

Rikke Iversholt, Project Manager at Iriss, Glasgow



The Creative Worker

Creativity and innovation go hand-in-hand. Creativity being the mental process of developing an idea. Innovation takes those ideas and makes them happen.

“Innovation is creativity + action, Imagination + experimentation”

In the 21st century we have seen an evolution in the creative economy. A recent survey by IBM of more than 1500 CEOs reported that creativity is the single most important leadership competency for enterprises. Tom and David Kelley, in their book Creative Confidence, tell us that Creativity and Innovation aren’t just for ‘creative types’; each and everyone of us has the ability in us to be creative. So as the creative economy evolves and knowledge no longer gives us the competitive advantage, creative workers have started to replace knowledge workers and everybody in an organization gets the opportunity to drive innovation.

Backing this philosophy up is Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt. In the Internet century a new type of worker has emerged, Eric has dubbed them ‘smart creatives’. Multifaceted employees who are the key to the success of every organization, big or small, global or local. As managers it’s our job to nurture creativity amongst these employees, to ensure that we allow creativity and innovation to grow, and to stamp out anything that might inhibit its flow.



In his book Creativity Inc, Ed Catmull explains the role of a manager in today’s modern organization: “My job as a manager is to create a fertile environment; keep it healthy and watch for the things that undermine it.”

“I like to reinvent myself - it’s part of my job” Karl Lagerfeld

1. Nurture Diversity

Inspired by the most innovative companies in the world, we established the Seven Rules for Creativity Managers who want to nurture diversity, break boundaries and be the innovators in their industry.

The Seven Rules For Creativity Managers

The most innovative products and services emerge when people connect ideas from entirely different contexts. Far from building a team of robots, creativity managers choose to build a team of individual minds, as diverse as a coral reef. That’s mental, not physical diversity. It matters little their sex, colour or creed. The objective is to build a team of emotional vs. rational thinkers; left vs right brainers. A cross-functional team who bring individual skills and a unique perspective to every project, and ultimately have a desire to make a positive impact in an organization.



As important as is mental diversity, we also have a duty to hire personalities that will fit in with the values of the organization. Successful recruitment campaigns invite team members and outsiders to get involved in the candidate selection. Your team will be able to pick out talent that fits in with team culture and employees outside of the core team will help recruit diversity. If we allowed only our team to pick candidates, we’d end up with a team of like-minded people who all looked the same. Yes, people pick people who look like them! And that’s just bad for diversity! Bringing in other employees outside of the team, will safeguard against sameness.

At Happy Melly our team gets to have an opinion on the candidates we believe should reach interview selection and we can take part in the interview itself. It’s essential that creative teams feel involved in the recruitment process; one bad egg could breakdown the rapport of a team and in turn its creativity. There are a variety of tools used by organizations to assess a candidate’s suitability. Try asking a candidate to prepare a Personal Map, which can be discussed during an interview with the team. Personal maps give a good insight into what motivates a candidate on both a personal and work level. There’s a whole chapter on how to use them in the Management 3.0 #Workout book.



Traditional MBTI tests can also offer an indication if a candidate is the right fit for your team. Whatever test or exercise you use, the results should be discussed and analyzed in a peer-to-peer setting.

Where in the world are you? Personal assessments are not allowed in some parts of the world, so check before you ask a candidate to undertake one.

When you have the right team in place, your role will be to support their individualism and to facilitate diverging opinions. Smart managers implement an ecosystem within their business. A system which breeds innovation and creativity, giving every employee the opportunity to reach their potential. A good way to help employees gain better experience is to mix up team roles. Job swaps encourage employees to think outside their comfort zone and can encourage new ideas and innovation. It’s also a great way to get coworkers appreciating the roles of others.

Ultimately the work environment should be inclusive and supportive, projecting the values and philosophy of the organization and allowing every employee to reach their full potential and find their sense of being.



2. Create Markets

When you nurture diversity and creativity in your organization you’re planting seeds to cultivate networked teams who will pioneer innovation and cultivate future products and services. Teams who collaborate, innovate and solve problems, yet are formed by individuals who also want to succeed on their own merits. Think the Tour de France. Individual competitors race to win, but they also work within a team. They have the support of the team, but an individual passion and drive to be the first past the finish line.

In this sense, we are creating markets within our organization. Replacing a traditional hierarchal system with a more networked structure. Replacing control with adaptability, conformity with diversity, credibility with contribution and uniformity with evolution. Network-centric teams need a strong leader capable of uniting diversity and preserving individualism. Their goal is to create markets over hierarchies and to foster collaboration and entrepreneurship. It’s a complex situation and one that must be managed meticulously.

Saying goodbye to traditional job titles also helps dissolve hierarchal thinking and create an efficient market environment. Creativity Managers allow their intrapreneurs to pick their own titles. They become a network of people, rather than a hierarchy of job titles. As long as every contributor understands their purpose within the team and achieves results, little else matters. Your team no longer have to undertake a task, because the boss told them to do it. They are given the autonomy to create and innovate using the skills and initiative they were hired for.



A great exercise which triggers people into thinking network over hierarchy is to get them to create a personal work profile. Ask them to consider the role they play within the team, the tasks they undertake and commitment they pledge to the overall goal of the organization. Make them responsible for their work profile, no one else in the organization can update or change it. This profile can cover the many facets to their role and skills a whole better than a single job title.

“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.”

Simon Sinek

If you want to sustain a high level of contribution amongst your team for every project, you must prioritize employee re cogn i t i on and recogn i ze the i r achievements immediately when a project completes. Just as every actor, writer, executive producer, assistant producer, line producer, sound grip, gaffer and best boy (I’ve always wondered what the best boy does) gets credited in the rolling credits of a movie, so every team member should be credited for their contribution on project completion. Giving Project Credits will motivate your team to continue to do a great job time and again.

You can use any system you want to recognize their work: a short movie following the project journey, an email to the whole organization recognizing team members, or a ‘kudo wall’ with each individual recognized for their contribution. Whatever you do, make it public and make them feel honoured to be part of the team.



3. Rely On Markets

To ensure your markets stay buoyant and don’t crash and burn, you’ll need to find an effective method to recognise individual achievements and offer regular feedback for your team of budding entrepreneurs.

Networked organizations who have moved away from a hierarchal structure, concentrate wholly on getting great people to do great things. No longer doe s recogn i t i on have to flow downwards. A pat on the back from your line manager is less effective than recognition from your peers who have lived a project with you. Peer-to-peer recognition encourages understanding and appreciation of the role of each individual team player, empowering innovation and creativity and awakening a common approach to finding solutions.

In larger organizations, where management finds itself largely removed from the day-to-day workings of a team and no longer knows everybody’s name or the team dynamics, analyzing peer-to-peer merits can give an insight into the successes and achievements of individuals they might not get a chance to communicate with regularly.

There are several merit systems that encourage team feedback and then store and analyze that feedback. It doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective, but it must be consistent and regular. Peer-to-peer recognition creates better connectivity amongst teams; the recognition acting as a catalyst to motivate coworkers to better performance. Our Happy Melly team use Merit Money to recognize our peers, which we distribute via Bonus.ly.



And we don’t just reward great work or success. I also reward support or help from my coworkers, when someone makes me smile, or has overcome a work hurdle; even when they showed up to a meeting, although they were moving that day (yes that happened in our team!) The reason for giving is ultimately connected to the purpose and values of the organization, but we allow for deviations to reward values such as kindness, patience and flexibility. The aim is to bring together individuals and empower them to create value in your organization.

Peer-to-peer recognition can significantly improve employee engagement, when compared to personal appraisals handed out by management. In a peer-to-peer merit scenario, the role of the leader is to use the feedback to measure engagement across different projects, social engagement and evaluate the innovation and creativity happening in the team.

4. Make No Predictions

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Benjamin Franklin

In the 1800s the average size of a lower class family was seven. Families didn’t take risks, or birth control! They understood the more children they bred, the more chance they had of some of them surviving.



Jump forward to the 21st century, in a world where still the only certainty is uncertainty. Distributed organizations can take a lesson from 19th century family values. We too must plan for an unknown future, we can make no concrete predictions. Our strategy planning has to allow for multiple scenarios and we must advocate diversity and innovation at all levels; empowering teams to incubate their own ideas and giving them the confidence to present multiple solutions to our organization’s goals.

Work together to create mental images of what your organization might look like in the future. Let them create various ideals and multiple set-based designs and plan the systems or routes to each end scenario. Your product will then have a much better chance of success in our ever-changing and capricious consumer world. It’s all about taking action to get your organization to the right destination, but which destination will you arrive at and did your team enjoy the journey?

5. Update The Workplace

“Much of the success of companies such as Apple derives from providing the right environment for creative employees.”

Bill Becker

Now it’s time to set the scene, add the props, set a stage where your intrapreneurs can perform at their very best. The environment they work in has a huge impact on the creativity of your workforce.



A well considered workspace will foster innovation and play a big role in the success of your organization. Creativity Managers understand that creating a dynamic office environment where employees feel inspired is a fundamental factor in the innovation of new products and services.

The world’s most innovative companies spend millions of dollars on creating the ‘right’ environment for their most talented creatives. At Google’s offices there’s a slide for you to descend from floor to floor. At Box there are swing chairs and at Microsoft they have an R&D department, where employees can move around the walls, change the carpets; basically change the layout when they feel like a change.

The more space, colour and flexibility you introduce in the workplace, the more likely your creative workers are to feel stimulated and motivated to succeed.

You don’t have to go completely crazy. There’s no need to add a merry-go-round or shark tank to make it inspiring. The enhancement of key elements, such as space, flexibility and colour will do the trick. Think about creating an environment that doesn’t feel like work, that imitates life outside of the office. Just as a city has a variety of neighbourhoods, which make it energetic and fun, so too should your office have a character that supports diversity. Just as you give your team the freedom to be creative in their roles, why don’t you also give them the freedom to customize elements within the working environment?



Be sure to keep some closed off areas available. Your team will appreciate there is a space for everyone - for the introverts and extroverts. A quiet place away from the babble, for private phone calls, or five minutes meditation. And don’t forget a space to relax, to enjoy some downtime, to get your people up and away from their desks. A sofa/lounge area, comfortable cafeteria, or games room, can also double up as a space to welcome clients and guests.

Colour is life. So make work colourful! There’s a whole genre of reading matter on colour psychology. How it affects your mood and its impact on our behaviour. Research shows that colours can have a major influence on the motivation and productivity of employees. For example, blue is said to calm, centre and influence workers; even lower heart rates. Green reduces stress and anxiety. Get your team involved in decisions on colour schemes, space rearrangement and furnishing and allow them to add their personal touches wherever possible. Some of the most creative and beautiful offices have been designed completely by the employees themselves.

We’ve covered customization, transparency and variety, but what about a fourth solution? What if you give your employees the freedom to work from where they want? Statistics suggest that by 2020 half the working population will be remote workers. Think about it. Where’s the motivation in sitting at the same desk day in, day out? Why not let your employees work from where they want to, as long as they are producing the results?



6. Change Constraints

So many constraints to deal with on a daily basis - work, social etiquette, bureaucracy. Why does everything have to fit into a neat little box? Actually it doesn’t. Yet some managers still insist on putting outdated constraints on their employees.

Of course every work environment has to have some constraints. Research even shows that creative workers like constraints. The objective is to encourage experimentation and workplace flexibility, at the same time introducing ways to keep the team productive, motivated and aligned with company goals and values. Delegation Boards and Delegation Poker are both effective methods of introducing constraints and a level of structure in self-organising teams; more traditional methods such as a Workplace Flexibility Policy or Shared Need Guidelines also help to identify positive constraints that keep a team motivated and productive, whilst fostering innovation and creativity.

The task of a good creativity manager is to identify and introduce good constraints and wheedle out the ones that are just plain stupid.

“Reward employees with time to think, while providing them with the structure they need” Soren Kaplan

Good: Unlimited Vacation Time. What does it matter how much time you spend in the office, as long as you get the job done? Companies such as Virgin, LinkedIn and Netflix have all put their trust in good work ethics in the introduction of Unlimited Vacation Time.



Bad: Clean desk policy. In a New York Times article, psychologist Kathleen D. Vohs wrote that being around messiness leads people away from convention, in favour of new directions. In an experiment carried out by Kathleen, people were asked to create a list of unconventional uses of a ping pong ball. The subjects in a messier environment came up with ideas that were 28% more creative than those who worked in a more organized environment!

Good: You have to work a couple of days on another team each month. There are several benefits to this rule: Firstly, your team gets a taste of what life is like on another team, they share their team values and learn the values and cultures of others; secondly, you rotate knowledge, team members get to see things from another perspective and learn new ways and methods of doing things.

Bad: Clocking in and out and fixed lunch breaks. This type of constraint says to your team that you don’t trust them to get the work done without putting constraints on their working day. Unfortunately it doesn’t make us more efficient, it leads to ineffective and broken workflow and poor team morale.

A Fast Company article titled, 6 Ways to Create a Culture of Innovation, debated various methods to create a culture of innovation. It concluded the best solution was to reward employees with time to think, while providing them with the structure they need. Step back to Erik’s visit to the instant soup factory and you see this clearly demonstrated.

A highly effective way to evoke learning and innovation in your organization is to introduce Exploration Days, also called Hackathons and Shipit Days. Give workers regular time out of the daily routine to run experiments and play with big ideas. As a Creativity Manager you should be optimizing these opportunities. Don’t just ask them to experiment. Require it of your teams to explore the unexplored and spark innovation.

Before you set out to write a company or team guideline, think about the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’: Why do we need constraints? What will our team benefit from these constraints? How will it help us reach our higher purpose?



7. Open Boundaries

And why stop there? The more freedom you allow your employees, the more likely they are to adopt a learning mindset. Creativity managers connect instead of protect. They believe in the value of knowledge sharing and collaboration. Who says networking and collaboration has to stop within your organization? Take the giant that is Intel. When they organized their last Intel conference, they didn’t just make it for Intel employees, they invited people from other organizations in their sector. They understood that as much as they could teach, they could also learn a great deal from networking with organizations in sync with their values.

Managers who fear openness will surely be those that stifle worker creativity. Those that open up boundaries will enjoy the inflow of great ideas. Allow your teams to network with like-minded businesses, attend cross company conferences and create open innovation platforms where you share ideas and practices with like-minded organizations. Open closets, share ideas and grow a transparent culture, where employees are not afraid to listen, learn and share knowledge within the industry. Of course, some protection for your organization’s next innovation has to be committed from a management level, such as copyrights and patents for product innovation.

Another great example of open collaboration was related during a Management 3.0 Workshop. One of the participants explained that in their organization anyone was allowed to join the company's internal workshops and events. This included people from other companies, including competitive businesses. She was very proud of her employer opening up their borders.


Summary

If you take anything away from reading this chapter it has to be the knowledge that:

The fear of giving your employees free reign to be creative WILL kill innovation

Do away with the traditional boundaries that may be suffocating the creativity and entrepreneurship in your team. Feed enthusiasm by regular feedback and crediting people for their work, and introduce a peer-to-peer and project credit system. Let your team invent their own role by introducing work profiles and let them choose their title, or be a title-free company! You will find that de-emphasizing traditional management behaviours and policies in your organization, will also de-emphasize the hierarchy structure and open boundaries to let creativity flow from within.

References

Ballard, J.G. What I believe. http://www.jgballard.ca/uncollected_work/what_i_believe.html Science Fiction magazine, January 1984 Becker, Bill. Create the Best Environment for Creative Employees With These 6 Principles. http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237221 Entrepreneur, 9 September 2014 Brown Tim. Change by Design Catmull Ed. Creativity, Inc. Random House Publishing Group, 4 August 2014 Emmerling, John. “Innovation is creativity with a job to do.” Innovation Unleashed speech to University of Michigan students, 2008 Fast Company,.“The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” http://bit.ly/1ESb7AY



http://bit.ly/1ESb7AY

http://bit.ly/1ESb7AY

Forbes. “The World’s Most Innovative Companies” http://onforb.es/KN91JP Franklin, Benjamin. “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789 Gille, Erik. Can you be a creative worker on a production line? http://www.happymelly.com/can-you-be-a-creative-worker-on-an-production-line/ Happy Melly, 27 June 2014 Hogshead, Sally. How to Fascinate Advantage Assessment Test. http://www.howtofascinate.com Iversholt, Rikke. Iriss On… Blending Ideas http://www.iriss.org.uk/resources/iriss-blending-ideas, June 2014 Kaplan, Soren. “Reward employees with time to think, while providing them with the structure they need.” 6 ways to create a culture of innovation. Fast Company http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672718/6-ways-to-create-a-culture-of-innovation 30 December 2013. Kelley, Tom & David. Creative Confidence. Lagerfeld, Karl. “I like to reinvent myself - it’s part of my job.” The world according to Karl: The wit and wisdom of Karl Lagerfeld. Thames & Hudson Ltd, 16 September 2013. Print. Schmidt, Eric. How Google Works. Grand Central Publishing, 23 September 2014. Print. Sinek, Simon. “When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” Steve Jobs. Think Different Vohs, Kathleen D. It’s not ‘mess’. It’s creativity. New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/its-not-mess-its-creativity.html?_r=0 13 September 2013.



The Happiness of Workers 24

This article is part of the Management 3.0 Workout practices. All rights reserved. It is

not allowed to copy and/or distribute this article. But if you do, we’ll forgive you.

Text: Louise Brace – Illustrations: Chad Geran – Ideas: Jurgen Appelo


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Creativity & Innovation chapter - Meetupfiles.meetup.com/19444942/Creativity & Innovation_chapter-low.pdfclockwork. The challenge between the two teams was to make the whole process