Creative illusions
Setting out on your journey to be a more creative leader it is easy to feel intimidated by some of the big names out there that are today’s modern examples and often touted exemplars of innovation and creativity. When you first become a parent someone with wise words will no doubt have said to you let your children grow in their way but be careful of comparing them with others. Yet we did it all the same.
In this blog and episode if you’re joining me for the podcast I wanted to look through the illusion of innovation theatre that is easy to indulge in as a leader and yet ignores the opportunities at the tips of our noses and how you as the leader hold the capacity in your organisation to springboard or stifle innovation and creativity. Being innovative doesn’t come together just by wishing upon a star but the good news is that the way to do is a whole lot cheaper than building a new campus in Palo Alto.
First let’s talk about innovation envy. Look at the list of global innovative companies in 2015 and in the top five are Tesla, Apple and Amazon. Zip forward to looking at the list of global innovative companies in 2021 and in the top five are Tesla, Apple and Amazon. It’s interesting but not altogether useful to us mere mortals because we’re not in a position where the TAA triad are wholly relatable.
Yet many smaller organisations are tempted to emulate success through illusory innovation theatre. The first of these manifestations is “innovation comes from having an innovation campus”. With images of Apple and Pixar in mind, the impression is gained that bringing innovative people together in one place is how innovation happens. In a sense and in a large company like the US where distances are vast there is some sense in bringing scriptwriters, storyboard, artists and animators closer together so they can achieve faster review cycles in closer proximity.
In smaller organisations it’s easy to attribute innovation to come from bringing the creative people together. We put the innovators on a floor of a building or even a building to themselves. And they can innovate and they can wonder, but left to themselves without the stimulus of the mainstream business they can also create solutions to problems that don’t exist. Remember Natalie Nixon’s wonder-rigour axis – we have all the wonder andnone of the rigour which comes from knowledge of how things work to come up with the incremental change. An innovator without rigour will likely come up with something that is commercially unviable or impractical to implement.
Innovation theatre is illusory and falsely symbolic but hugely tempting for leaders as a way to change culture and bring innovation into an organisation. Alf Rehn, as professor of Innovation at the University of Southern Denmark should know more than a thing or two about innovation. This innovation theatre as he calls it hopes to signal to everyone that heywe are now an innovative company and the symbolism of the theatre in itself infuses a company with ideas, inventions and courage. There is little to no evidence of this working and more true in reality is it produces a toxic divide between the “ideas people” and those who sigh and wait for the eventual mess they’ll have to sweep up in its wake.
The second major mistake for smaller organisations is the emulation of start-ups. The internet’s ability to cross borders and available angel investor capital has made start-ups something to be admired. At certain points in the news cycle it seems like every day there’s a flotation of some start-up that seems to have cornered the market in serving a consumer need you never knew existed let alone thought anyone cared enough about. Our rational brain tells us that those we hear of and maybe admire are the tip of a very large iceberg of start-ups that never surface above the waves before sinking unknown and unloved and out of sight. But it doesn’t deter us.
And it tempts leaders to believing that the emulation of a start-up culture is the means for being creative ad generating great ideas within their company. Again it rarely works. Most start-ups are surprisingly simple. They take a core idea, an uncomplex business model, target a very specific niche of customers and acknowledge there’s a population they don’t want to and won’t serve. Precarious financing creates a hunger to succeed and a reasonably high tolerance of risk of losing it all in the pursuit of success. The high tolerance of risk possibly comes easier when you had nothing to start with and much of what you do have has been invested by someone else.
It's hard to existing organisations to truly emulate a start-up culture but it doesn’t stop some people from trying to establish tiger teams, panzer divisions and other terms filled with an odd sense of machismo who will smash through the boundaries and turn the company around. Yet the tiger-team are still living with the comfort of a monthly pay-cheque and eventually tend to run out of road when they’re told despite their preference not to, they have to acknowledge and integrate the service for existing customers or protect the existing company brand.
The third mistake with innovation culture is selectively choosing palatable or socially aspirational examples to emulate, particularly perceiving innovation in technology to be a superior form of innovation. I looked up a list of Europe’s most innovative companies. Within this list are Siemens, Withings, AI royalty tool Amuse and a biometric security company Sthaler. One brand you won’t see if Ryanair. . Outrageous and often outspoken, Ryanair was scoffed at by traditional flag carriers with its assertion that it could do without food, drink, cabin baggage and float ideas such as charging customers for using the toilet and standing “seats” to get more people on to a plane. Yet many years on and Ryanair is still there arguably as outspoken as ever but with a huge passenger following and few can dispute they fundamentally disrupted the concept of European air travel. Innovative and creative for sure in taking the South West Airlines model and adapting it to the significantly more complex European airspace context, but rarely cited in favour of technology alternatives that generate considerably less money for their shareholders. You don’t have to like every aspect of a company to recognise qualities you don’t have.
If you’re a leader that is seeking to harness creativity you have a decision point in front of you. Are you looking to instil true creativity or the semblance of theatre? There is a distinction.
And now for the good and bad news. To foster creativity in your organisation it is unlikely that you’ll need a big budget innovation campus. So far so good. The bad news is it is highly likely that it’s your own behaviour that is the greatest set-back to seeing ideas foster. And back to the good news, it’s relatively easy to do things differently.
A little while ago I had an appointment in central London and decided I had time and it was early enough to walk to where I needed to be. London’s an interesting place to walk and as I strolled through Farringdon I had a flash back to an innovation workshop I’d attended. We were dropped into groups to come up with customer service ideas. The familiar personas, post-its and dotocracy devices were all in play until we narrowed down our ideas to eventually pitch them to the investor board. My team came second, we were robbed. No seriously I think none of the pitches were quite ready to hit the market but the top four were 60% on to something and 40% not quite working.
But here’s the thing with the innovation workshop. At the end of the day, only one idea went off to the executive board to be presented and debated. Nine ideas and over three hundred collective hours of researching customer problems and pain points and 60-80% good enough solutions were never seen again. Except of course the customer problems and pain points still existed and were very real, just not known to the executive team who focussed solely on the winning idea, which they also ultimately rejected. Nine customer problems and concept ideas to resolve remain possibly to this day unresolved and un-noticed because they lost out in the game of innovation theatre. But it was never a game.
According to Alf Rehn in his book Innovation for the Fatigued, Alf Rehn, innovation theatre is what we tend to construct when in actual fact our leadership behaviour has a more profound and telling impact on others.
Most ideas die from neglect and a lack of care. Not over opposition and criticism. In my example nine ideas died because no one deemed them important enough to even leave the room. But even when you’re present as a leader you may say you’re into creativity but you can kill an idea with a simple yawn.
How many times have you been in a meeting and casually pitched in an observation of a problem or the germ of a new idea. You know you’ve not got it all figured through, but something sparks, you say it and round the room is silence until the chair of the meeting gives a polite thank you and let’s move on. This is the stuff that kills ideas because once experienced we ourselves then become far less likely to want to do it again.
It's not that as a leader you’re out there actively rejecting ideas, but the people around you have all been through this cycle of social embarrassment. They’ve said something well-meaning and watched the lowering of people’s gaze around them as the silence becomes deafening. Critique of an idea handled well is a compliment because it shows engagement. The worse thing to do when someone is attempting to be creative is to ignore them as you’ll rarely see them try again.
So what to do to foster greater creativity within your team? Don’t fall for the theatrics and symbolism of creativity. You risk creating one winner and teaching everyone else that they are the losers and they won’t come back for more.
Instead become used to nurturing seed-corns not just of solutions but also problems, because as we know from the wonder-rigour model it’s not enough to have ideas, ideas need to connect themselves with a problem.
Express interest in the problem and ask open questions
- how did you notice this?
- what have you seen?
- what are you thinking we could do?
Solutions need domain-expertise so how about
- who else might be able to add some perspective on this?
Your second tactic is to recognise the seed corn of creativity is messy and incomplete. The theatrical illusory way of looking at this is to praise presentations that are slick and visually compelling for their presentation skills and ignoring the substance. Instead look at ideas like a jigsaw made of many pieces. The proponent may have a few pieces but not all of them – it’s your job to spot this and consider how to find the missing pieces – don’t task them with doing it – you’re the leader with the supposedly superior view and command of all the resources in the organisation, now is not the time to be delegating that to someone junior – it’s the moment they need you to step up and help find the missing pieces. Proposing anything that is beyond the ordinary takes guts and courage that should be admired and not dismissed.
In 1982 James Wilson and George Kelling proposed the broken windows theory – that neighbourhoods with signs of low-level crime and anti-social behaviour created an environment that saw more crime and disorder. The inverse of this belief was that fostering a clean and orderly neighbourhood encouraged others to contribute to its upkeep.
Creativity is a delicate thing, people who propose ideas risk rejection not just of their idea but feeling themselves rejected unless you as the leader set the conditions to foster a counter culture that welcomes learning through experimentation. Something didn’t work as we expected – your choice as a leader to command an enquiry to find the culprit or to look at the pieces, take advantage of some of the shapes that work and recognise every experience is something to learn from.
Creativity thrives when the cultural conditions allow it to. No campus or innovation theatre can replace that.
