Six Key Cultural Values for Enabling Creativity in Engineering
“About 60% of the CEOs polled by IBM cited creativity as the most important leadership quality.” fastcompany.com. If creativity is the most important quality, surely a close second would be building team abilities and capabilities. If not at least building a creative organization seems more reasonable and consistent than relying on the talents of one individual. Perhaps building such an organization will turn out to be easier than finding the next Steve Jobs? If so, how do we go about promoting that creativity within an organization? Surely the expectation isn’t to hang up abstract art and start yelling ‘Be Creative’!
Creativity is a process. Every process has inputs and outputs. The inputs to the process of creativity are imagination and communication. The output of the process of creativity is a shared idea or artifact which can be judged on a scale of novelty and interest to a target market. By optimizing the organizational environment for imagination and communication an organization can develop more ideas with useful levels of novelty. That environment is formed through the cultural values of an organization. The core values that form a fertile environment for imagination and communication are diversity, curiosity, security, empathy. In order to focus that imagination and communication towards a targeted level of novelty organizations should also embrace transparency and bottom up solutions. Structurally those values can be reinforced with smaller self-directed teams.
Creativity is a process. Every process has inputs and outputs. The inputs to the process of creativity are imagination and communication. The output of the process of creativity is a shared idea or artifact which can be judged on a scale of novelty and interest to a target market.
Imagination
Of the things in the world which are mysterious, the root of imagination is near the top. The modern popular conception of imagination is that people’s brains take in a variety of experiences and recombine them to create something novel. While there’s possibly something unique happening in the brains of the truly novel among us; the artists, the inventors, the really out there folks; for most organizations that basic modern concept will suffice. Organizations aren’t trying to develop the next Salvador Dali, they are generally trying to build a better UI/UX. To encourage the collective imagination to achieve this desired level of novelty, organizations should encourage their members to be exposed to as many relevant ideas as possible.
We are exposed to new ideas from two sources. One source is from conversations with others. Another source is from deep investigation into a topic. Deeply investigating a topic requires curiosity. To develop that curiosity within an organization it is necessary to give the space and time for discovery. In order for conversations with others to provide new ideas, the organization must nurture a diversity of view points and skills.
Diversity
What diversity is and why it is important is pretty straightforward. If everyone in an organization has the same experiences and knowledge, any ideas generated within the organization will be limited to those experiences and knowledge. If, however, members of an organization have a variety of experiences and knowledge then there is an opportunity for the variety to be recombined into something new.
Diversity is rarely a problem for startups, perhaps it is because of their dynamic nature or their smaller size that encourages exposure to a variety of concepts. However, larger organizations tend to be very stable and viewpoints tend to be less diverse. The stability means that new skills and technologies are rarely introduced into the organization. When this happens there is a tendency for the people within the organizations to deeply specialize in a skill set. While deep specialization can yield some fruit it’s more likely that the same hammer is going to be used on 20 different nail like problems. This is an actual lack of novelty. In order to bring novel ideas to an organization the people within that organization need to know what IS novel. They need to know the limits, the current practices, the current technologies within a given field. Stable organization tend to become insular and thereby less creative. Building or structuring an organization of diverse view points will counter this insular tendency and encourage more imaginative thinking.
Curiosity
Diversity creates an atmosphere in which people are exposed to new ideas. Curiosity explores those ideas. Through exploration, a deeper understanding is developed. That deeper understanding itself creates a new idea which adds to the richness of the organization’s tapestry of ideas. The trouble with curiosity is that by extension teams are working in unfamiliar territory. This is the stuff of failure. A reasonable way to build slack for that failure is to use internal projects as a method for learning technologies. This provides a more forgiving environment for finding the limits of technologies.
Empathy
Sometimes the pursuit of curiosity will be fruitless. And sometimes diversity will create friction. Encouraging empathy within an organization, being understanding of others, acts as a glue which allows diversity to thrive and allows the sometimes fruitless pursuits of curiosity to develop unforeseen benefits.
Communication
Creativity requires more than one person. To use networking terminology, communication requires a sender and a receiver. Someone generates an idea and someone else receives that idea. This is called communication. To improve the communication of creative ideas organizations need to encourage frequent sending of ideas, effective reception of those ideas, and create positive feedback loops between the two. Creating a secure environment and actively practicing empathy will encourage those behaviors.
Security
It’s not everyone who will just blurt out their favorite ideas in meetings or in conversations with colleagues. Sharing an idea creates vulnerability. Other people will judge not just the idea but the one who presented the idea, potentially leading to a loss of perceived status within an organization. To encourage sharing imaginative ideas then, at a minimum, people need to feel secure that their status within the organization will be improved or maintained.
It’s easier for people to say nothing than contribute an imaginative idea. For most people to make that effort, they want to know that their idea has an impact. To create an environment in which people feel secure and in which people believe their idea is a worth while contribution, an organization should take the time to recognize the idea makers and promote empathy. Recognition helps both to improve security as well as encouraging effort. With a simple recognition the organization is communicating to employees that ideas in themselves are desirable and useful. Recognition also helps those that are sharing their ideas gain more exposure within an organization in order to promote the next creative thing.
Empathy
The receiver plays a part in successful communication, too. It is not hard to imagine a CEO as above saying they want more creative leaders, but novel ideas from the rank and file are never pursued by management because the concepts are considered too ‘out there’. And then the CEO keeps seeing the same ideas trotted out like a state fair ferris wheel, thinking, “I need more creative leaders”.
Perhaps the leaders don’t need to be more creative, but more receptive. While we generally think about increasing our creativity as encouraging more novel ideas, it is important to also consider the reverse, that organizations need to be more receptive to more novel ideas. In order to understand ideas that people are sharing, it is important to actively listen. Active listening requires not just listening, but also asking questions in order to better understand what is being communicated. This is a skill which is built by improving empathy.
Empathy is also considered an important attribute for creative thinking psychology today. In the context of encouraging individuals to share ideas, if an individual has more empathy for the recipient they would be more willing to put in the effort to generate solutions that benefit others and share those ideas to make an impact.
Useful Novelty
ideas must have a level of novelty which delights but does not confuse a target market
By providing a fertile environment for imagination and communication organizations can encourage a greater volume of creative ideas. In order for those creative ideas to have a positive impact on the health of an organization, those ideas must be relevant. The ideas must be relevant in terms of solving actual problems. In other words, the ideas must have a level of novelty which delights but does not confuse a target market.
Transparency
Sometimes creative solutions don’t solve the actual problems of the enterprise or the customers. When this happens the organization suffers from what appears to be a creative drought. The phrase “it’s very creative, but not very useful” comes to mind. In organizations of size the actual problems of the organization or the customer are rarely clear. It is rare to see metrics that have not been massaged for a quarterly report. If organizations want solutions that are aware of second order effects, the context needs to be visible to everyone. In order to do this it is important to communicate to members of the organization what IS relevant. In order to do this organizations should look to expose members to the problems of the organizations and their customers.
Bottom Up
To have solutions which are relevant, organizations should look to solutions from those who are more familiar with the systems and processes in the organization. These are the solutions which come from the bottom up. In order to generate these ideas, it is important to ask. There are a few methodologies out there which help organizations leverage the brain trust, one such is to lead with intent. That is, rather than have directors and VP’s determine what will be done, have directors and VP’s determine what outcomes are important for the business. Let the teams involved in the process determine what implementation will achieve those outcomes. This achieves two things. One, the solutions will be more relevant. And two, it creates a sense of ownership. When people own the work they will be more likely to contribute creatively to the solutions.
Summary
When we look at increasing organizational creativity by improving communication and fostering imagination to achieve a desired level of novelty several organizational values become apparent:
- Empathy ( active listening, encouragement )
- Transparency ( of problems, of customer feedback, and metrics )
- Diversity of experience and knowledge
- Curiosity
- Security
- Bottom up solutions
Several of these are behaviors that can happen within any organizational structure, for instance : empathy, diversity, a secure work environment. These cost nothing and only require specific attitudes. Others, such as curiosity, may require strategic investment. And the third category may require cultural organizational changes and possibly structural changes to achieve; transparency, bottom up solutions.
Empathy seems that it would be encouraged mostly by smaller working groups where the individuals are more familiar with each other. However, that seems to be at odds with providing an environment that encourages a diversity of experience and knowledge. And transparency is famously difficult for an organization to achieve. Any attempt to be open with the problems of an organization or the needs of a customer will also encounter a tendency to craft those issues and form a coherent narrative and consistent purpose for the organization. After all that’s part of leadership. The issue with crafting a consistent purpose and narrative is that metrics or problems which don’t fit that narrative need to be edited out.
Ideally an organizational structure would leverage smaller teams that provide closer relationships between individuals. These closer relationships would serve to improve a sense of security while also encouraging empathy within the group. Organizing these smaller teams into larger autonomous product groups would provide an easier path for transparency, consistent narratives, and bottom up solutions. The larger groups would also be large enough to provide diversity, but the shared focus of the group would still encourage empathy.
