Shaping Culture for Creativity (Part 1)

How can you influence the culture of your organization naturally and organically, even if you don’t explicitly work on it directly and proactively? This article points the way, with specific practices to guide you.

By Steven Kowalski, Ph.D.

 

Creative Together offers a methodology for activating creativity to invent anywhere inside your organization. The insights and approaches can be applied in any domain—to spark innovation in arenas like product development, manufacturing, scientific discovery, engineering, and the invention of new technologies. Or the methodology can be applied to evolve core infrastructure, invent new platforms and systems, redesign service delivery models, reimagine core business processes, and shape external ecosystems in ways that support the enterprise mission.

Whatever your focus, as you bring conscious creativity forward every day to co-create solutions, you will make a difference. You will influence the culture of your organization naturally and organically, even if you don’t explicitly work on it directly and proactively. You will shape the norms and practices for how people interact and behave with each other.

At the same time, there may be some of you reading who are called to more actively and explicitly shape your organization’s culture to foster proactive, creative accountability. This is important work. And you can use everything we’ve explored about creativity and co-creation to instill new norms and practices that support creative expression for a broader circle of people than just those you work with today. And you can architect a culture that makes it easier for those who will join your organization in the future.

Over the years, I’ve led (and participated in) multiple efforts to directly and intentionally shape organizational culture to unleash collective, creative potential. I’ve discovered that three areas of focus are core and critical:

1. Shifting collective mindsets and behaviors (including your own mindset, the mindsets and behaviors of leaders and leadership teams, and efforts to shift collective mindsets “for all”)
2. Generating practice fields like innovation incubators and “labs,” innovation “projects,” and other places where experimentation can flourish
3. Shaping business processes, systems, and infrastructure in ways that support a robust innovation “pipeline” and accelerate the process of turning ideas into new value at scale.

Focusing on only one or two of these areas yields less than optimal results. Together, they form a powerful foundation for evolving and transforming cultures into places that unleash both creative and leadership potential.

Focus Area One: Shifting Mindsets and Behaviors

Why is mindset important? Our mindset includes our most deeply held values, beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and the world around us. It guides our aspirations (what we hope for), our motivation (what drives us forward), and the purposes to which we are attracted. It shapes how we view and navigate constraints and possibilities. And it influences your day-to-day choices about how to create inside of social systems; how much control you seek, whether to share or protect, whether you ask for permission or forgiveness, who you include, and so many other aspects of your creative life.

When mindset is unexplored, gaps can emerge. Here, you will notice a difference between what people say they want and what is true at a deeper level. For example, I often hear leaders and managers say they want more creativity and innovation from employees. But when it comes down to it, they don’t behave in ways that align with their words. There’s a gap between their request that people “innovate” and what they actually do (their behaviors, actions and decisions) and how they support (or don’t support) people. This is an example of the kinds of gaps you will need to confront if you want to change the culture of your organization. If people’s mindset is at odds with their aspirations, mindset will always win out in the long run.

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to work with a team of people in the Finance function of a mid-sized Bay Area based firm. Each of them had elected to join in a collective effort to change the culture within the Finance organization: to unleash creative potential. They participated in this culture change effort as volunteers, above and beyond their day-to-day roles and responsibilities. Each of them cared deeply about making their Department a place where people could raise ideas and pursue innovations that added value. In their eyes, this was urgent and important—not just for the engagement and satisfaction of the workforce but also so that they could continue to innovate in the changing business landscape they foresaw.

One of the challenges this team observed in their culture was a lack of available time to test and implement new ideas. There was more than enough time and space to have ideas. Having ideas for how to improve things or adapt or invent was not the problem. But feeling like it was safe to raise them (challenging the status quo) and finding the time and support to invest in testing out ideas—this is what was difficult.

Managers were reluctant to reduce the responsibilities of peoples’ role (what they were hired to do) to make time to co-create or work on “innovation projects.” That meant pursuing innovative ideas could only happen when they worked above and beyond their day-to-day responsibilities. Why not make it part of everyone’s job, they wondered? Why not makes sure anyone in their organization had the freedom to build coalitions amongst partners across boundaries, and inspire people to try new things out and change the way they were currently doing things? Why not reward this kind of behavior?

Pursuing these kinds of organizational changes required the team to confront their own values, assumptions, and beliefs about themselves; including their beliefs about creativity and who they were as creators, their sense of value and contribution to the organization, and what disturbed them about the way things were currently done. They had to confront the mindsets of their leaders – and how these mindsets translated into behavior that supported or diminished their efforts. They had to think differently about building partnerships with functions that could help make the changes needed to implement their ideas. And ultimately, they realized that in order to generate sustainable change, they would need to focus on changing the culture in the Finance department for everyone—and not just a select group of people.

As my clients in the Finance organization discovered, when you work directly and consciously to shift culture in ways that unleash creative potential, the first step involves taking a look in the mirror. That means scouring your own mindset, motivations, belief systems, values and your assumptions and intent, so you can clearly see what’s best for the broader system. Your mindset will shape how you engage. After all, you are a member in the community you seek to change. And as a member, there are beliefs and assumptions you may be taking for granted or which represent blind spots for you. These will need to be examined and addressed before real change can occur, starting with you.

Let’s start with your mindset about the process of culture change itself. Here are some key questions:

• What do you believe it takes to create within the system in which you work? What helps and what gets in the way? What might have to shift and change? What do you believe your role might be in such an effort? How might your creative Style play out in the way you approach this journey and in the way you engage with others? What might be different if you bring the Collaborator forward, and let some of the individualistic tendencies of the Soloist, Rebel and Entrepreneur fade to the background?
• What do you think gives rise to an organization’s “culture”? Is it the leaders (and how they behave) who set the stage for how things get done, what counts, and what gets reinforce and rewarded? What influence do the industry (and its particular blend of opportunities and challenges), the external environment, and the times in which the organization exists play a role in setting norms and practices? Does culture evolve organically, or can it be “designed?”
• What do you believe about the process of culture change itself? Do you believe it’s complicated to shape and change an organization’s culture? Easy? What do you think is needed to alter the artifacts and structures that have been built up over years of going about things in a particular way? Can you build-in a propensity toward innovation, agility, exploration, and discovery? Is it possible to intentionally evolve an organization’s culture to foster co-creation and shared leadership?

Here, I’d like to add some perspective from my experience working on multiple longer-term efforts to shape organizational culture. I do believe it is possible to consciously enhance an organization’s capability for world-class discovery, creativity and innovation. Whether you’re forming a small start-up, aiming to shift how people work together in a large governmental agency or in a hundreds-year-old academic institution, or working to revitalize a 90,000-person global organization that’s dispersed across multiple continents, I believe that all organizations need to be – and continually become – places where adventure, play, mystery, surprise, creativity, collaboration, and innovation can flourish. Increasingly, people are being called to consciously fashion the work environment into not just a place for execution—not even simply a place for innovation—but into a place where adventure, discovery, and creative expression are the norm.

Despite what I read in the literature and popular blogosphere that warns that culture is hard to change, my experience has shown otherwise. It’s not that culture is particularly hard to change—but that it takes an active investment of energy, perseverance, a long-term vision, and continued attention and care. Maybe that’s why it seems difficult: because these qualities are often in short supply. Shaping culture also takes iteration and often involves leaps forward and steps backwards. Leaders need to model new behaviors, “stay the course,” and know when to let go and when to drive forward. And people throughout the organization must get involved in the change and own it for themselves.

In fact, shaping culture is a journey of discovery in and of itself – one that involves learning, invention, change, and transformation. There’s a reason why the learning process, the creative process, the Design Thinking process, the change process, and the Hero’s Journey all overlap and follow a similar, shared path of transformation. They are all processes of becoming anew; all requiring crossing the threshold into the unknown; all require passage through tests and swamps; and all requiring a compelling, meaningful purpose to spur forward movement despite the dangers of the unknown.

This is the mindset to take into your work to shape and evolve the culture of your organization – a mindset of discovery, adventure, and of becoming. Your creativity, and your skill in co-creating and sharing leadership, will be critical assets on this journey.

So, what levers can you pull on to help your organization live and breathe discovery, co-creation, and shared leadership—and leverage them to spark innovation? Three make the greatest difference:

1. The leadership of your organization: they set the “tone at the top.” And despite the importance of getting everyone on board, their attitude and involvement in your efforts is critical.
2. Relationships with your partners from Human Resources, Finance, Legal, Procurement, IT, and with key external vendors/contractors who are part of your organization’s efforts. These groups, and the dedicated people who work within them are also critical to your efforts.
3. Engaging everyone in the organization in ways that ensure you build a strong, sustainable and solid foundation for change.

Focus Area One, Lever One: Leaders and Leadership Teams

The most important test of an organization’s culture is whether it supports and activates progress toward its mission and goals. Does your organization need creativity and discovery to achieve its mission? Are agility and innovation found in the business strategy? Are goals primarily focused on execution or are they also focused on improvement, invention, and pushing the boundaries of today’s standard practice? Do governance structures help focus creativity and promote invention and innovation—or do they stifle freedom, autonomy and creative expression? Is it easy for people to see how new ideas contribute to the organization’s mission? Because the senior leadership team has a key role in the answer to all these questions, it is imperative to get them involved from the start.

Unfortunately, the team working to change the culture within the Finance function missed this important step. When I joined them (after almost a year into their efforts), I was surprised to find that they had been operating without support from the senior leadership team (LT). Two sponsors from the LT had been assigned to guide their efforts, but neither was particularly interested in the team’s work. On top of that, each sponsor had very different ideas about what creativity was, who could be expected to “be creative,” and how to proceed in an effort like this. Because the LT did not get involved, and the sponsors were not much help, the team was operating under a great deal of uncertainty about whether anything they tried would be successful.

To make matters worse, the organization had a very hierarchical, top-down culture. People waited for permission and signals of support from leaders before adopting changes. And it wasn’t at all clear whether the LT believed creativity was necessary to achieve people’s individual goals or the broader goals of the Finance Department.

The confusion and conflict generated by the indifference of the Sponsors, along with the abdication of involvement by the rest of the LT, signaled that challenging the status quo was not worth the risk. Despite repeated requests, the LT declined to define innovation as a key priority in their strategy. They also decided not to set metrics that would track the value received from improvement and invention. They didn’t make time for the team. They failed to show up at team meetings when invited, and routinely knocked scheduled time for the team off their LT meeting agenda for other topics deemed more urgent or important.

Over time, some people left the team. There wasn’t clear evidence that the extra effort they were putting in—and the added stress in their day-to-day life—was worth it. Without a mandate, it seemed risky professionally to be involved, despite people’s passion for the topic and for the outcomes that were possible. Those that remained “swirled around the drain,” talking over and over about what they should do and deliver. They spent a lot of time talking about how to please the sponsors and the LT. Without support, engagement, and clear, principled direction from the LT, progress was much slower than other teams I worked with.

We learned a lot from this example. And it was helpful to observe the challenges this team faced compared to others I was working with at the same time— to see them in contrast with other LTs who did show up and do the hard work to shift their mindset. This provided perspective, and insights into what is most important to secure and set in motion with leaders early in the arc of an effort to transform culture. Some of our most valuable lessons follow:

1.  Progress is accelerated when the LT takes an early, collective standfor the value of creativity and innovation in the future of the function. People want and need the LT to stand up—individually and collectively—and clearly articulate the link between creativity, innovation, and the day-to-day work of the function. They have to set clear expectations for everyone within the organization as well as for themselves. And they must demonstrate their collective commitment to those expectations, like showing up at events and forums, talking about creativity in collective gatherings within the function, and talking about it outside of the function. They need to demonstrate their commitment through decisions and actions, like re-allocating resources to work on projects that challenge the status quo.

The Leadership Team also needs to walk the talk. Do they co-create together or are they running siloed, autonomous functions? Are people encouraged and rewarded for crossing boundaries and collaborating with people outside their narrow remit? The LT needs to publicly acknowledge progress and recognize people and project teams who are pushing the boundaries. People across the organization will want to see that their leaders are proud of what’s happening, appreciate the effort people are expending, and recognize the value that’s being generated publicly.

2.  The LT must develop themselves individually and collectively. The topic of creativity—and how to foster it and champion it—is not often the focus of management or leadership development programs. Amongst the LT, there will be variable understanding (and mis-understanding) about what creativity is, how innovation happens, and what leaders can do to either catalyze or inhibit creative expression. The LT will need to work on topics like empowerment and delegation, sharing leadership, transparency, courage and vulnerability, asking powerful questions and getting better at being a coach. They will need to get better at learning from failure and deriving value from undesired results. They will need to practice inspiring others—and then getting out of the way. They will need to know how to sponsor purposeful experiments and iteration, and advocate for the time it takes to test out new ideas despite uncertainty. They will need to learn about their blind-spots, how their own creative style might get in the way, and how they can model the behaviors of the Collaborator. And, equally as importantly, they will need to cascade these expectations to the teams that report to them, as well as to the community of managers within their respective organizations.

This kind of learning doesn’t happen in a classroom. It happens along the path of the journey. And like every Hero’s Journey, your LT will need guides—whether that is you or an outside coach or facilitator—to help them look in the mirror, hear from voices out in the organization, and shape a collective understanding of what they want to work on together to change the culture. For some of the LT, business value will be the hook that engages them. For others, it may be value derived from developing people. For others still, it might be value for themselves in their career ambitions. I encourage you to explore and tap into all these motivations as you consider how to help your LT shift their mindset and behaviors.

3.  Nothing focuses collective creativity better than making it a strategic priority. This can be accomplished by linking creativity directly to the business strategy of the function in the form of an “Innovation Challenge” or “Innovation Goal.” A challenge like this should require cross-functional collaboration for its achievement. It needs to be something no one group within the function could achieve alone. And it must contain some measure of stretch and creative tension—to make it crystal clear that things will have to be done differently. Some of the Innovation Challenges I’ve heard over the years include reducing costs while increasing customer satisfaction or reducing costs while developing technological advances. Others have focused on partnering externally while building internal capability or accelerating the delivery of value while improving efficiency.

Coming forward with an Innovation Challenge or Goal was a step that the Finance Leadership Team refused to take—and the team’s efforts suffered greatly. But fortunately, several groups I’ve worked with over the years have created multi-year plans to bring innovation into the strategy of their function. In one such effort, the LT of operations function formed an over-arching innovation challenge and used it to generate shared purpose—to let everyone know how to focus and direct their creative energies.

Despite the execution-oriented nature of their work, this LT and their leader recognized that unleashing creative potential was essential to drive innovation in their function in the form of process improvements, the elimination of waste, and in implementing best practices gleaned from experts outside the organization. They envisioned an organization that was alive with energy and passion—one that could discover and invent, self-organize around new ideas and projects, and one where people worked across functions to save time, reduce costs, and make the quality of the company’s operations a central element of attractiveness for employees and partners.

To put these aspirations into practice, the first year’s efforts focused on education and experimentation. We offered a number of curated learning experiences for a sub-set of the group (to see what worked), and we offered an opportunity for different cross-sections of the organization to experiment together in an Innovation Lab. The LT and their teams were deeply involved and participated in everything. They showed up and signaled to people that they believed it was worth the time. And over the first year, we carefully watched and tracked where people’s energy and passion were, what they chose to work on, and what kind of value they generated.

In the second year, the LT got more focused on targeted arenas that supported their innovation challenge and built on themes from year one. And they tracked the value generated. We adjusted our approach along the way; bringing in new people who hadn’t been involved in the first year and building on what resonated with former participants. And finally, in the third year, we invited the entire department to self-organize around multiple focus areas at the same time. People started working on their own projects across functional boundaries. We no longer “orchestrated” things—they took on a life of their own. Some of these projects lasted for just a month or two, and some lasted six-months and longer. We let go—and people stepped up to work together on purposeful experiments.

4.  People engage when they can clearly see meaningful progress. When you tie culture transformation to key performance metrics, it’s easier for people to see and feel the impact their efforts are having. And it’s easier to identify the value of purposeful experiments. This will be of particular interest to leaders of your organization and to the leaders to whom they report—and will go a long way in building pride, commitment, and engagement. Some of the most common metrics include the reduction or acceleration of time (e.g., time to deliver, develop and produce, time to decision, etc.), an increase in customer satisfaction and benefit, a reduction in cost or waste generated, the transfer of downstream value to teams and groups who follow yours in the value chain, and an increase in the probability of success.

You will need to select and customize any of these metrics for your particular industry, organization and function. In addition, targets and the criteria for success have to be addressed differently depending on where you are aiming along a continuum from execution to discovery.

For example, in new ventures, you can’t expect to use the same measures of progress and success that work for execution.

• If you are aiming for execution, design measures against goal and plan, and for reliability, predictability, performance, scalability, and reuse
• If you are aiming for improvement within the existing model, look for value in savings within cost and delivery models, sustainability, reduction of waste, return on investment, and in acceleration of time to execute process, make decisions, and deliver products.
• If you are aiming for invention, look for value in advances and benefits that impact customers and the broader ecosystem, like generating entirely new products and line-extensions, opening up new markets, creating customer value, satisfaction, and loyalty, and amplifying return on investment.
• If you are aiming for disruption, look for value in areas like impact across previously distinct boundaries, within the value of new markets and new customer segments, and across portfolios of assets.
• If you’re aiming for discovery, look for value in learning and learning from failure, in the establishment of networks and communities, and in the results of purposeful experiments. Look for measures of progress, not achievement.

Surprisingly, the articulation of clear metrics can actually be one of the most challenging steps for teams working to change culture. One challenge is the effort needed to get everyone on board with common metrics for value across functions and types of work. Another challenge is convincing people to stop tracking progress in different formats and systems and use common tools and technologies to track value. If the information collected about progress on goal isn’t accessible and useable by all groups, it loses value. Still other difficulties include the challenge of gathering inventories of current baselines and starting points, such as the current statistics on customer satisfaction, time to deliver, waste produced, etc. And even then, you’ll have work to do to change habits so that people actually enter data and share information to keep your progress current.

The good news is that there are people who love this kind of work. And while it might not be an area of your greatest strength (it certainly isn’t one of my strengths), you can enroll partners and allies to help you showcase the progress you are making, analyze and illustrate how things are different, and help you tell the story of the value your efforts are making to the goals and mission of your organizational. Bring these folks into your efforts early and engage them as you design your path forward. Remember: demonstrating value is a core motivator for all Leadership Teams. Find out what metrics the leadership of your organization use and tie your efforts directly to those.

As you consider how to shape the culture in your broader organization, I encourage you to start “close to home,” in your own department. Think carefully about how you might take some of these suggestions to your own LT, as a first step. Approach it like a purposeful experiment and see what reaction you get. Your Leadership Team’s example will generate positive, creative tension within the organization and serve as a magnet to draw in others who are interested, who see the results you are getting in your department, and who want a piece of the action for themselves.

(Please proceed to Part 2 of Shaping Culture for Creativity)