Shaping Culture for Creativity (Part 2)

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.

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. Part 1 of this article contains more practices you can utilize for culture change for creativity (https://clgleaders.com/shaping-culture-for-creativity-part-1/).

Focus Area One, Lever Two: Partnerships with Key Support Functions

When you’re looking for metrics and working to change mindsets and behaviors around collecting metrics, your Finance colleagues will be great allies. When you’re seeking ways to enroll, engage, and inspire people to change behavior, or if you need to revamp reward structures to promote new kinds of choices, your Human Resources colleagues can provide insight and ideas. When your inventions bump up against policies, laws, and protection of value, your Legal partners will be important allies. When you’re seeking new ways to share knowledge in accessible, intelligent, and intuitive systems, your IT partners can help you build and adapt solutions. And when you’re looking for innovative ways to source materials and resources, your colleagues from Procurement can have invaluable perspectives. Each of these groups provides unique and important expertise that can make or break your efforts.

Show these folks the love by seeking them out early and letting them know you appreciate and value their contribution and partnership. It’s a common mistake to leave them out. Instead, include them and work together to foster a mindset of co-creating and sharing leadership. Help them stretch into ambiguity, discovery, adventure and into the unknown— typically, it’s not a place they often get to play. It may not feel comfortable for them at first. But if you stand with them, honor their expertise, and engage with them in open, transparent collaboration, you will find loyal and trusted partners. Together, you will generate and sustain the conditions for something new to keep emerging—for the organization to live in a constant state of becoming.

Focus Area One, Lever Three: Unleashing Creativity “For All”

In order for lasting change in the culture, your efforts to unleash creative potential cannot be segmented to a specific group of people, relegated to one function or only a group of chartered teams, or located in a particular building or location within your organization’s campus. The work you do with the Leadership Team is important— but it is not enough. The partnerships you form with HR, Finance, IT, and Legal are also not enough. It needs to be clear that improvement, agile adaptation, invention, and disruption can come from anyone and any part of the ecosystem. While not everyone may choose to answer the call to bring their creative energies forward in service to the mission, everyone must receive the invitation. New folks joining your organization should feel a palpable sense of excitement and urgency, and observe visible, forward-leaning action coming from all corners of the organization. Everyone must be able to see how their ideas for improvements and for new approaches can contribute to innovation goals that benefit customers and your customer’s customers, the organization, the community, and serve the larger ecosystem.

With a “for all” mindset, every employee, contractor, partner and supplier understands the expectation to innovate and believes they can generate new value within the system. Everyone is encouraged and inspired to bring ideas forward in a climate of trust. And people are able to connect ideas to organizational goals, processes, and the mission to realize ideas and contribute value. Here are a few of the key activities I’ve implemented with clients to signal that everyone across the organization is invited to participate:

• Develop people through Learning Initiatives. You can’t shift expectations that have been in place for years without providing support to people to think and do things differently. Learning “programs” that include opportunities to experiment, practice, and fail fast help to build a sense of competence. People will start to believe, “I can do this.” And depending on the nature of your industry, the complexity and maturity of your organization, and how quickly things are changing in your domain, people will need exposure to different content and practice. Three types of learning opportunities make up a powerful foundation: 1. Provide opportunities to learn about the work of other business functions and how different groups generate value, make decisions, work at key interfaces, and address challenges and pain points. Bring in people from other functions to talk with folks. Set up panels and interviews. Video people from other parts of your business. An understanding of the broader ecosystem and how it works helps everyone think beyond their remit, generate ideas that are viable, and understand critical interdependencies that can make or break implementation. 2. Provide opportunities to hear external perspectives from within and outside your industry or domain. As organizations become successful and mature over time, and as people stay longer in roles, knowledge and expertise can easily get stale or far removed from the leading edge. It’s not enough to rely only on new recruits to bring in fresh ideas. Invite experts from likely and unlikely arenas to share thought leadership. Hold summits and sponsor conferences and take people out on field trips. 3. Provide opportunities to develop specific skills, like calculating projections for the “return on investment” for an idea, delivering “elevator pitches” (short narratives about the value/benefit that is expected), giving and receiving feedback, prototyping, agile iteration, learning from failure, and asking powerful questions. Consider whether to hold special sessions for leaders and managers, or to blend groups—depending on the messages you intend to send about how people need to work differently.

While content is important, mentors and coaches are even more valuable because they help people learn by doing. These are people who have traversed the unknown and can anticipate some of the challenges and share strategies. And while mentors need not be in a position of power, they need to be people who folks can look up to, who can personalize and tailor advice and coaching, and who can help people build their networks and connections.

• Address cultural enablers and inhibitors. Because creativity precedes innovation, you can’t expect a vibrant, innovative culture unless your organization is a place where creativity can flourish. That means there is a compelling purpose to help focus new ideas, and the conditions are right for people to dance at the intersection of possibility and constraint. The first step is to start talking, with transparency and authenticity, about how it feels now for people to express creativity at all levels of the organization. Start with the good news—those qualities and characteristics of your culture that promote co-creation, sharing leadership, and venturing into the unknown. How can you amplify these and help people share examples and stories about people demonstrating the behaviors you want others to emulate?

But talking about the good news without addressing the tough issues will just make things worse. You will have to take bold, visible and tangible actions that make a difference for people in their daily work life. Usually, the most common blocks to activating creative potential are not a lack of new ideas, but complex organizational issues like the ones we explored in chapter six of the second Adventure in Creative Together. To signal that things are changing, you will need to take tangible, visible steps to clear out the Swamp as much as possible: reducing organizational sludge, calling out toxic politics and routing out bad actors, and helping to make it safer to speak up.

What are the hard truths that might stifle creative potential? How are expectations communicated and rewarded? Do things have to be perfect, right out of the gate? Or is there a generous tolerance for the ambiguity that comes with more iterative, experimental, and emergent approaches? What happens when people mess up, or projects don’t succeed? Are learning and smart risks celebrated, or are people stigmatized? And finally, what are the myths that people propagate that may have a kernel of truth, or may have been true at one time, but not any longer? Work with people across the organization to identify myths and hard truths and address them head on.

When people see that you have identified some of the bad habits that inhibit creative expression and risk-taking—and are really taking action to clear the path, they will be more likely to join in and come forward. When they see that bad actors are removed from their positions and reward structures are shifted, they will begin to believe that things are changing for the better. When blame and judgment quiet down—especially at key interfaces and critical handoffs—people will get curious about what else could be different. Nothing can take the place of strong signals to the organization that things are opening up, becoming more transparent, and it’s getting easier to invent from inside.

Focus Area Two: Generating Places Where Experimentation Can Flourish

I mentioned earlier that the two sponsors of the Finance team had very different perspectives on how to go about changing their culture to unleash creative potential. Sandra wanted the team to focus on changing mindsets and behaviors broadly across the function. She urged the team to come up with a few activities, like organizing training programs, bringing in external speakers, and selecting a few bad habits to focus on (like fear of failure) in hopes it would help free people up to “be creative.” Fredrik, on the other hand, had a more pragmatic perspective on what was needed. “We need to show results,” he said. “Get a few creative people on some key projects and don’t worry about everyone else.” Part of the challenge for the team was that Sandra and Fredrik were never available at the same time. Each one had to be managed separately—and each thought the other was wrong. There were virtually no opportunities to resolve these different approaches.

The team addressed this schism by forming two separate teams—one to focus on “Mindsets” and the other to focus on “Innovation Projects.” The teams operated independently, working to satisfy two very different views of how to proceed without realizing the potential for a combined approach. What neither team realized is that changing mindsets and behaviors is often best accomplished while making tangible progress on innovation goals. And conversely, successful innovation projects require that people think and behave differently.

This is where the second Focus Area becomes critical. One of the most vital strategies to shift your culture involves providing opportunities for people to learn and experiment “real-time” in organized, curated practice fields like Innovation Labs and Incubators. These are places for people to co-create, learn from each other, practice new behaviors, and exchange ideas in service to shared goals. And I’ve seen lots of them over the years. Some succeed, but most fail for what turns out to be very common errors in how they are set up, how the people working in them are supported, and how they are disbanded after they have served their use.

• The first and most common mistake is to set these practice fields up as elite, protected forums where people are sequestered from the Swamps of organizational life. From my experience, this kind of protection is counter-productive. It attempts to rescue people from a whole host of constraints that are important to encounter and navigate through – in order to become better at co-creating inside the system. It promotes the idea that everyday innovation is too difficult to do without special rights and circumstances. And it sends a signal that something mysterious happens in these places that the average worker can’t be expected to accomplish. Instead of sequestering innovation teams, embed them with the rest of the organization. Loosen them from other, unrelated responsibilities. And include people from all levels across your value chain to demystify what happens there.
• Another mistake is to leave them alone and unsupported. The people with domain expertise needed to turn challenging problems into opportunities are rarely skilled at navigating the unknown and managing an innovation process. Teams need support in the form of coaching, mentoring, project management, and to some degree, education. And there are a host of professionals you can partner with. These are people who specialize in designing and leading teams through the innovation life cycle. Leverage them to help design your approach. For example, will you bring multiple teams together to work on different facets of the same opportunity challenge or have teams work separately? Will you select team members or let people volunteer? Will people generate their own projects, or will you pre-identify sponsored, project teams? How can you provide just-in-time learning experiences to accelerate progress? What mechanisms can help capture learnings from all teams, whether or not projects continue forward? How might you create a virtuous circle where members of teams that have gone before become mentors for new teams? These are design questions that can make or break the success of your efforts.
• One final mistake I have witnessed as people set up Incubator Labs is to focus too heavily on the tangible output—the prototypes, products, and “deliverables” that will be produced within the experience. They focus on the output at the expense of learning and experimentation. Incubators and Labs are most successful when they have a clearly defined purpose and are set up as a field for learning and experimentation; a place for people to practice the skills of co-creating and sharing leadership, and to see their creative Style in action. Yes, the projects and the output are important. And, even more important is getting people to feel competent and familiar with the process of moving projects through an innovation process— so they can do it for themselves, embedded in their day-to-day work. Make sure to set it up from the start as a journey of discovery and exploration, a celebration of venturing into the unknown, and a place for purposeful experiments, skunkworks, and unsanctioned ideas.

Innovation Incubator Labs are great for helping people become opportunity sleuths and innovation scouts. They help people get better at co-creation: developing and implementing ideas together. They are places where participants can safely practice dancing in the space between purpose, possibility and constraint— as well as the spaces between “me” and “we.” Together, people can learn to care for themselves and each other on journeys into the unknown, learn to confront hard truths about inventing inside, and grow their capabilities as Collaborators. For changing culture, there is no substitute for these kinds of opportunities to help people directly experience co-creating and sharing leadership.

Focus Area Three: Business Processes, Systems, and Infrastructure

For sustainable culture change, at some point you will have to turn your attention to the institutional processes, systems, and structures that guide how work gets done. These are the tangible manifestations of the dominant mindset of the organization, including IT platforms and knowledge-sharing tools, policies, metrics and reporting tools, work processes, governance structures, and reward systems. Think of it as you might imagine working on a car; you will need to look “under the hood” to see what kind of engine is powering your organization’s infrastructure; how it’s running, and whether it’s well-suited to get your organization where it needs to go both now and in the future. Is the engine running on a mindset of compliance, control, or protection? Is it running on a mindset of openness, purpose-driven experimentation, transparency, and sharing? How does that mindset play out in your version of what HP called the Rules of the Garage —the organizational values and principles that drive how you are structured, how infrastructure is developed, and how your organization’s operating system is set up?

Getting the structure and infrastructure “right” is not the aim. That’s because it’s not an end-state that you get to and then you’re done. In fact, there is no one template for an operating model that works for all organizations. As Carl Weinberg has said, “structures that support creativity should neither obstruct too much nor help too much; for people must recognize the possibility and value inherent in their own efforts. ” (Weinberg). The systems, processes, and infrastructure in your organization needs to deliver appropriate freedom— without making it a “free-for-all.” Infrastructure needs to support sustainable invention and even disruption, but it doesn’t need to be perfect— in fact it never will be. The key is to build dynamic tools, policies, and systems that can change and transform as the landscape of your context evolves.

I recommend that you work with an Organization Development professional and with your IT, Finance, HR, and Legal business partners as you consider what might need to be different to unleash everyone’s creative potential. Work on infrastructure in tandem with your work on mindsets and behaviors. Use the hurdles that show up in Incubator Labs as evidence for what needs to change. Make this third Focus Area part of your efforts to change culture from the start, but don’t put all your eggs in the basket of just changing Infrastructure.

Too often I have witnessed departments or business units focus early efforts on developing internal websites and portals with collections of tools and resources or implementing idea management or crowdsourcing software technologies— only to have these tools languish, unused. While these investments are tangible, and easier to “see,” on their own they cannot change behavior, culture and mindsets. They support and enable creative expression, but alone they cannot build innovation as an organizational capability that has energy and aliveness. Without the will and commitment to do the deeper work— addressing mindsets and behaviors— as soon as obstacles arise or a strong leader-advocate leaves, or budget cuts are instituted, or an innovation project does not yield the value that was promised, efforts to change infrastructure alone are abandoned and the teams working on them are disbanded.

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As I’ve suggested, working on changing the culture of your organization is both an honorable and formidable undertaking. Whether or not you feel called to actively and directly take steps to change your culture, I encourage you to build a deeper understanding of what is involved in looking more broadly at your organization from a systems perspective—and being a partner in improving things for others and for the people who will join in the future. This requires a different level of focus for your creativity—on benefit for a broader circle of people for both “today” and “tomorrow.”

At the very least, you will contribute to making your workplace one where it feels “safe” to create and where people have autonomy and feel empowered to make decisions about how to progress ideas. At best, you will join in a complex, challenging and important imperative that requires you to think beyond your own work, your domain, your projects, and your function. It requires you to think about both upstream and downstream inputs and consequences. And by working on your culture, you will develop important capabilities that come into play if you plan to extend your focus further afield—to big dreams and urgent imperatives beyond your organization and its mission.

ⁱ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_the_garage
ⁱⁱ Carl Weinberg, The Existential View of Creativity