Creative People Must Be Stopped (8 page)

BOOK: Creative People Must Be Stopped
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You probably know people who, deliberately or not, use criticism to try to look like the smartest person in the room. Naturally this behavior can cripple a group's efforts to be innovative, as it can cause members to stay quiet rather than risk losing status by having their ideas shot down.

Avoiding Mistakes

In his famous book
Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas
, James L. Adams (2001) points out how risk aversion sets in as people overestimate the negative consequences of making an error. This happens because we often lack information about the actual probability of each event in a causal chain of events. Instead of making realistic estimates, we have mental scripts that may predict the worst: “If I take a risk by proposing my idea for cleaning the parts using lemon juice instead of that awful chemical we use now, Joe will shoot down the idea, just like he always does, and I'll look like a fool. Or if the idea gets adopted and doesn't work, the boss will think I'm a dumb SOB for proposing it in the first place. Then I'll get passed over for the promotion I'm angling for, and Jeanne will never let me hear the end of it—if she doesn't divorce me. No way am I making that kind of mistake; I'm going to keep quiet and let somebody else take the fall.” Of course I've dramatized this a little, but only a little. Often even an objectively small risk evokes a mental script that leads us to back out of trying or proposing new ideas.

Avoiding Good Conflict

People have a natural tendency to avoid conflict in groups. Conflict is uncomfortable, may put our status at risk, and can hinder our ability to work together with others in the future. We may avoid conflict out of a sense of propriety—for example, by choosing to remain silent even when we know that someone is making a false or wrongheaded claim. Maybe we feel that our silence is justified because having the
correct
answer in this particular case is just not that important—certainly not worth embarrassing the person over. One hopes that we can predict how important any given answer will need to be in the life of a project. We may also act to protect our status in the group. Going along with a proposal or decision being promoted by a high-status member of a group—even when we know it to be suboptimal or wrong—will feel less risky than supporting a proposal that may be wrong or that puts us on the losing side of an argument with a high-status person. Besides, we think, maybe they are high status because they are smarter than we are or know something we don't, which, of course, may or may not be true. Finally, we will also tend to avoid those behaviors that might lead others to brand us as being uncooperative, a “jerk,” or worse.

In each of these cases, we tend to avoid those ideas or topics that we believe may cause others discomfort or that may get us into an argument we don't want to have. Unfortunately, in the service of innovation, those challenging ideas, topics, and perspectives are exactly the ones we are searching for.

Overcoming Emotion Constraints

You've probably known managers or group leaders who believe that the solution to the problems emotions can cause in groups is to try to keep emotions out of the group process altogether. “Come, let us reason together” is a useful approach up to a point, but emotions are not in themselves good or bad. In fact, they can be a big part of fueling our thinking and motivating our efforts to solve problems. The key is not to banish emotions but to channel their power so that they support our efforts to innovate in groups.

Support Psychological Safety

A
psychologically safe
group environment is one in which people feel supported and able to explore and learn (both activities that require trial and error) without risking painful emotional consequences. How do we create such an environment? One powerful tool is a formal set of rules for behaviors during meetings that the group is reminded of at the start of
each
meeting. For example, clear rules can help the group keep the powerful impulse to criticize in check. This is especially key in the early, idea-generating phases of the group's work. Of course there will be a need for significant critical analysis of the ideas, but that should happen during the
assessment
phase when that is the group's job, and not during data gathering or ideation early on.

At IDEO, the rules of brainstorming are written on the walls of every conference room and even on the back of business cards (see
Figure 3.2
). These rules are reviewed at the start of
every
brainstorm, even though most employees participate in multiple brainstorming sessions each week. They are reminded not because they are a forgetful bunch but because the social and emotional incentives to criticize are so strong. The penalty for repeatedly criticizing others' ideas is ejection from the session (and possibly not being invited to future ones). The model of brainstorming shown in the
Nightline
segment “The Deep Dive” provides excellent examples of ways that groups can avoid many of the negative emotional dynamics.

Suppress Idea Egotism

Claiming ownership of our ideas is pleasant when the group approves of them. But what if the group rejects the idea, or we fear that it will? Then we may not be quite so enthusiastic about proposing it in the first place. Sometimes we feel the sting of rejection even when those around us actually like our idea—just not as much as we do. And even if we're perfectly comfortable having our ideas examined and criticized, encouraging individuals to own their ideas can lead to the kind of status competition described earlier.

The strategy for combating this dynamic is to discourage individual ownership of ideas in favor of group ownership. There are several ways to do this. First, have each person generate
lots
of ideas. Besides more thoroughly exploring the potential solution space, members are less likely to become overly enamored of any one favorite idea. Have members generate ideas before the actual meeting; the overlap of good ideas across their lists will spread ownership throughout the team.

Second, have members post their ideas on the walls instead of presenting them to the group one person at a time. When we vocalize our ideas in front of the group, we perceive the audience to be looking at and judging us. If approval isn't immediate and wholehearted, we're likely to feel rejected and become less motivated to help the group succeed. If instead interactions occur informally in front of the idea wall, the originator of an idea is less likely to feel put on the spot. And this simple tactic implicitly encourages shared ownership of all the ideas.

Leaders and managers have a significant role to play in modeling the collective ownership of ideas. I have worked with companies run by people who had founded their enterprises on a brilliant idea they had had. Ten years later, the success of the company had outgrown the founders' ability to generate sufficient ideas to keep the company in business. Yet the founders still acted as if
their
ideas were the vital key to success and paid little heed to input from others. When a good idea was finally extracted through a painful group interaction, the leader would attach the term “my idea” to that which the group knew perfectly well was “our idea.”

If we want to foster the emotional gratification that comes from group ownership of ideas, we have to walk the talk. Especially for higher-status individuals, that means learning not to say “I” and “my” when the appropriate words are “we” and “our”—and making sure that our nonverbal behavior matches our words.

Have a Good Fight

Despite our natural tendency to avoid it, there are many good reasons to have constructive conflict in a group. If group members always shared the same perspective about everything, there would be no need to have a group in the first place.

There are three kinds of conflict, and the effect each has on the group depends on when it occurs in the group's process. The first kind is
process conflict
, or disagreement about how to arrange the required parts of the task at hand. Which should we do first, brainstorm or gather data? Conflicts like these are good to have early in the group's work because they may surface useful alternative paths to the group's goal. Once the order of tasks is agreed to, however, then it must be considered final. Everyone needs to be committed to the same process if things are going to get done in an effective manner.

The second kind of conflict is
task conflict
. This includes any kind of disagreement about the correct answer to a question connected with the task (as opposed to the process). We want this kind of conflict to the extent that having the right answer is important. For example, I think 15.8, but you say 24.7. If the two numbers refer to the minimum safe thickness of the stainless steel walls of a nuclear reactor, this is a very good argument to have. In contrast, if the right answer isn't critical to the group's work, try to minimize spending time and emotional energy on disagreements. Sometimes just pointing out that the right answer doesn't make that much difference is sufficient to defuse the argument.

The third kind of conflict is
relationship conflict
. This refers to conflict that doesn't have to do with either the task or the process. Sometimes people just bug us. “Why do you always eat garlic before the meeting and then sit right next to me?” “Why do you always interrupt when I'm talking?” “Why does it take forever for you to make a simple point?” Relationship conflict is generally unhelpful. It focuses attention on emotion processing instead of on the information processing that is the group's proper work, so should be avoided or minimized.

Relationship conflict is extremely uncomfortable, so groups may do everything in their power to avoid it—even if that means not risking engagement over important questions. What you can do is to establish formal roles in the team to be adopted by members during those stages in the process where asking the hard and conflict-engendering questions is desirable. For example, you can set a short time for doing the “devil's advocate” work of taking a contrarian and pessimistic view at the end of each meeting. Explain to group members that it is better to shoot holes in their own ideas than to have it done to them in front of an executive team.

Celebrate Failures

By reducing the emotional penalty for making mistakes, you can get people in a group to pay more attention to the information than to their fears. But how? In his book
Weird Ideas That Work
, Robert Sutton (2007, p. 103) offers a provocative dictum: “reward success and failure equally, but punish inaction.”

What does it mean to reward failure? Consider framing the goal of the group's work not as finding the right answer but instead as
seeking and
testing hypotheses for what might solve a given problem
. For example, if a particular idea—that is, hypothesis—isn't confirmed or is positively disproved, celebrate what was achieved by the “failure.” Center the discussion on how much risk was reduced and costly investment avoided by determining that the particular approach was unlikely to work. In this view, success is not just coming up with the next great idea. It's also finding the showstopping constraint before more significant investments in time, money, and emotion have been made. The value of that kind of failure is well worth calculating—and celebrating. And when the group does come up with the next great idea, be sure that the celebration encompasses everyone's hard work, including the work of those whose criticisms helped refine the idea until it really worked. Remember, it's the group's idea.

Culture Constraints: Cohesion and Meaning

The culture of a group, which develops over the life of a project, is the set of understandings about what the group is for and how it works. The group's culture is made up of assumptions, often unconscious, about the group's goals, values, norms, and acceptable behavior.

What enables group culture to exist is a social force I'll call “cohesion.” Cohesion is the glue that holds a group together, helping members stay aligned and cooperative according to the spoken and unspoken rules of their culture. However, although groups need a healthy degree of cohesion to perform optimally (or at all), every silver lining has its cloud. Groups often use a number of unconscious means of maintaining a high level of cohesion that can seriously impair their information processing capacity, particularly in the early, idea generation phase of an innovation process.

Forming Homogeneous Groups

The most direct way that groups establish and maintain cohesion is by deciding who gets to be part of the group. There is overwhelming evidence that groups engage in homophily—the tendency to choose and retain members on the basis of social similarity. Especially in work environments, we tend to like people who are similar to us in such characteristics as race, gender, level of education, social and economic status, and skills (e.g., Owens, Mannix, and Neale, 1998; Ancona and Caldwell, 1992; Newcomb, 1961). Because we can communicate more easily with “people like us” and are likely to share many values and habits with them, a group of socially similar individuals is likely to be more cohesive than a more diverse group. Managers know all this at some level, and they often encourage forming groups made up of people they think will “get along well.”

BOOK: Creative People Must Be Stopped
10.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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