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When failure is part of the rules

19 Mar

A few weeks ago, a woman in one of my workshops raised her hand and asked a very important question: “Are you telling us that it’s okay to fail?”

A group of incredibly smart, focused, and skilled future leaders was confused. No one had ever given them permission to fail before.

I told her what one of my mentors, Randy Nelson told me: life is not about error avoidance, it’s about error recovery.

I wasn’t actually encouraging them to fail, I simply encouraged this group to change their reaction to failure.

Most of us fail inward – meaning, our bodies tense up, we get smaller and we let the world know that we are ashamed.

Improvisers practice what same may see as a silly exercise called the “Failure Bow” – we turn failure from an inward defeat to an outward celebration. This small practice helps us act the way we want to feel.

Seth Godin speaks brilliantly about failure, here in this interview. Some of the highlights:

  • those who fail more often, win – The people who don’t win are the ones that don’t fail at all and get stuck, or the ones that fail so big that they don’t get to play again.
  • What are the risks that you can take that keep you in the game even if you fail?
  •  Following the rules can lead to a fear of initiation and a fear of failure. Where can you work where failing is part of the rules?

The concept of embracing failure is broad and confusing for some – depending on your profession, and your past experience. This concept is also juicy and full of connection to vulnerability, innovation, creativity, you name it.

Simply put…error recovery builds resilience, it provides a new kind of reward…perhaps one that we aren’t teaching or recognizing enough.

 

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How to give yourself permission to be more creative

14 Feb

High on a mountaintop sits the creative genius. Not to be bothered with, talked to, or talked down to. He speaks in short, punctuated sentences, rides a scooter (yes, on a mountaintop) and abstains from yellow food. Who is this person? Surely he must be creative.

If you ask me, the great divide between “the creative person” and the non-creative type is phony.

Anyone can be creative. It’s not a category you fall into, the job you are assigned, the assessment you take. Creativity starts with permission.

To be creative is to give yourself and to give others the permission to explore, to have new ideas and to follow them. 

Creative people are more comfortable with the freedom inside structure than just the structure itself. They are more comfortable exploring, less on logic and rules and more on what could be.

They take risks because they have given themselves permission to. They think broadly, in opposites, in analogies, or in obvious straight-forward methods.

It’s a shift – from a judging to learner mindset, a mechanistic or organismic structure, technical to adaptive problem solving, or whole-brain thinking. But, becoming more creative involves not just a neurological shift but an environmental shift as well.

Peter Sims talks about this in this article, “Ultimately, while basic design and creative methods can be learned much like muscles, and developed and strengthened through practice, this shift in mindset requires a different kind of leadership.”

Helping others become more creative involves giving them permission to fail, to have big ideas, to take risks and to blur the lines between who is deemed creative and who isn’t.

 

 

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The year of Daniel Pink

31 Dec

Little did he know it, but in January of 2012 famed author Daniel Pink was already applying some of the tools he talks about in his latest book (out today!), “To Sell is Human“.

I’ll explain. It was December of 2011 when I finished reading his earlier work, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” . I was enamored with the material, and overjoyed that his words seemed to validate my career path, and passion.

On a whim I sent Mr. Pink an email. I complimented him, pointed out our mutual connection (Go ‘Cats!), and…well, asked if he had some time to talk. I may have even quoted Oprah?! Silly me, I thought. But, I had nothing to lose.

I was sitting in a quiet cafe on Polk Street in San Francisco when I received his prompt response:

“hi, lindsey. thanks for the note.

i’m happy to talk, but only on the condition you share with me one or two tips for getting better at improvisation. (as it happens, i’m doing some research that’s kinda, sorta on that topic right now.)”

I screamed. There were some odd looks. I didn’t care – to me, Daniel Pink is a rock star and this was the equivalent of a backstage pass.

Almost a year later Daniel Pink finished the project he alluded to and released “To Sell is Human”. It is a fascinating, thought-provoking read that I highly recommend.

Pink devotes an entire chapter to Improvisation and the tools we use as Improvisers to improve communication, presentation and even, authenticity. Just like in “A Whole New Mind”, Pink has validated, supported, and encouraged the use and application of these tools to a broader base and signals the growth of this field for years to come.

Our conversation in January was one of the highlights of my year. Daniel Pink said “Yes, and” to my request to talk and it is something I will never forget.

In December of 2012 I was chosen to be a part of a small group that would serve as a launch team for “To Sell is Human”.

Small actions (to say “Yes, And”, to help make someone else look good, to practice generosity and taking risks) help to create memories and connections that we don’t soon forget.

Here’s to a new year of saying “Yes, And”,  and to being uncertain but taking a risk anyway. You never know where it will lead.

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Innovation: No pain, no gain?

5 Oct

Bumper stickers, cubicle walls, and email footnotes are just some of the places you might see clichés such as:

  • no pain, no gain
  • nothing worth having comes easy
  • tough it out, you!

And I wonder, these sayings are either the work of an athletic coach, or… someone who cares about real, sustained change.

Perhaps they are one in the same.

Up and down your organization you will find people with different tolerance levels for pain. They will recognize it somewhere along the scale from an unnecessary evil to a requirement for growth and renewal.

Some say “bring on the change!”, and others hide under their desk. Left under our own devices, how many of us would willingly seek out and go after change if we knew how hard it would be?

Leading through change means recognizing that yes, there will be pain. Instead of ignoring it, we can help navigate others through it by asking “where is this coming from?”, and “why?”.

Two lessons from Improvisation comes to mind when thinking about leading through change: commitment and trusting instincts.

When we embrace change as a practice, we learn to recognize the good pain from the bad pain. Ignoring the bad pain in favor of commitment doesn’t do anyone any favors.  We don’t have to be the “change” hero that results in a broken leg or worse.

But when we see the momentum moving in the right direction, the aches and pains that comes with all things new, can, under the right guidance and mental know-how, remind us that it’s all in the name of, you guessed it… the game.

 

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What’s the drill – September 12: And because of that…

12 Sep

Remember the Story Spine? The fantastic tool we use to apply elements of storytelling to a plethora of organizational situations and cases?

  • Once upon a time …
  • And every day …
  • Until one day..
  • And because of that …
  • And because of that …
  • And because of that…
  • Until finally…
  • And ever since that day ..

Today specifically we can talk about the Story Spine as a means of discussing risk and reward.

Take the phrase, “And because of that…”

Improvisers are taught, and become more comfortable with taking risks. They feel on stage, experientially, what it’s like to get out of their comfort zone. And because of that, they stretch, grow, and so much more.

Sometimes, off-stage, we take a risk (“until one day”) and wait for the reward (“because of that”). We see risk taking as a means to an end. It’s got to be something tangible, right?

“Where is my ‘because of that‘ already?”, we ask. Show me the reward! Let’s flip to the end of the story.

In truth, the other, “because of that’s” might not have been written yet. We often can’t see them coming although we hope they appear. It may take months, years for you to recognize what they are. You might find there are more than 3, perhaps dozens of “because of that” phrases. All we know sometimes is that the risk moves us forward, certainly in learning, and hopefully in tangible results.

If we are taking risks solely in pursuit of the reward we might never be satisfied with our story spine.

The point is that we as organizations and the people who run them have a responsibility to keep the story moving forward. Choosing to take risks and to use the call to action of “until one day” moves us forward, compared to the glacial, steady, predictable pace of “and every day”.

 

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Leadership as Jazz: Becoming an Improvisational Leader

19 Aug

Sometimes articles pass through your news feed that, when you read them, make you nod your head so consistently you fear you’ll give yourself a headache.

If Miles Davis Taught your Company to Improvise

“Nurturing spontaneity, creativity, experimentation, and dynamic synchronization is no longer an optional approach to leadership. It’s the only approach. The current velocity of change demands nothing less. It demands paying attention to the mental models, the cultural beliefs and values, the practices and structures that support improvisation.”

How do we as individuals, leaders and organizations prepare to Improvise? It can be done. In fact, here are 5 tips.

It’s why Improvisers rehearse, warm-up, and spend a lot of time building trust. We learn the structure first, and then find the freedom within the safety we’ve created.

1.  Approach leadership tasks as experiments – Be open to what emerges by suspending a defensive attitude. Improvisers are skilled at withholding judgement – with both our own ideas and the ideas of others.

“An experimental approach favors testing and learning as you go. It means presenting ideas, then observing how others pick up and build on them. This is leadership with a mind-set of discovery”

Being more open and receptive to the ideas of those around you also helps to break up a routine or automatic habits that may be weighing you, and your team down.

2. Expand the vocabulary of yes to overcome the glamour of no - Saying “no” is a habit for many of us, for many different reasons. To use what’s in the room, and accept all offers is to heighten and find the positive in what is already available to us. In improvisation, wishing things were different is truly a useless game.

“Too often, in established cultures, cynicism is a way to attain status, and cynical responses to ideas seem justified because they are more “realistic.” It is much easier to critique than to build. Yet equating cynicism with realism shrinks the imagination.”

3. Everyone gets a chance to solo - Learn the give and take. And, at the same time, if you’re passionate about an idea, do you have the freedom to go solo and experiment beyond your comfort zone?

4. Encourage serious play. Too much control inhibits flow.

5. Cultivate provocative competence: create expansive promises as occasions for stretching out into unfamiliar territory. - Competence versus a learning and growth mindset? Is there a happy medium?

“The need of leadership in a distributed age has never been greater. Instead of imposing competence–a virtual impossibility–leaders provoke it by designing the conditions that nurture strategic improvisation and continuous learning, and thus help their organizations break out of competency traps. Great leaders like Miles Davis are able to see people’s potential, disrupt their habits, and demand that they pay attention in new ways.”

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What’s the drill – August 15: Failing on purpose

15 Aug

What’s your focus?

Competence, and being right? Or a focus on always moving forward?

Can you focus on “getting it right”, being okay with failure and moving forward? It may depend what “getting it right” means to you, but I believe you can have your cake and eat it too (and rhyme!).

The truth is, we can still move forward when we don’t get it right, and we can move forward faster, quicker, and hopefully cheaper than when our singular focus is just on being correct. 

No one wants to fail.

But, there are some times when we need failure to keep us moving forward – it is often where our best learning and growth (i.e. innovation) comes from.  We can choose to manage our reaction to failure, to greet it with a smile and use it to our advantage.

We may end up preferring failure to get us closer to where we want to go.

You can build competence by creating a safe place to make mistakes and fail.

Getting it right versus getting it completely wrong may just be in how you view failure.

Yes, and you failed. Keep moving forward. 

 

 

 

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The top five qualities of innovative companies, via HBR

14 Aug

Companies that know how to innovate have something in common — they make it a priority. The companies listed in Hay Group’s seventh annual Best Companies for Leadership (BCL) ranking recognize the value of  innovation and put it at the heart of their corporate culture.

How do they do they do it? Well, you may recognize some of these best practices. The theme remains one of openness, flexibility, agility, and growth via learning:

1. Create a safe space for innovation

  • Idea – allow calculated risks
  • Example – build a lab environment into part of the culture

2. Enable organizational agility.

  • Idea – allow job definitions to be more flexible and fluid — if you want an organization to be adaptable, and flexible,  and changing to the needs of the marketplace, take a look at the job structure.
  • Give employees room to grow and explore their range of interests within a company, for example, Google is great at this.
  • Example – build empathy across organization, independent thinking and problem solving by allowing others to join a new department for a month/quarter, etc.

3. Broaden perspectives. 

  • Idea – new ideas can come from anywhere – an innovative company knows this and is an expert at “staying open”.
  • Example – Solicit feedback on ideas from the community and company as a whole.

4. Promote and reward collaboration.

  • Idea – the majority of innovations are born from collaborative efforts.
  • Create an environment that encourages collaboration
  • Ideas can be those of the individual, and “yes, anded” by the group as a whole.  Reward dependence, not just independence.

5. Celebrate success and learn from setbacks.

  • Idea – fail forward
  • Innovative companies see problems and failures as learning experiences. By reacting this way, companies encourage risk taking and keep the innovation engine running. An employee who feels they can never mess up, will never try to be anything other than average.
  • Encourage “what if’s” and “why not’s”

 

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Why Creative Ideas Get Rejected – via David Burkus

8 Aug

If you feel like getting your creative ideas approved and accepted is a battle, new research suggests it may not be your fault.

Creative work that’s novel and different often goes head-to-head with our desire for certainty and structure. When that certainty is well…uncertain, our natural, inherent creativity bias can rear its ugly head.

We want creativity without the risk. Can we have our cake and eat it too when it comes to creativity and innovation?

To help our brains accept new ideas, this research and wonderful writing from Management Professor David Burkus gets us thinking about how we sell our ideas:

“We now know that regardless of how open-minded people are, or claim to be, they experience a subtle bias against creative ideas when faced with uncertain situations. This isn’t merely a preference for the familiar or a desire to maintain the status quo. Most of us sincerely claim that we want the positive changes creativity provides. What the bias affects is our ability to recognize the creative ideas that we claim we desire. Thus, when you’re pitching your creative idea, it may not be the idea itself that is being rejected. The more likely culprit could be the uncertainty your audience is feeling, which in turn is overriding their ability to recognize the idea as truly novel and useful.”

Regardless of how open-minded people are, they experience a subtle bias against creative ideas when faced with uncertain situations.”

To me, this research shares similarities with the work of David Rock and his S.C.A.R.F model of rewards and threats. When our certainty, the “C” in scarf’” is threatened we close down.

To break through, Burkus and Rock remind us to speak the language of those we are trying to persuade, make them look good by using empathy, listening, and perhaps most of all, patience.

http://99u.com/articles/7207/Why-Great-Ideas-Get-Rejected

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What makes people more creative on some days and not others…

7 Aug

The million, okay, billion-dollar question: How do you create a culture of creativity, and make it last?

Harvard University Professor Teresa Amabile wanted to find out.

Discussing her research into the topic with Bloomberg Television, Amabile and her team compiled over 12,000 individual daily diaries over 5 months, from professionals who were working on creative projects within their company.

What she found, “People do their most creative work on days when they’re feeling most positive emotions, most pleasant thoughts about their organization and their co-workers and strongest intrinsic motivation in their work”.

To put it simply: inner-work life drives performance, and allows teams and individuals to come up with better, creative ideas.

Every area in business requires coming up with creative solutions – and to foster that kind of creative thinking takes more than waving a magic wand:

  1. create an atmosphere of trust and collaboration
  2. tap into those favorite intrinsic motivators of autonomy, purpose, and mastery
  3. Remember that “small wins”, making progress on meaningful work (Amabile’s Progress Principle) matters.

For more: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/what-inspires-creativity-in-the-workplace-xLy2z9V~TGKtienzTsGryQ.html

 

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The genius of the “and”…

1 Aug

 

“Collaborative innovation involves the genius of the “and” versus the tyranny of the “or.” It’s not that brainstorming must always turn into “Groupthink” or that introverts or individuals have the best ideas. In good brainstorming, one feeds off the other and the end result is significantly more powerful than either approach alone.” – Harvard Business Review 

The need, space, and time for “Passionate Champions” to “and” an idea is the often missing step in the brainstorming process, says this latest article from HBR. 

Step One: Collaborate on ideas as a group. Make sure everyone is heard, help individuals improve their own thinking and be exposed to ideas they may not have thought of on their own.

Step Two: Open up the session to passionate, individual champions:

“Anyone, alone or with other people if they need or want help, can pick any idea and develop it further. Even if the idea has already been developed in one direction, a Passionate Champion may see it very differently and develop it in a totally different manner. Or, they can pick an idea that was not advocated by the group or selected by the client, and develop it as they see fit.

In our work, we find that Passionate Champion ideas often account for 50% of those that make it through internal and external vetting, and 20-30% of the ideas that make it into final concepts. What’s more, they are often the most breakthrough in terms of truly new, game-changing concepts.”

Create the safe environment for ideas to flow, allow those who want to “yes, and” an idea to do so. Who can say yes to an idea in your organization? 

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Break it down – A lesson in creative insight

31 Jul

To spark creative insight, you don’t necessarily need to start from scratch.

Staring at that blank sheet of paper for hours on end probably isn’t doing you any favors.

We find inspiration from increasing the number of associations in our brain, and according to new research , also breaking apart our items of inspiration to just their component parts.

This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about this technique for busting through rigid thinking, also known as “functional fixedness”.

To overcome your functional fixedness, says researcher Tony McCaffrey:

1. Break down the item at hand into basic parts

2. Name each part in a way that does not imply meaning.

Strip away the fixed associations that are holding you back.

In his research, subjects he trained on this technique solved 67 percent more problems requiring creative insight than subjects who did not learn the technique, according to his study published in March in Psychological Science.

Give this trick to engineer friends, and those who enjoy and crave tactile problem-solving and learning.

His research is a nice reminder to remove the limitations we put on everyday objects, and maybe even… people? Is our description or label of something or someone keeping us from creative insight and innovation and a better way of working?

To me, this technique applies to more than just design thinking. Finding your creative solution starts with building your platform. What do you already have to work with. How can you “yes, and”, or amplify these pieces to find your creative solution?

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A new way to think of change

26 Jul

In an Improv scene, a movie, a story, or a great presentation we find resolution by completing this sentence,

 “and ever since that day”…

What changed?

This change is brought about by what we call a tilt. Something a character says, does, expresses, and admits to, etc in a scene.

It is our goal in an Improv scene to be open to change and to actively seek it. This change then answers the question, “what was different about this day”.

As innovators, creative problem-solvers, leadership coaches, managers, trainers, and facilitators we push positive change.

“And ever since that day”….

The tilt, the catalyst for change, comes from being hyper-aware to what offers and ideas have already been expressed. What is around us that we can use? What are our characters feeling, expressing, and wanting and what honest reactions and desires can we pull from to help our characters organically grow and evolve?

We can think of it this way:

Once there was…
And every day…
Until one day…
And because of that…
And because of that…
And because of that…
Until finally…
And ever since that day…

Improvisers want to be changed. The static scene and character that stays the same from beginning to end is not our friend.

To embrace change is to ask… “and ever since that day”… and to see the world of possibilities that appear when we making even one small tilt pushes us in a direction we couldn’t have predicted.

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How to rev up the creativity engine at your workplace

23 Jul

Here’s what we know…. To rev up your creative engine:

  1. Expose your mind to a broad range of stimuli – expand your creative awareness by ingesting more remote associations in your brain. To think differently, your inspiration needs to come from different places. The more associations, and the wider the variety – the more possibilities!
  2. Don’t worry be happy – the more relaxed (and in a good mood) you are, the more likely you are to find insightful solutions to a problem.
  3. Create more opportunities for insight – direct your psychological experience inward

Inward attention + context of fresh ideas + relaxation ….  tell me more! But if it seems like these efforts cost too much money (or time) consider your competition. “Creativity in the workplace isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s what keeps companies in business”, says Fast Company magazine.

I couldn’t agree more.

Tickle the senses. Break up the routine. Encourage interaction, sharing. New experiences. Time for relaxation. A creativity room? Chalk board walls? More spontaneity.

Can you create a stimulating, and relaxing work environment that also promotes empathy across departments?

The first step towards promoting creativity at work is to make a conscious decision to devote effort and energy to it. I’d argue the only failure comes in sticking with the same old.

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What’s the drill – July 17: Put this brainstorming trick into action

17 Jul

Did you know, IBM’s 2010 Global CEO Study cited “creativity” as the most important leadership quality for the future.

Bolster your toolkit to include strategies for creative problem solving… like this one:

A two-minute brainstorming session… it might just be the efficient tool you’ve been looking for and a go-to trick when you’re stuck in a creative rut.

Here are the rules:

1. Two minutes

2. No judgement of ideas

3. Write down everything

4. Quantity over quality

Then, take a look at your results.

Pick 3 of your ideas (trust your instincts on this one) to do another 2 minute brainstorming session, extrapolating on each idea.

Dig deeper into your creative well by asking yourself questions like — what would happen if the opposite were true? What would this idea look like a year from now? How would our competition execute this idea?

Start with the phrase… “What if” and see where it takes you. By role-playing scenarios and ideas without any fear of judgement (and just a little bit of time and energy) you’re pumping up your creative muscle by asking the  curious questions that promote self-reflection, resilience, flexibility, empathy, and sometimes… more questions.

 

 

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How a willingness to change makes the impossible possible

18 Jun

Below is an excerpt from “If It’s Not Impossible, It’s Not Interesting—Leveraging Personal Experience to Create a High Performance Team” by Guy L. Smith IV, and the Diageo North America Corporate Relations Team. 

Mission Impossible | trainingmag.com.

“…..Is achieving the impossible just a mindset, a belief the football coach instills in his players during halftime in the locker room? Yes, that’s part of it. The impossible we are talking about here holds back successful companies, entire industries, sometimes even societies. In part, the impossible is defined by a fear of change. Being afraid of change stymies progress.

It won’t take you long to recall the last time at work somebody resisted changing something. From the mundane and unimportant like changing the stationery, the look of the bulletin board, the type of coffee in the coffee machine, or the traditional venue for the office holiday party to the much more serious like changing the company name, dropping a product line, merging to survive, or closing regional offices.

But we forget that change also brings about the impossible—a new life, a new family, a new career, a new person. Change can be a friend. Change can be harnessed to achieve beyond one’s wildest expectations. The impossible can only be achieved with change.”

Achieving the impossible requires openness to change. Achieving the impossible requires taking risks. Achieving the impossible requires a journey into the unknown. Ask Columbus. Was Columbus scared as he sailed into the unknown? You bet. Ask any astronaut. Ask Lincoln. Was

Lincoln scared when he set out from Springfield for Washington, the United States of America at war with itself? Certainly. But also ask the athletes who won the game against all odds. Ask those heroes who are celebrated in the news media everyday when they help the disadvantaged, the homeless, the single mom, the wounded soldier. For each one, the journey began without a final destination. The journey began with an objective, yet the final destination was unknown. And the unknown is inherently scary, at least when you are by yourself and on your own.

An open mind makes change a friend. It is exhilarating and exciting. It can make the hair on your neck stand up sometimes, but just like the rush of adrenaline the athlete feels course through her body, so can be taking on change and embarking on that journey into the unknown. But it takes a mind that is open to ideas, to looking at things from a different angle, to thinking thoughts that are different, heretical maybe, forgotten sometimes, foolhardy to less intrepid souls. But that is what it takes.

So let’s go back to that ever-repeated comment so often made in offices everywhere: “You can’t do that; it’s impossible.” Maybe you don’t want to try for the impossible because you will fail. And for sure you don’t want to be seen as a failure. There are myriad examples of not taking a risk at the office, as any regular viewer of The Office on TV knows. And there are certainly a zillion examples of someone who got promoted because he or she never took a risk, always took the safe path. These are the “successful” people we spoke of earlier. But it takes more than success to achieve the impossible.

What does the impossible look like? How does it feel? Impossible is different to each of us. It can mean many things. We have seen this with the personal stories of my colleagues. And we have seen how these experiences, each one deeply personal and unique to each individual, were incredibly empowering.

The next time somebody says to you “You can’t,” just smile and think to yourself, “Yes, I can. If it’s not impossible, it’s not interesting.”

Our corporate story has given voice to this remarkable team that repeatedly accomplishes the impossible. How do they do this? Why do they do this? These pages lay out seven simple guideposts for achieving the impossible. Remember them. Commit them to memory. Believe them. Practice them. And achieve things you never even dreamed! How hard could that be? It is not hard at all if you decide that it is not.

The Seven Guideposts to Achieving the Impossible

  1. Believe in yourself.
  2. Believe in the mission.
  3. Be willing to change the rules of the game to achieve your goal.
  4. Have the humility to ask for and use help from others.
  5. Focus all available assets against a single objective.
  6. Have the tenacity to relentlessly, tirelessly persist in the mission until it is accomplished.
  7. Use your own (and others’) knowledge, skills, experience, and training to confidently say, “I can handle whatever they throw at me today!”


Who in Your Company Can Say “Yes” to Innovation, Without Permission? – via Harvard Business Review

30 May

It’s no secret everyone wants to innovate and to be innovative, and you can propel it forward by adding a lot more of the word”yes” into your vocabulary.

I don’t mean saying yes to more meetings, more red tape, and more hierarchy -but instead, saying yes to more PLAY.

“The truth about big innovation is that you get what you play for. If that looks like a typo — if it’s jarring to see “innovation” and “play” in the same sentence or to hear anyone suggest that you, a manager, should play at anything — then this blog post is for you”, write Mark Sebell and Vijay Govindarajan in this latest post from the Harvard Business review. 

Everyone – leadership included, should come to play.

What it means to play is to be more open to new ideas and to have the ability to test out, and toy around with products or inventions you may have scoffed at in the past. Innovation could leave you feeling vulnerable, and risking failure – and you’ll need to asses the level of risk that’s right for you and your organization. But, when everyone comes to play, and it’s easier to get on the field instead of sitting on the sidelines, you’re at least putting more ideas on the field than watching them go by, judging them as they pass. Playing, in this case means removing the barriers that were once in place so that you can say “yes, and” where you used to say, “yes, but”, and letting teams run with an idea for a little while so that they fail faster and better instead of never trying at all.

 

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(Updated) Two words that kill innovation and creativity

21 May

This past week, I had the privilege of guest blogging for online leadership think tank, LeaderLab. A re-posting of my updated post is below and here. I’d love to hear your thoughts. 

Every moment and in every interaction we are capable of choosing our “performances” and how we act, behave, and respond in a given situation.

Often our performances, and our reactions are habitual, instinctive, and we aren’t even aware of the mindset that’s ingrained in us or our companies.

But is this mindset decreasing your organizational capacity for innovation?

It’s possible these two little words are killing the innovation and creativity of your team:

“Yes, But”.

Reflect on how you and your company respond to new or untested ideas. Do you “but” ideas to death? And in doing so, do you cast a negative light on risk-taking, failure, and openness.

The unconscious performance might look like this:

“Yes, but it won’t work”

“Yes, but we don’t have the time”

“Yes, but we tried something similar before and it didn’t work”

Researcher Shawn Achor from Harvard tells us 75% of or job successes at work come from optimism, our ability to see stress as a challenge instead of a threat, and social support at work.

When we are met with a “yes, but” attitude to our ideas and innovations, it can be difficult maintain the motivation to do our best work and to feel support for our contributions.

I’m not advocating a company full of just “yes” men. Instead, we can choose a performance that involves less judgement, more open-mindedness, acceptance of others ideas, and a willingness to build on ideas instead of rejecting them.

Luckily, research from Achor (and others) tells us we can train our brain to become more positive. Through practice and habit building, we can learn to scan the world through a lens of positivity, instead of negativity and to create more conscious performances that involve the words “Yes, and”, instead of “Yes, but”.

Think about all of the performance choices you have every day. How can your performance increase and not block the flow of ideas, open communication and an open mind.

“But….” , just give it a try!

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Innovation as Jazz

18 May

http://blog.clomedia.com/2012/05/ld-and-all-that-jazz-at-astd/

“Jazz is a conversation that is comfortable with uncertainty and new knowledge,” said John Kao at the ASTD conference keynote session last week.

Jazz, he says, is a metaphor for innovation – where you need a combination of improvisation and discipline.

“If you play just to what’s on the sheet of music in front of you, you’re limiting your options. Jazz musicians have a different mission – to go new ways with the music and create new notes and moments.”

The freedom found in the limitations creates the magic.

Develop the basic skills needed to play the notes – build your capacity first, set the ground rules, set the target – but realize that the real innovation happens in the space between that structure and the unknown.

 

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The organization of the future – where failure is an option

14 May

Last week, San Francisco hosted the Wisdom 2.0 Business conference – a gathering dedicated to harnessing the innovative mindset at work and creating the conditions for innovation to occur.

Key to this  mindset is having the courage to fail.

The definition of failure is changing and innovative companies of the future believe failure is an option, a necessity.

Organizations of the future will focus on what failure builds, instead of what it destroys.

Organizations of the future believe you can  train the courage to fail, and the ability to manage fear around that “failure”.

But it all starts with the organizational mindset.

Training the courage to fail is something I learned (and still actively practice) in Improv classes.

It was there I learned:

  1. How to fail happily, visibly, and how to embrace failure
  2. How to view mistakes as gifts and use it in a productive fashion
  3. How to use a failure mindset or mistakes as a way to gain trust, connection, and support across a team
  4. The more risks I take, and the more I fail – the more I learn, grow, change, improve.
  5. How to own up to my mistakes and to not be afraid to try again.

I was trained on how to fail. But, I was in an environment where failure was an option so my learning and development was accelerated.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. But make sure the failure mindset you train extends outside the classroom.

 

 

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