Building a Culture of Innovation
Genius is created, not born. The right geographical, cultural, and economic environments can create an ecosystem that facilitates innovation and creativity. This was illustrated amply in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers The Story of Success where he demonstrates that certain eras, situations and geographies created the right environments allowing people to flourish.
Is it possible for us to create these environments of success everywhere and at all times? History provides us with examples of how these environments were created serendipitously. We can take these pages from history and implement those lessons to build ecosystems of innovation and creativity. In his book Imagine How Creativity Works, John Lehrer has researched and documented these historical examples that created environments of innovation and creativity. Based on his research and my experience, I will discuss the four pillars that can be used to create these environments of innovation and creativity to build a culture of innovation.
1. Create environments that facilitate child-like curiosity and free exchange of ideas
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” — Picasso
Children create with abandon. A box can be the greatest toy because they can imagine all the possibilities of fun and play that the box can provide. A box can be a cave, a castle, a volcano, a fort, and everything else that their brain can imagine because their imagination has not yet been constrained by rules, expectations and labels. As we grow up and our pre-frontal cortex develops, it provides us with the invaluable trait of impulse control which is essential for our survival. But when we inhibit our impulses we also inhibit our imagination. We become so scared of saying the wrong thing that we don’t say anything. We walk around with vast reservoirs of untapped creativity that we are constantly suppressing for fear of ridicule, sanction and retribution. The silence of the scared imagination (as John Lehrer calls it) is truly deafening.
To allow ideas to flourish and multiply we must create environments that inspire child-like curiosity. It is important to create environments where everyone feels safe to express their opinions without worrying about offending people and facing retribution. When ideas and knowledge are shared, they multiply, creating a domino effect.
When I teach, whether it is students or professionals, I always include games in my curriculum — games that we played as children, that might seem juvenile to adults. These games are wonderful at promoting teamwork, camaraderie and collaboration, because they allow us to be children again and experience the unbridled joy of being silly, of failing and trying again. The spontaneous laughter, silliness and joy that these games create, also creates a strong bond between students that makes them better collaborators.
Classrooms where students just sit and listen are passe. We don’t learn when we are consuming information, we learn when there is a free exchange of ideas that leads to creativity and creation. When I walk into a room, my aim is to convert it into a space where students feel comfortable to physically move around, debate ideas and challenge each other and me. One of my favorite memories of teaching was when one of my students was struggling to verbally explain something. He suddenly stood up from his seat, walked up to the board and started drawing out and explaining his idea. I promptly took a seat with my students giving him the space to explore his idea. Moments like these are ideal learning environments, where we are all students and we are all teachers.
The best way to create these environments that facilitate child-like curiosity and free exchange of ideas is to eliminate the fear of hierarchy. Zappos implemented this with their holocracy model of governance which eliminated the hierarchical structure and created an environment of equality. As Peter Thiel appropriately said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This model of unbridled creativity made Zappos wildly successful and it was acquired by Amazon in 2009.
The challenge as we grow up is to continue thinking like a young person, while layering on the wisdom of experience. To do this, we must find new ways to constantly challenge ourselves so that we can embrace radical ideas and keep our minds youthful.
2. Engage in and encourage outsider thinking
“Outsider creativity isn’t a phase of life, it is a state of mind” — John Lehrer
Outsider Thinking is when people solve problems that are outside their field. For example, technology that powers space shuttles into orbit was adopted to create a heart pump. This idea came about when a NASA engineer, the late David Saucier, an expert in rocket engine fuel pumps, became a patient of the heart surgeon, Dr.DeBakey. Dr.Bakey wanted to find a way to help patients survive while they were waiting for a heart transplant. Saucier, after receiving his heart transplant began working with physicians to reimagine how the pump that fuels space shuttles can be purposed as a heart pump.
Innovation often happens at the boundary of disciplines, when people from one industry adopt their solutions and applications for another application. This is the premise of the field of Open Innovation, where industries crowdsource ideas to develop solutions for their tough to solve problems.
Outsider Thinking works because our brains are often shackled by our familiarity of the field. Our expertise also makes us dogmatic about what works and what doesn’t work, which can make us comfortable with the existing failures and imperfections in the systems or solutions. When we leave the safety of our expertise behind and invite unique perspectives, the solutions present themselves.
The best way for us to engage in Outsider Thinking is to invite input from people that are outside our field and engage with problems that are outside our discipline. We must strive to work with multidisciplinary teams so that we can challenge our point of view and step away from the safety of our expertise. Companies like 3M and Google who allow employees to spend a certain percent of their time exploring “crazy ideas” have been extremely successful in innovation because they have created an environment where people can explore problems that are outside their areas of expertise.
Most importantly, we must experiment with ignorance. We have heard of the quote “do one thing that scares you everyday.” The source of fear is that the activity or the outcome of that activity is unknown to us. Jumping feet first into something we are ignorant about is both scary and exhilarating. Whether we are jumping off a cliff or trying a new cuisine, this activity takes us away from our zone of comfort and allows us to momentarily disassociate from our daily routine. This temporary distance can provide us with new insights and ideas to enhance our creativity in our discipline.
3. Collaboration and team work
“I am not capable of surprising myself everyday with some great new idea. That kind of magic can only come from a group.” — Lee Unkrich, Pixar
In the last couple of decades we have seen a strong push towards team work and collaboration as we realized that the nature of our work is changing. As automation becomes prominent and repetitive tasks can be automated, how humans contribute towards a productive society are changing. Our contributions are increasingly coming from ideas, innovation and creativity rather than the manual labor that was prominent in the industrial age.
Ideation, innovation and creativity are team sports. When individuals work together in teams, we create outcomes that are bigger, better and unique than any one person could have achieved individually.
One of the key tenets of the design thinking methodology is that innovation must happen in teams and teams must comprise of members from diverse fields. This allows insight from various fields to coalesce creating solutions that no individual member could have developed on their own. It allows us to engage with problems and situations that we don’t fully understand, but can solve a a team.
Creativity comes from a culture of collaboration and interaction. Research by Tom Allen at MIT shows that the most productive employees are those who engage in the most interactions. The knowledge spillover that happens when people interact and share ideas, results in the acceleration of innovations, because when knowledge is shared, new knowledge is created.
To effectively work in a collaborative environment, we must first create a space where colleagues admire and respect each other. This mutual admiration society can be built only when people feel safe to express their opinions. Collaboration and competition do not go well together. We must strive to create environments where collaboration leads to the success of all.
Secondly, our environment should promote healthy criticism and debate aimed towards perfecting the solution. Colleagues will criticize us, only when they are fully engaged in our work, and want to help improve it. Criticism surprises us and propels us to reassess our assumptions and look at the problem from a different perspective.
Lastly, the collaborative team must have the right mix of people who have worked together in the past and newcomers. This mix ensures that we are challenging the status quo to generate new ideas, while utilizing expertise and experience to pursue ideas that will work. Research shows that the most productive collaborative team is a team that has an intermediate level of intimacy, i.e. some new people and some who already know each other. Teams with intermediate levels of intimacy outperform teams where there is a high level of intimacy (everyone knows each other) and teams that have a low level of intimacy (everyone is new).
4. Create spaces that facilitate diverse and random interactions
“Nobody comes out of their basement playing perfect.” — David Byrne, Talking Heads
The “Talking Heads” was the first band to take diverse influences from all over the world and make music that blended all these ideas and sounds. Living in New York city, they were exposed to diverse music and cultures which influenced their music. Cities are wonderful at facilitating diverse and random connections. The larger the city, the more exposure we get to unexpected things, which makes us more creative and productive.
We realize the value that these chance interactions have. The famed water cooler was the company melting pot in the 90’s, when working in a cubicle was the norm. Now, companies have created more open work environments to facilitate these interactions. When people organically mingle, it maximizes human capital. The most productive and creative people know that the best way to interact is face-to-face.
COVID has changed how we work, and remote work has become more acceptable since the pandemic. I personally have never enjoyed remote work. Being a natural extrovert, it has always been difficult for me to be productive in an isolated environment. I have experienced that a quick conversation will solve a problem faster that hours of toiling alone. I also believe that being around people makes me smarter, as I am constantly exposed to new ideas from them.
To facilitate these diverse and random interactions, we must work horizontally rather than vertically. We spend so much effort trying to guard our innovations that we stymie innovation. Silicon Valley become the innovation hub because in it’s early days, exchange of information was horizontal. People moved from one company to the next without the fear of non-competes and NDAs, freely adopting what they had learned in their previous roles to innovate in their new roles. This horizontal exchange of information made Silicon Valley the most innovative place on earth. When organizations restrict the free flow of information by creating work silos or limiting knowledge exchange, they become less innovative. It’s not enough to create open work spaces, we must also give people the freedom to freely share information. We must create a culture of borrowing and adaptation, because when knowledge and ideas are shared, they inspire new ones and become more useful.
Innovate Innovation
We live in an era of unprecedented innovation and progress. What we are creating today will change life as we know it for the next generations. While we are working on groundbreaking tech, let’s also adopt a philosophy of sharing and access. Let’s make it easier to become a genius, because genius is created, not born.
