Does your physical work environment foster the right kind of thinking?

We recently came across this beautiful quote by John Hunt, from his wonderful book, 'The Art of the Idea'. Recommended reading.

Change the physical space you're in and your brain follows suit. I've noticed, in an absolutely literal sense, if you give people a distant horizon, their ideas are less short-term. If you're physically on top of the world, it's more difficult to think small, mean thoughts. A point of view is sometimes just exactly that. And by altering it, an enormous amount of stimuli is allowed in.

Source: The Art of the Idea. John Hunt. Pg 105

Multi-tasking makes you dumb.

A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test (5 for women, 15 for men). This effect is similar to missing a night's sleep - or smoking cannabis.  "Always on" is clearly not the most productive way to work.
Why?
When your brain is on 'alert' constantly it increases the allostatic load, which is a reading of stress hormones and other factors relating to a sense of threat.  It creates an artificial sense of constant crisis.  The fight or flight mechanism kicks in.

Given your small amount of working memory, you decrease the amount of data that can be held for what you want to focus on at any moment.  So, whenever you multitask, accuracy does down.
So if you really want to innovate, turn off those notifications, put your phone down, close your laptop, put away the iPAD, clear your calendar - and create the space and time for deep thought. And if you want to read more about this, see recent work by David Rock, Mark Jung Beeman, and others.

Coaching for insight: a foundational practice for a culture of innovation

Are you trying to foster innovation in your organisation? 

Coaching a team to encourage insights is a skill you can develop with the right knowledge and practice.

Innovative organisations have leaders who encourage people to think for themselves. To become a great innovation coach you need to become passionate about about improving not what people are thinking about, but the way they think. To do this, focus on facilitating a self-directed learning process.

David Rock has some great suggestions for how to lead for innovation in his book Quiet Leadership.

Here is a summary of some of the key mindsets:

  • Process vs Content:  When a leader is having a conversation to help someone thinking something through, it's important that the leader focus on the process rather the content of the conversation.
  • Explicit vs Implicit: In order for something to be made explicit, it needs to be said aloud, with words. Making things explicit frees up everyone's neurons to focus on central issues, because we are less distracted by uncertainties.
  • Interesting vs Useful: Discussing problems is interesting. Discussing solutions is useful.  When something is interesting, we don't put much energy into memorising it. But when something is useful, we consciously make the effort to learn it so that we can apply the learning elsewhere.
  • Deconstruct vs Reconstruct:  Deconstructing the hard wiring in the brain is very difficult (when we try to eliminate ingrained habits). It's much easier to create (reconstruct) new wiring, and create new habits.
  • Why vs Learning: There are two types of questions you can ask of others.  Those with the word 'why' in them don't lead to learning; they lead to reasons and justifications. Learning questions help make new connections, by bringing about new insight.
  • Intent vs Impact: Sometimes the intent that we have in a conversation is not achieved and the conversation has an undesired impact on the other person.
  • Thinking About Thinking: Thinking about an issue a person has brought to you means you come up with ideas for them. Thinking about thinking means thinking to figure out what questions to ask that will help the person come up with their own insights. The leader is focused on the person, not the issue on the table.

When you are having a conversation with a team member remember the following to be most effective:

  • Let them do all the thinking. Don't tell them what to do. Let them think, then help them think in more efficient ways.
  • Focus on solutions. Focus only on the way ahead.
  • Remember to stretch. Stretch people, and help to normalise any unsettled emotions they may feel along the way.
  • Accentuate the positive.  We are all our own worst critics.  We need more positive feedback, this helps embed new mental maps.

Leading in this way will create motivated, inspired team members who constantly grow in self-awareness, skill and empowerment. They will find work both challenging and rewarding, and will produce innovative outcomes everyone is proud of. You will foster an environment where everyone does their best work. 

“What got me to being a successful designer was being good at having good ideas. What makes me an impactful leader is not about the quality of my ideas but my ability to enable those ideas in others.”

- Tim Brown, President and CEO, IDEO

What is the secret to teams that innovate?

Google have been conducting research into a crucial aspect of innovation - how to make a great team. 

In doing so they are in line with recent research that shows modern workplaces are increasingly based on teamwork. Rather than focussing on improving individual workers, they wanted to find out what makes the perfect team. Google has, obviously, an enormous amount of data and plenty of algorithms to work with, and yet the team, Project Aristotle, who were tasked with solving the riddle, struggled to find the secret. 

They looked at teams with strong leadership, teams with no leadership, teams with strong social connection, teams with little social link, teams of similar backgrounds, and others which were highly diverse. The secret couldn't be found in any of those combinations. It didn't seem to matter who was in the team, or how they were structured. They found high achieving teams made composed in totally different ways, the diversity of group makeup supplied no clues for a formula.

Then they had a breakthrough. It happened when one team leader was able to turn around a team - changing it from a moderately successful team into one which was strongly bonded and highly effective. The leader did something very unconventional at Google - he took the group off the premises for a get-together, then started a conversation by spontaneously revealing to them that he was fighting a losing battle with cancer. The group members responded with compassion, and, in turn, sharing parts of their own lives, things they had never discussed before. They talked about the tricky topics, things which left them vulnerable and open. This vulnerability lead to a profound bonding of the group; they then found their group work more rewarding, more meaningful, and therefore were more effective.  As it turns out, the successful teams did have one thing in common - in the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

"What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no-one wants to put on a 'work face' when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel 'psychologically safe,' we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us - without fear of recrimination. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor."

Google found that the key thing that made people really 'show up' to work, really give their best, and work well with their colleagues, was the sense of connection amongst the group. Fostering this sense of connection required tapping into feelings, vulnerability, and authenticity.

Remember that this breakthrough occurred at Google - where the workforce is largely made up of data engineers and IT specialists, certainly not a group of people known for their ease with emotional conversations. Quite the opposite in fact. However, by adopting the data-driven approach of Silicon Valley, Project Aristotle has encouraged emotional conversations and discussions of norms among people who might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about how they feel. The data provided clear evidence for the value of these type of conversations, and quickly established a set of methods and tools they could use to adopt these in everyday work settings. 

The key takeaway here is that effective teams, and effective people, need meaningful connections, both to each other and the work they are doing. Meaningful connection is the glue that holds our lives together, and when you're leading a team charged with driving innovation , thinking about how you're going to create the platforms for this meaningful connection is critically important.

To read more about Project Aristotle, see the New York Times article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

The Adjacent Possible

Innovation resides in the places we imagine ourselves into.

The scientist Stuart Kauffman has coined a phrase which captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation - "The Adjacent Possible".

The Adjacent Possible describes all the other possibilities at any given moment; all the other things that could occur in if we were to take a different path. It is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of thinking which points to all of the ways in which the present could re-invent itself.  It is all those things which could be, not the way things already are.

As Steven Johnson writes in Where Good Ideas Come From:

"Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that your haven't visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn't have reached from your original staring point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you'll have built a palace".

The Adjacent Possible expands out from the edges of now. It is the acknowledgement and awareness that at any given moment the world is capable of extraordinary change.

Though the possibilities are not infinite - each moment has some limits to it's future, the beautiful truth is that the boundaries of The Adjacent Possible grow as you explore those boundaries.

Think of The Adjacent Possible as birthplace of innovation. It is the space of potential which motivates us to keep exploring the boundaries of the possible. The better we become at exploring, the more possibilities we see, so that every situation we encounter holds the seeds for paradigm-changing opportunity.

How can The Adjacent Possible help you?

The key is awareness. 

By being aware of The Adjacent Possible you are encouraged to test out new ideas, and to look beyond the existing paradigm. The Adjacent Possible urges you to consider different doors before taking action or committing to a direction.

Awareness of The Adjacent Possible puts you in the mindset for innovation.

For more see Steven Johnson's book or check out his TED talk.