sticky wisdom

Before starting, the team members were invited to read a number of books and articles:

From Sticky Wisdom they had learnt that the six steps to starting something exciting in your company are …

1. Freshness – this is lateral-thinking, out-of-the-box stuff: find other ways to describe things, find analogies in other fields, challenge assumptions and make random connections.
   
2. Greenhousing – stay in the SUN (Suspend judgement, Understand and Nurture), and keep out of the RAIN (don’t React, Assume and Insist).
   
3. Realness – make ideas real as soon as possible, don’t try to be perfect, share prototypes.
   
4. Momentum – manage energy and keep things going.
   
5. Signalling – tell others how you want them to respond to your ideas – analytically, emotionally, supportively, critically…
   
6. Courage – find it through positive self-commentary, getting support from friends, conviction, visualise how things could be.

The team followed a lot of this advice. They had SUN only sessions and reminded each other about signalling. Their coach, Javier, in particular, encouraged them to get out and talk to friends and to visualise the future, as part of managing the ebb and flow of energy in the group. Lack of time and becoming-whale-of-an-idea inhibited them when it came to making ideas real, though. If you’re going to change the world you don’t want to stuff up by missing an important clause in your Terms & Conditions.

But who knows? Reacting and Insisting might be really helpful in some teams. More helpful than Unconditional Positive Regard. And being open to whatever kind of reaction you get from colleagues may open doors that would otherwise have stayed diplomatically closed. Clear, analytical thinking is useful when making incremental change. And so on.

I like Signalling, though. And I saw it at work. Rather than the ‘say three positive things first’ approach or the ‘criticise with abandon’ Straw Man, it seems to me really helpful to signal the kind of feedback you’re looking for. After all, who knows if the current idea is one you’ve been quietly working on for a couple of weeks or something you googled half-an-hour ago?

Dilemmas:

Don't react and insist, even though reacting and insisting may sometimes be really useful?

Is signalling the kind of feedback you want a helpful guide or unnecessarily controlling?

becoming whale

Stewart: 'There was a problem with us not being able to pick an outcome.'

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick 'is not like the little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it'. He is no ordinary whale. In the same vein, Project Red Stripe's big idea, whatever it was to be, was not like the kind of idea that you have in the bath.

Of course, it could have been an idea that you have in the bath. But it wasn't, because it quickly acquired a weight and a symbolism and a significance that transformed it into something quite other. So that having it in the bath would have been as improbable as having Moby-Dick in the bath.

Moby-Dick was no ordinary whale but one that 'bypasse[d] the pack or the school'; less an animal than an event in its own right and one whose character and fleshiness are partly an emergent property of Ahab's relationship with the whale. Another emergent property (or side-effect as we used to say) of that relationship was that the captain ceased to be just Ahab. Choosing to hunt Moby-Dick 'in a choosing that exceeds him and comes from elsewhere', Ahab is eventually overtaken by his preoccupation with the beast. He can be seen as 'becoming-whale'. So Red Stripe's idea, whatever it was to be, was no ordinary idea. And the team can be seen as becoming-idea.

Taking the notion of Ahab-becoming-whale one step further, we could also imagine that, in the course of Ahab's struggle with it, the whale somehow changes. Perhaps Moby-Dick is himself becoming-more-than-whale. He is becoming-Ahab. So the idea can be seen as becoming-the-team.

In any case, a sense of the idea (though not the idea itself) was there in Mike Seery's head nine months before the project began when he proposed an internal innovation team to the Internet Strategy Group, of which he was a member.

Though he tried to talk it away - 'the key measure of success is not the idea itself, but that The Economist Group wants to run this innovation process again' - it continued to preoccupy him. The idea of an idea. 'It should be something that we couldn't otherwise have come up with.' It also preoccupied the team from the outset. Where would they find it? Would they know it when they saw it? Would they catch it? Would they be good enough for it? Would it be good enough for them? Would it be cool enough? Would they deserve it? If they found it, would other people recognise it? Would someone else steal it once they'd found it?

As Mike said later about the idea-gathering process:

...by the time each team member had read through all of the ideas and the
rush of new submissions had turned into a trickle, we knew that we still lacked
the big idea. And we were already nearly two months into the project.

To me it seems that this whale-of-an-idea was sometimes too much for the team. Too much for any team. They tried to bring it back down to size by playing with it: 'Let's divert the Thames through Lichfield', 'Let's make the world square'. But still it became the elephant in the room, to mix gargantuan mammal metaphors. And the team found themselves becoming-whale-of-an-idea-in-the-room. Then they had two ideas. Which one should they choose? Had they chosen the right idea? Then the idea was altered. Was it still good enough? Then it was changed altogether. As time ran out there was an awful dread that they had missed their chance. And, from the moment that they decided to look externally for their idea, there was a pervading sense that the idea lived 'out there'. Which meant, in turn, that the team would not be the authors or creators or owners of the idea.

In the end, it's a serious responsibility being invited to change the world. The whale-of-an-idea is an onerous beastie, and cetanthropy is an onerous business.

Dilemmas:

'Thinking big' is obviously necessary for a major innovation project, especially as it's notoriously difficult to get people to think beyond the confines of their current reality. But giving people the freedom to try and change the world may leave them a little dazed by the enormity of what they might be able to achieve.

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Credits:
Wordle: www.wordle.net
Moby-Dick: Barnes & Noble
Square World: Funny Stuff Is All Around
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flocking

Stewart: 'I'm going to work from home tomorrow, unless anyone has any objections.'
Joanna: 'We'll miss you.'

On the way home from hearing Javier talking about people's need to flock from time to time, which he related to the tensions that can build in the course of one family Christmas dinner, never mind over six months in a cockpit, I was reading Arie de Geus's The Living Company. I've already quoted him talking about flocking as a prerequisite of organisational learning. In the same chapter he quotes Allan Wilson's suggestion that accelerated evolution takes place intragenerationally in certain species when three characteristics are present:

• Innovation - the capacity to invent new behaviour


• Social propagation - the capacity to transmit skills through direct communication rather than genetically


• Mobility - the capacity to move around as individuals, to come together into flocks, and to move as a flock.

[Pinta digression

Allan Wilson - in the article linked to above - neatly explains the whole blue tit/milk bottle thing if you've ever wondered.]

Arie then makes two key assertions. The first is that, 'no one can "command" a bird to flock in a certain direction, because the travel pattern of the flock emerges from its own movement.' We all know that choreographing directional flocking in geese or fish is hard. But the idea that the next movement emerges from the current one is less obvious. In an innovation team, as in all things, it may be helpful to start from movement rather than from stasis.

The second is that 'human organisations have resources for evolution'. No quibbling with that. But he expands on this by saying, 'surely, corporate life is not a Greek tragedy in which the outcome is hardwired into the characters by the Olympian gods, and the play can climax only in its inevitable tragic ending'.

To take his second assertion first, I'm not so sure. The error, fatal flaw or hamartia, that leads Oedipus unwittingly but unerringly to the awful climax of killing his father and marrying his mother, is still used in contemporary psychotherapy when talking about the scripts that people act out in their lives. Sometimes it really does seem that an individual is hell-bent on his own destruction or on making the same mistakes again and again in different relationships. Often we can link this determination to explicit or unacknowledged beliefs that the individual holds about himself. I see no reason not to extend this analysis to organisations, where a group of individuals can hold equally strong beliefs and assumptions about the organisation, its worth, its direction and its likely end. When organisation culture experts talk about culture as 'the way we do things around here', they refer to a whole range of values and beliefs that inform every aspect of an organisation's operation and can define, unless they are openly challenged, how that organisation will end its days.

But to return to Arie's first assertion about directional flocking, I learnt that Craig Reynolds was working two decades ago on replicating flocking behaviour with computer modelling. In thinking about the steering behaviours of a boid (a computer simulation of a single flocking creature) he concluded that three factors are at play:

• Separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates


• Alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates


• Cohesion: steer to move toward the average position of local flockmates

It seems to me that separation, alignment and cohesion (which, at first sight, look interestingly contradictory) may be behaviours or inclinations that can be seen at work in many situations from a holiday beach to an artistic movement to a business. They were certainly in operation at Red Stripe, both in terms of the team members' working relationships with one another and in terms of the team's relationships with the outside world.

Furthermore, I found that Bryan Coffman has written about the application of some of these principles to the organisation. Talking about Knowledge Nodes or Knodes, he suggests some rules that each Knode follows in a web or flock of Knodes:

• If another Knode does something you value, emulate it.


• Send regular "here's my current state" messages - communicate your current state to your neighborhood.


• Hunt for and discover resources and opportunities. Once
  discovered, communicate these as a part of your current state message.


• Look outward to identify new ideas, toys, tools and techniques. Once identified,
  communicate these as a part of your current state message.


• Tell the story of the purpose of the web to new Knodes you run into (which may or may not be a part of the current web/flock that you belong to).


• Family and immediate neighborhood come first.


• Critical mass:
  - If the neighborhood flock is too small for critical mass, join another one.
  - If the neighborhood flock is too large and noisy, split off.


• Align with and converge upon the currently highest wealth-generating opportunity (from your value vantage point) that you are aware of, based on current state messages you receive from other Knodes.


• Always ship a product from your experiences to your local
  neighborhood. A product is actually a specific subset of a current state
  message.


• Reply to current state messages you think are valuable, even if it's
  just to say, 'thanks, that was valuable'. DON'T respond to current state
  messages which you think are not valuable.

Now there's an interesting prescription for an innovation team. Again, the rules can apply to the way team members work together and to the way the team as a whole relates to the organisation it works for and to the outside world.

• Emulation reminds us that the incremental approach to change may be more useful than the quantum leap.
• Current state messages sound like Gerard Fairtlough's suggestion that we write things down.
• Hunting for resources and opportunities sounds like a more practical approach than hunting for an idea. It might help to avoid becoming-whale syndrome.
• Looking outward was obvious for this team; less obvious for many others. And looking for toys is like talking to children.
• Telling the story is what Javier urged the team to do when they were getting stuck.
• Family first is, amongst other things, a reminder of the issues that some team members faced whilst working so far from their families.
• Critical mass gives us a guide for the size of the team and the business of working in one room.
• Focusing on wealth-generating opportunities would have changed the team's direction at the time it was thinking about starting a charity.
• Shipping a product from your experiences is a way of describing Mike's not-a-white-paper, which could perhaps be extended to include a reminder of the unexploited ideas that the team considered.
• The formula for replying to current state messages might have been a helpful guide for Red Stripe when they were receiving ideas at the crowdsourcing stage.

Dilemmas:

The theory of flocking seems to make very good sense and is intrinsically appealing. Web 2.0 is all about flocking and the transmission of memes. As we've noted, the team was doing a great deal on online flocking. But many extremely creative people find flocking anathema. Recruit hermits or flockers to your team? And if you opt for both, how do you get them to work together?

Like what used to be called surfing the web, telling the story, transmitting and acknowledging current state messages, hunting and emulating all require huge amounts of time. Just as a team like this perhaps needs one person working full time on PR, maybe it would be useful to separate out those responsible for all these necessary flocking behaviours and those responsible for making a plan and creating a new business?

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Credits:
Milk bottle: Mykl Roventine
Blue tit: Lawrie Phipps
Flock: fdecomite

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creativity and innovation

Joanna: 'There's this idea that you can only create great ideas in a free-form, unstructured environment. I don't believe that.'

In Creativity is Not Enough, Professor Ted Levitt (who later became editor of the Harvard Business Review and popularised the term 'globalisation') said interesting things about creativity and innovation:

It is alleged that everything in American business would be just dandy if
industry were simply more creative and if it would hire more creative people and
give them the chance to show their fructifying stuff.

It seems to me that the world would be a better place if more Harvard Professors used terms like 'fructifying stuff' and my fantasy is that, of the two terms, he'd rather be famous for that than globalisation.

Levitt goes on to explain his view that:

...there is really very little shortage of creativity and of creative people
in American business. The major problem is that so-called creative people often
(though certainly not always) pass off on others the responsibility for getting
down to brass tacks. They have plenty of ideas but little businesslike
follow-through. They do not make the right kind of effort to help their ideas
get a hearing and a try.

His point, clearly enough, is that ideation in businesses is relatively abundant. It is its implementation that is more scarce. Which brings us back to one of the conventional distinctions made by people who attempt to define innovation and creativity: namely that creativity is about having the idea, while innovation is about making it happen.

In this sense, Red Stripe had the perfect brief. It had not only to have the big idea or ideas, it had to 'pick one or more of these ideas to develop, and then bring the idea(s) to market'.

Another point made by Levitt in the same article, is that 'in most business organisations, the most continually creative men... are also generally known as corporate malcontents.' For whatever reason (Mike Seery says the team members were chosen 'for their flexibility, enthusiasm and to get a range of experience within the team'), the Red Stripe team members were far from corporate malcontents. Of course, they were not all unreserved admirers of their employer but, by and large, they liked and respected The Economist, were proud to work for it and determined to do well by it during the six months of the project. Perhaps, if the team really had been capable, as Slashdot suggested, of frittering away the six months on drink and debauchery, then they might also have been even more receptive to even more revolutionary thinking:

In the first week, the staffers bought beer, wine, whisky, condoms, flat
screen televisions and gaming consoles.

In the second week, the staffers hired a young graphic artist through the internet for $35 per hour to set up a rudimentary web page asking for innovative ideas.

The next 5 months is a blur.

The final two weeks were a flurry of activities. So many good ideas to review! So little time!

By contrast, it was their respect for The Economist Group and concern not to do anything that might damage its reputation (or concern for their jobs, or conservatism, or pragmatism... call it what you like) that led them to back off from their brief at times. When they could have gone public with the Lughenjo idea and effectively forced the hand of The Economist Group (who would not have wanted to be seen ditching an admirably philanthropic scheme), they deliberately chose to stay silent and seek approval from the GMC first.

Staying with Ted Levitt, he further noted:

There is some evidence that the relatively rigid organisation can build into
its own structure certain flexibilities which would provide an organisational
home for the creative but irresponsible individual. What may be required,
especially in the large organisation, is not so much a suggestion box scheme as
a specialised group whose function is to receive ideas, work them out, and
follow them through in the necessary manner.

One of the bravest decisions that Project Red Stripe took in its early days was to abandon the great ideas that most of its members had brought with them and, in some cases, which they had worked up into virtual business plans in order to get accepted onto the team. (Joanna didn't have an idea at the outset and, as a result, felt somewhat split off from those who were 'awash with them'.) After presenting their ideas to each other on a cold day in Regent's Park, the team set about finding ways to harvest ideas from Economist readers and other interested parties. In using this crowdsourcing approach, they defied James Surowiecki, the granddaddy of crowd stuff, who claims - in the words of Dave Pollard - that 'despite compelling evidence that executives and experts are poor at making decisions, and that the collective wisdom of large numbers of people is very much better at it, few businesses rigorously canvass their employees and customers for anything more than inconsequential assessments after the decisions have already been made.'

For the first few weeks they simply worked on developing a workable scheme for collecting, collating, sorting, classifying and evaluating these ideas.

As a result they put themselves at a stroke in exactly the position of the 'responsible' evaluation group rather than that of the 'irresponsible' creative individual.

One reason this was such a bold decision was that it effectively undermined one of the most significant 'glues' that the team started out with - the notion that they could come up with an idea that would change the face of business, or the world, or - at the very least - The Economist.

In doing so, they freed themselves temporarily from the clutch of the becoming-whale-of-an-idea.

Dilemmas:

If good ideas are relatively abundant but the ability to commercialise them is relatively scarce, it may be useful to focus on the latter. But, if you do that, you might end up missing out on the really good idea, which no-one has had yet.

The crowd will come up with good ideas but it may also be tainted by lowest-common-denominator thinking.

A less responsible (or more malcontent) bunch than the Project Red Stripe team might have pursued the idea of a philanthropy website and launched it in a blaze of publicity without approval from the GMC. The Economist Group would have got 'businesslike follow-through' but would also have got an innovation it didn't want.

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Credits:

Innovation depot: Chris Denbow

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the last fart of the ferret

In Creativity Under the Gun, Amabile, Hadley and Kramer describe how time pressure has a negative effect on creativity unless the pressure is felt to be meaningful and is delivered in a form where individuals can work largely on their own and in a focused way. Where it's unproductive is when there's just too much going on, too many competing demands and pressures, too many distractions.

Creativity under time pressure, the authors maintain, is most likely to happen when people feel 'as if they are on a mission'. In the absence of any time pressure, they argue that people in an innovation team need to 'feel as if they are on an expedition', which comes closer to the idea of drifting or wandering around, which I explored in drifting, angst and pan-ic. This sense of being on a mission or expedition also reminds me of Tom's euphoria at the outset and occasionally later on.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

What Amabile et al. are talking about is motivation, of course. And, specifically, they're talking about what they call intrinsic motivation, which Professor Amabile elsewhere defines as 'authentic', as opposed to the extrinsic motivation produced by promises of a bonus or threats of redundancy. I'm not at all sure about this distinction. What about the motivation to look cool, to get a better job after completing the project successfully, to become famous as a result of delivering a triumphant new business to The Economist? Where's the boundary between intrinsic and extrinsic? Why should we try to create a boundary at all? (I'm afraid the answer to that is simply that 'blur' makes less good copy - and sells less well - than 'black and white'.)

The team members were equally unclear about this motivation thing. At different times, several of the team members explicitly said (see motivations) that they would have worked harder or longer hours if they had been offered a share in the eventual business. I don't know how true this was. They all seemed to work hardest when they sensed that their mission was possible and less hard when they felt it was going nowhere. They also worked hardest when presentations and other key deadlines were looming. Though we need to distinguish between working hard to complete a defined process - like preparing a business plan or a presentation - and working hard to be creative - which is a much more elusive skill, as noted by every writer or artist who endlessly defers creative work, choosing, instead, to do the washing up or a thousand other humdrum tasks.

Returning to intrinsic motivation, the factors that Amabile says enhance intrinsic motivation include: challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encouragement and organisational support.

Challenge is about getting a good fit, but not too good a fit, between the employee's skills and the task. (This relates to my discussion of who was chosen to do what job.)

Freedom relates to freedom over means but not ends. Specifically, Amabile says that 'creativity thrives when managers let people decide how to climb a mountain; they needn't, however, let employees choose which one.' Project Red Stripe could hardly have been given a broader brief than 'creating an innovative and web-based product, service or business model'. (Tom, one day recalled the cry attributed to many, including David Ogilvy and Pontus Nyström, of 'give me the freedom of a tight brief'.) It's possible to see the first couple of months for the Red Stripe team as having been spent deciding which mountain to climb. But then again, would the Group Management Committee have been well placed to tell them which mountain to climb?



Taiichi Ohno

The important thing seems to be, as Amabile et al. say, that the time constraints appear reasonable and that, as far as possible, they be imposed by the team itself, rather than from on high. This is at odds with one of my favourite ideas about creativity, which was developed by Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System and an inspiration to many Systems Thinkers. In an interview with an Economist journalist (and which I have never been able to trace), he reportedly likened creativity in a survival culture to the last fart of the ferret. When a ferret is cornered it emits a powerful stench like a skunk, and employees, he said, when facing closure of the company, would come up with some of their most creative ideas. [Incidentally, if you search for 'last fart of the ferret', Google will rather coyly ask you if you meant 'last fruit of the ferret' - a delightful possibility which, sadly, produces no results if you accept the suggestion.]

But, to come back to the business of creativity itself, Amabile et al. suggest that creative thinking results from the formation of a large number of associations in the mind, followed by the selection of associations that may be particularly interesting or useful. This process of juggling ideas like balls is a playful process and it was noticeable that the team quickly abandoned some of its more playful activities under the pressure of time constraints. As Mike Seery notes in his report on the project:

However, as early as February, team dinners and outings were delayed or
rescheduled, because we were so concerned at using the time to work on concrete
ideas. In doing this we unwittingly removed a key element of what allowed us to
recharge our batteries and remain fresh and excited about the project.

Incidentally, though they didn't reinstate team dinners, they did in late March, at the instigation of Javier the team coach, begin to go out for lunch in twos and threes to build better relationships between them. Funny that, having sat round a table together all week, people should need to get up and go and sit round a different table to build better relationships. But that's context for you. And movement.

Dilemmas:

Set deadlines and create a sense of urgency or give people the time and space they need to explore in a relaxed environment without unnecessary pressure?

Offer financial incentives to participants or deliberately avoid them?

Give the team the freedom of a tight brief or the freedom of a wide one?

Continue to encourage 'unproductive' play, even as the team approaches the end of the project, or use it only at the outset to foster creativity and team cohesion?

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Credits:

Ferreteria: Dipfan
Wordle: www.wordle.net
Professor Amabile: Harvard News Office
Pontus Nyström clip: sixtysecondview
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