rules and values

At the outset, the team agreed three rules:

1) don’t use the toilet (the one in the office).
2) don’t always sit in the same seat
3) don’t send e-mails across the table

Asked to share something positive about the previous week, all the team members but one talked about personal/family experiences, rather than work:

• Tom: on holiday in Morocco, had visited a dead warlord’s estate.


• Joanna: had stayed at a Landmark property in Scotland.


• Stewart: in his work had become proud of what he has achieved.


• Steve: had said goodbye to China, where he noted that Chinese people never hesitate to ask other people for a favour, except from foreigners.


• Mike: had organised a birthday party for two-year olds.


• Ludwig: had organised an outing with his daughter and wife (until 3am) and resolved to do it more often.

Asked to come up with a list of things that they would all commit to, the team formed into two groups.

The first came up with a long list including: honesty, no booze at lunch, being open with each other, being bold, being ready for criticism, expecting to upset the GMC, supporting each other, being unafraid, remembering that they were lucky to be doing this job, not compromising.

The second team suggested: being reflective, focusing on the positive, developing a meritocracy, transparency, trial and error, taking ownership of the project, putting family first.

The lists were summarised as follows:

• Be open with each other and the outside world


• Be tolerant


• Be honest with each other and yourself


• Stay loyal to each other


• Make a difference


• Be reflective

Finally they were narrowed down like this:

For this particular team, I’m still struck by the ‘touchy-feely’ quality of this list of things they wanted to commit to. In many ways it seemed untypical of the team and noticeably ignored issues like when and how hard they should work and how much time they should take off. Perhaps it would have been useful to bring the list up to date from time to time to reflect the issues that later emerged in the group. Perhaps drinking at lunchtime sometimes would have promoted fructifying stuff. And in any innovation team, perhaps some of the following oblique strategies (discussed, naturally enough, in Oblique Strategies) would be interesting:

• Ask people to work against their better judgement


• Be extravagant


• Call your mother and ask her what to do


• Discard an axiom


• Display your talent


• Do something sudden, destructive and unpredictable


• Do the last thing first


• Faced with a choice, do both


• How would someone else do it?


• How would you explain this to your parents?


• Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list


• What wouldn’t you do?


• You don’t have to be ashamed of using your own ideas.

Dilemmas:

What does coming up with ‘a list of things you can all commit to’ do? On the face of it, it’s an excellent idea. The team reminded themselves of it from time to time. Inevitably, they didn’t keep to it fully. Might it be useful to come up with a list of things you cannot commit to? Or that you don’t agree about? Or rules that you don’t accept? There is shadow/inferno stuff in this list, inevitably. Should it be openly explored?

motivations

The team had a conference call with Javier. Javier asked them about their personal feelings and motivations about the project.

The following extracts from their unprepared answers give a distorted and wholly unfair view of why the team were there. I quote them for several reasons:

Steven (who is wearing jeans): 'I'm hoping that my work will provide potentially an out from Beijing [after the six months of the project, he was due to return to his job there].... I'm interested in the glory. I think it's going to look really good on my résumé.'

Stewart (who is wearing jeans): 'I wanted to learn what it takes to start something... Part of it is to guide me on whether to leave my existing job. I'm a classic geek... Should I develop a separate work personality? My intention is to learn about how to be me.'

Ludwig (who is wearing jeans): 'For me it's also a personal development thing. I want to learn whether I can work in a team... Shall I go on being a journalist?'

Tom (who is wearing a cravat and waistcoat): 'I wanted to learn how to do start-ups... My big dream is to be a stand-up comedian and to write comedy... There's a revolution happening in media. It's one of the most exciting times you can even imagine.'

Joanna (who is wearing black and a very high collar and later said, 'I tend not to wear jeans because I like a degree of formality to get my head in the zone'): 'I think what I really like is being part of a process... I love this sort of exercise: making things come together... I do like belonging to something. Being part of this thing, with such kudos, is so good on your CV and a real privilege.'

Mike (who is wearing jeans): 'I wanted to do something I enjoyed more than my old job. I wanted to do something that proved that I can do something other than what I'm currently doing.'

Now, my reasons for quoting them:

First reason: the team made much of honesty and openness. One of the ten draft recommendations, which were then whittled down to seven for inclusion in the 'not a white paper' was: Be honest with each other. There were often times when team members felt that they didn't achieve this goal, which Stewart had named during the first week thus, 'We should be able to say to each other, "You're a bit slack."'

At the end, Mike summed this feeling up by saying, 'The unsaid stuff exploded a few times.' The unsaid stuff was what Tom had stuck under the table in Inferno early on. Mainly, what was unsaid, I think, were negative feelings that they had about each other. But, in situations like this one, I was struck by the team's remarkable frankness about themselves.

Learning to say the negative stuff about each other in a constructive way, and learning to hear it in an open and non-defensive way, is one of the toughest skills, in my opinion. We have very few role models for it. Few families can manage it. It's a skill that's intrinsically alien to children, politicians, journalists and even most teachers. Yet it's probably at the heart of almost any successful team. This team had that skill in very good measure.

Second reason: there was some debate later on about whether the team should have been offered a financial bonus for a successful outcome, or a share in the resulting business. Everyone except for Ludwig said that some kind of financial incentive would have helped:

Steven: 'It would have been different if we'd all had a financial stake, for sure. Much different.'

Yet, it was clear from the conversation and the websites and blogs that the participants had created as part of their applications, that the opportunity to work on a groundbreaking project like this for The Economist, to get away from the routine of their usual jobs and to have a chance of coming up with the next Google was already a massive incentive.

So what was it that led people to look for a further financial incentive? What was it that led Mike to say, 'I got the sense at one point that people were just turning up for work.'?

Probably it was connected to how the project was going. Had the team members felt that they were on the verge of creating the next Google, they would all probably have been happy with the kudos and happy just to be part of it. Mike had various thoughts on this, including blaming himself and a helpful suggestion which only Tom really took up:

I didn't make it big enough, aspirational enough. It should be people saying 'this could change my life, this is the thing I'm going to be remembered for'.

[I don't agree with him on that. Everybody knew it could change their life. That was the whale thing. If anything, in my opinion, it was too aspirational.]

Maybe people were too comfortable. I don't think it's anything to do with incentivising. If people had been out of a job at the end of the six months, that would have been an incentive. That's how most start-ups work.

[I don't agree with him on that, either. If people had been out of work, they would have come up with a business, for sure. But The Economist didn't need a business. They had a very good one already, thank you very much. In this case, the team found they had to do far more than come up with a business. Which is why, in part Lughenjo and HiSpace didn't happen - The Economist didn't need them enough.]

When you talk to other people about the idea, that's when you feel good. You feel more fired up and energised. We needed to get out and do that... Tom's good at that. He gets that anyway.

Third reason: people at work are just like people at home. They're not very grand. They want to feel OK about themselves, feel wanted, find out what sort of a person they really are, do something they can be proud of, make people laugh, have fun.

When I said in an early blog about the team that they needed a mother, I think that's what I meant. Because work has always been a very chilly business. Where do you go for a hug and a wail? They did need someone to make tea for them, but mostly they needed someone to ask them if they were OK and to find out what they wanted. Perhaps I meant that they needed a grandmother. Not like my grandmother who used to wander round the house with a steaming potty. A wise old babushka. Every team should have one.

Dilemmas:

Honesty, in many situations, including a marriage and an innovation team, can be a two-edged sword. In principle, it is highly to be prized. In practice, it may be carefully avoided.

If an innovation project is set up well, the drive for success 'should' be sufficient motivation for the participants. At the same time, not to give participants a stake in the project's eventual success can seem inequitable. Then again, trying to work out an equitable way of giving them a stake in something that hasn't even been thought of yet is almost impossible.

A classic conundrum: companies that really need to innovate are often the ones that don't have time for a project like this one. Those that have the time and resources and are already very successful are probably not motivated to implement the ideas their innovation teams come up with. How do you motivate a company (rather than its individual members) to be innovative?

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Credits:
Samovar: eye of einstein

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maps

Mike: ‘Let’s put a huge Google Maps marker flag on top of The Economist building so it appears on Google Earth.’ [Here’s one Aram Bartholl doing pretty much that:]

At the end of their first week, Mike asked each member of the team to produce a map of where they had been so far and to ‘sell’ their map to the rest of the team.

Three of the maps were 'geographic', in that they plotted where the team had been physically (they had been on a couple of ‘team-building’ trips in London and had been to Regent’s Park to have a meeting where they shared their own ‘big ideas’ for Project Red Stripe. Stewart had used Google Maps to record where they had been on their trips, while Steven used Google Earth to show his journey from Beijing, his natal Canada and the team’s current digs. Both were technically excellent and applauded by the rest of the team. Mike, who was the only one to remember his own instruction to ‘sell’ the map to the others, produced a map on tracing paper, which could be overlaid onto an atlas, given to others as a walking tour of London or resized on a photocopier.

It became clear from Mike’s comments that he had intended them to produce a physical map of where they had been, rather than something that would only qualify as a map in a fairly loosely metaphorical world. This immediately raised some anxieties among the others about whether they had done the exercise wrong and this, on and off, was to be an anxiety that recurred for some members of the group. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for innovation teams, where the notion of getting it right is even harder to pin down than it is for most teams. It’s a cliché in business that it’s only by making mistakes and getting things wrong that you learn how to get them right. So, in a group like this, it may be really important to work out at the start in what ways team members are allowed to get things wrong. It ought, according to the theory, to be an all-embracing acceptance, but getting things wrong by not turning up or not doing any work or consistently failing to meet self-imposed targets might be too much for any team to bear.

Six-second delay

[An enchanting possibility emerges from recent brain research and the making of mistakes:

‘we can predict the likelihood of someone making an error about six seconds in advance, with gradual changes starting as much as 30 seconds ahead of time’.

The research is reported in The Economist and the article goes on to suggest that people could wear hats that would alert others to the likelihood of them making a mistake. Clearly this relates only to certain types of task, at this stage, but the principle of detecting changing attention patterns could apply more broadly. Imagine the mounting pressure on a chess grandmaster or World Cup penalty-taker or business decision-maker or woman trying to decide whether to dump her bloke. Would a flashing dunce's cap (alerting themselves and others to the impending error) help prevent the error or increase stress levels to a point where a different error was more likely?]

On with the maps. Ludwig used a piece of visual content management software called TheBrain [which for a long time was the rabbit glue holding together your viewing experience here, before it got too clunky] to represent the areas that the project team had been working on rather than the geographic places they had visited. He was on something of a mission, announcing in his soft mid-Atlantic accent (which can make it hard to tell that he’s German until a word with a leading ‘w’ looms into view) that:

‘I no longer want to be the scribe, but if you want me to be the master of TheBrain, I can do that’.

The team never took him up on his offer and he continued to do most of the formal writing for the team, although he largely didn’t record their discussions any longer. In spite of his suggestion that the team used TheBrain to save and display information, they opted to use Central Desktop. With its traditional, hierarchical, information-storage structure, Central Desktop was perhaps not the most creatively useful software tool for them, though it made finding stuff easy and they used it for the next six months. [How much time should you devote at the outset to getting the technology right?]

Joanna (the only Feeler in a team with five other Thinkers according to their recent Myers-Briggs initiation: game and first set to Myers-Briggs) mapped, amongst other things, her feelings – which included hesitation, trepidation and excitement, though Gerard Fairtlough later told me that she seemed to him ‘to be the person who was the strongest’. Her map was on a single sheet of A4 and showed a series of loops (sharing ideas, getting to know each other, etc.) which all turned back on themselves and on each other. She said that the first week had ‘felt like you were planning your big overseas trip; you’d been out and bought your backpack, done your research, and so on’. It was the only thing I ever heard her say that betrayed her Australian origins, though her accent and High Rising Terminal did so in a different way, of course.

[You can listen to a sound file - not of Joanna - here.]

[You can read another account of the maps exercise - yes by Joanna - here.]

Joanna judged that the team was preparing itself before moving. She named ‘severe doubt’ and ‘fear’ amongst her feelings during the week – feelings that, in another context, might have been more fully addressed by the others. Here they were heard and the next map presentation began.

Tom (observing that ‘we have been places emotionally as well as physically’) had all sorts of stuff going on including Paradiso on coat hangers and labels on the spiral staircase and Inferno under the desks. You had to crawl under the desks and lie on the trailing sockets to read the contents of Inferno. Here were to be found:

• Failure
• No fun
• Hell
• Judging
• No hope
• Jealousy
• Blame
• Undeliverables
• Bitterness
• Disloyalty

Gerard Egan and Bill Tate have both written about managing and auditing the shadow side of the organisation – but few others have paid it much attention. (Although, of course, it lurks under every stone in conversations about corporate governance, business ethics and the like.) And here it was, being manifested before my eyes.

I think that every work group, project or process team, department or small business should have its own version of Inferno posted somewhere significant – just to remind themselves of the things they don't get to talk about. The contents should be as specific as possible – not just greed or ambition or lust, but clear examples of these shadowy 'behaviours' in action.

Dilemmas:

Giving permission for team members to get things wrong is the new mantra. But it may not be as simple as it seems. Obviously, there are times when you absolutely need them not to get things wrong. And some mistakes are much more fruitful than others. It’s probably helpful to come up with clear guidelines rather than a blanket permission, but there’s always a trade-off between control and opportunity.

Like teambuilding, or any other form of preparation, time spent getting the right systems and technology in place is - on the face of it - always time well spent. But things change. What if you use mind-mapping software that people don't know well or find well-suited to their needs? What if you adopt a more familiar and easy-to-use file management system but subsequently find that it unduly constrains information-sharing?

Paying attention early on to the 'shadow side' looks like the perfect solution to unspoken fears, tensions and rivalries. If you don't do it, you risk never addressing those issues. Do it, and you risk unsettling team members or replacing one set of unrealistic 'hope beliefs' with another set of 'failure fears'.

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Credits:
Google marker video: Aram Bartholl
Regent's Park photo - Francesco Gasparetti
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