leadership

One point that group development theory (discussed in stages of the group) largely ignores is the possibility of dispensing with a leader or, at least, dispensing with a permanent leader. In the Red Stripe team, as in many others, it would have been possible to rotate the position of team leader weekly or monthly, either randomly or by election. The team could also have elected its leader (perhaps after the first month when things had settled down a bit and people had got a good sense of each other’s strengths and skills and personalities). I think this would have required Mike not to stand for election, otherwise he would almost inevitably have been confirmed in his role, both because of his senior status in the Economist Group and because it would be a perceived slap in the face to vote for someone else.


When he talked to me about this point at the end of the six months, Mike observed that ‘there were more people that wanted to be led, rather than lead.’ But isn’t that normally the case? As Gerard Fairtlough might say, that’s what the ‘

hegemony of hierarchy’ does for you.

When I asked Javier, the team coach, about this team leader issue, he noted that the team inevitably brought with them the impression of The Economist Group’s organisational structure and their status within it. (I couldn’t help thinking of the expression: ‘bears the impression of the last arse that sat on it…). For the project founder and champion (and CIO) to have been anything other than the team leader would have been ‘cosmetic’ and the natural order would have reasserted itself when the team found itself under pressure, said Javier. And, as for having no leader, he felt that one was needed to move the team forwards in order to meet its deadlines.

I mention this issue because it’s now widely accepted that organisations should be flatter and less hierarchical, that power should be diffused and devolved and more networked, if they are to be able to respond fast enough to the pressure for continuous change and improvement. In all that has been written about the deficiencies of command-and-control driven organisational structures, there is a clear sense that self-organising teams or workgroups operate best when they use heterarchical or co-operative or 'female' modes of operation. These can include:

• Consensual decision-making rather than ‘orders’ imposed from above
• Job roles and tasks within the group being rotated or changed to meet current requirements
• Persuasion and engagement replacing the wielding of power and authority
• The selection of leader(s) by the team, rather than having them imposed.

Javier may be right that ‘the natural order’ would have reasserted itself under pressure. Arie de Geus says something similar when he talks about the reality of decentralisation and empowerment:

Few dare to risk the accompanying loss of control. Most of those who dare
will show their fears in a crisis. They will recentralise quickly, pulling power
back into the centre and into the top. After all, beneath the rhetoric about
empowerment, most managers trust themselves infinitely more than they trust
anybody else.

But Arie’s aspirational conclusion is rather different:

To behave with ecological concern often requires a leap of faith: you will
be better protected by harmony and flocking than by territoriality and force of
will.

Dilemmas

Electing and/or rotating the team leader is ‘fairer’, more democratic and likely to bring a wider range of different talents to the task. But it’s also likely to be inefficient at times and may be no more than window dressing.

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Credits:

Ducks: Pedro Simões
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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?

thunderbirds are go

Stewart: ‘We were going to decorate the room ourselves but we couldn’t be bothered.’

7th February

The room is almost square. White. With an alcove for filing drawers and two stacking boxes that don’t stack. They stand lopsided, empty.

Two tables are pushed together to make one and stand against the wall where the window is. The window goes from floor to ceiling, with a white blind pulled half way down. On the opposite wall is a large white screen showing the contents of Stewart’s laptop screen.

In the far corner is a white spiral staircase going heavenward. Coats hang from the staircase. To begin with the team can retreat in ones and twos up the staircase to a another meeting room but, later, this is reappropriated by the agency.

There is just about room to walk round the tables when people are sitting down without asking them to pull their chairs in. On the tables are six laptops (occasionally more), later on most with a separate mouse and full-size keyboard in front of them and, later on still, most propped up on silver laptop stands. A tangle of cables and leads run over the tables and down through round holes to socket extension on the floor. Morning and evening consist of the ritual plugging and unplugging of these leads and accessories and some scrambling on the floor.

Each team member has a separate locking drawer in which they can leave their valuables and (if necessary) their laptop. Later this system fails when Ludwig locks his drawer without realising that Tom’s laptop is in it and leaves for a long weekend in Berlin. It fails again when Steven loses his key and has to force the drawer. Some unhappiness ensues on each occasion.

At the same end of the room as the door the webcam offers a soundless, always-on vision of the room and its contents. On my computer at home, where I check the webcam periodically to see if a fight or other act of unexpected intimacy has erupted, the picture updates approximately twice a second with the result that the team members move with the same supermarionated rhythm as the cast of Thunderbirds.

By mid-February the room has assumed a slightly different configuration and will more or less stay this way until the end. The tables are now pushed into the centre of the room, so people can sit on all four sides of the oblong that they create. The blind tends to be up and, as summer approaches, the window is usually open. The screen has been raised and there are now two whiteboards on the wall, which are occasionally covered in idea clouds, target dates and to-do lists. On February 26th it had a list showing everyone’s mobile phone number. Intuitively, that didn’t seem like the easiest way to communicate the information. On reflection, it probably was.

The door to the room slams shut whenever someone enters or leaves the office. The room shudders slightly and everyone is jolted. By the time of my last visit in July the team are perfecting a device invented by Joanna. It involves folding a piece of cardboard and inserting it into the gap between the door frame and the hinged side of the door, which serves to slow down the speed with which the door closes and reduce the slam to a gentle pffftt.

Wall decorations are almost non-existent. One or two pieces of fruit and a packet of biscuits occasionally decorate the centre of the table. There is no other concession to homeliness.

The drone of central London traffic (average daytime traffic speed 6.1 mph/9.76 kph), punctuated by the wail of regular post-war-on-terror-and-current-war-on-gun-crime sirens, intrudes, as does the squeal and hiss of air brakes. Otherwise the outside world is largely excluded.

----------------------------------

As Richard Ogle and Suw Charman-Anderson, in particular, have observed, this kind of insulation isn’t obviously the best way to foster innovation:

If you don’t experience the problem you are solving, you are unlikely to
solve it in an innovative way. Locking six people up in a room for six months
with £100,000 isn’t giving them much of an opportunity to experience problems.

And again:

…cognitive scientists, researchers in artificial intelligence, psychologists,
and philosophers have begun to talk about how the mind extends out into the
world. This revolutionary expansion of the traditional concept of mind directly
challenges our belief in the individual mind’s internal self-sufficiency.

We are coming to understand that in making sense of the world, acting
intelligently, and solving problems creatively, we do not rely solely on our
mind’s internal resources. Instead, we constantly have recourse to a vast array
of culturally and socially embodied idea-spaces that populate the extended mind.
These spaces – manifested in forms as various as myths, business models,
scientific paradigms, social conventions, practices, institutions, and even
computer chips – are rich with embedded intelligence that we have progressively
offloaded into our physical, social, and cultural environment for the sake of
simplifying the burden on our own minds of rendering the world intelligible.
Sometimes the space of ideas thinks for us. We live in a smart world.

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That said, there’s the small question of those six eyes on the world provided by the team’s propped-up laptops. We tend to forget, even though we chant the truism as a mantra, that the Internet has changed the way we see the world. Six people checking the blogs of some of the cleverest minds on the planet, inviting the bright ideas of many more, reading and researching as they go, saving and sharing their discoveries via Delicious and, eventually and inevitably, having lunch with their would-be clients and users are less insulated in many ways than any human beings at any time in history.

Incidentally, they also had the fine minds of Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO (who had lent them their office) along the corridor. In February the team had watched the new BBC2 idents (designed by the agency and launched that month) and Steven had told me that there were plenty of people in the agency who could be very useful to them. Though they used Clare Hutchinson, one of the agency’s account planners, to facilitate an early brainstorming session, they didn’t otherwise draw on this resource.



The World Wide Web is an idea-space par excellence, though it’s perhaps less effective as a mind-space. Most of the team members felt they thought more widely and creatively when they were out of the office and an ideas session in Regent’s Park was often quoted as a particular instantiation of that. Mike said in March, ‘We need to do something that gets people into a different place. I mean out of the office; where we can be creative.’ At the same time Steven said ‘Yes, everyone agrees that this room is pretty dingy. We’re going to try and get out into the park more once the weather’s better.’ But, once the weather got better, there was never really time. So they didn’t.

Moving around does seem like a good idea. And/or working in a balmier climate, where you can be outside more. There’s even some science behind this now. Nicholas Humphrey asserts that, ‘sensations are not things that happen to us, they are things we do’. So sensation ‘is on the production side of the brain rather than the reception side’. Clearly, having good ideas also occurs on the ‘production side’. If this means anything, and it may not, it means that our thinking is more likely to be closely involved with what we are sensing than one might at first imagine. In which case, we perhaps need to be aware of environmental changes that lead to us sensing differently – or ‘doing’ different sensations – so that we can encourage ourselves to do different thoughts.

Worried by their feeling stuck, partly because they were constantly together in the same room, Javier (who observes that, ‘when stuck, teams go into intellectualising mode’) had invited two of them to go away and come up with ideas for how the team should work for the next four months – practical ideas about where to work, how and when. ‘Can I suggest you actually propose a solution, not just present ideas to talk about?’, Javier had said. So Tom and Ludwig had come back with a:

‘Fresh Air Straw Man’:

Beliefs:
- we need to put some air into the team so we won’t kill each other at some point
- our work will become more modular after we have taken a decision which idea to implement
- we can work in smaller teams and don’t need to be in one room all the time
- we need only two days a week during which we all have to be in the office (decision days)
- we can use webcams and voice to stay in contact
- we need a tool and a process to allow for efficient planning

Intentions:
- create a planning system which allows the team to work efficiently without having to be in the same room
- in other words: make sure that team “explodes” when it doesn’t need to be together

Promises:
- have no more than 4 people in the office, except on “decision days”
- don’t work from own home all three non-decision days
- try to work in other team members’ home spaces
- try not to be offline for more than half an hour
- try to work in more inspirational places

Actions:
- clear this with group
- purchase head sets and web cams for all of us
- identify spaces to work in (Starbucks, museums, homes, parks with wifi coverage, etc…)
- find a good online planning tool
- get smaller desks and re-arrange the room
- organise trip to Berlin

They’d discussed it. But hadn’t reached any agreement. Their internal blog said just that: ‘We disagreed on how to work.’

Dilemmas:

Stay in or go out?

Stay together or move apart?

Prioritise intellect or prioritise context/ecology?

Zoom in or zoom out?

If the answer is always ‘both’, how do you decide when to do which?


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Credits:

Webcam stills: Midas Oracle

BBC2 Ident: Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO and Red Bee Media, hosted on tvradiobits.

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success

Tom's Inferno reflects many of the definitions of failure that the team had identified during a separate exercise. In the idea cloud buzzing around 'success' I saw:

Launch ~ work as a team ~ Red Stripe 2.0 ~ 100,000 users ~ confidence ~ GMC (Group Management Committee) happy ~ make money ~ gain respect ~ healthy ~ do it in six months ~ being hired permanently by Red Stripe ~ learning ~ making something cool

And around 'failure':

No product ~ fighting ~ getting fired ~ leaving the team ~ GMC don't like it ~ goes bust ~ egg on face ~ boring ~ incremental ~ old business model ~ shame

At the end of March Javier, the team coach, asked them each what success would look like.

Tom: 'Success would look like a really, really, really great website which kicked ass and set me up with doing something at The Economist or fun elsewhere. A kickass website.'

Mike: 'getting the green light from The Economist to do whatever we want to do.'

Steven: 'To have created something innovative, new, where peers and colleagues stood up and took notice... something that we'd get recognised for.'

Joanna: 'A thing, most likely a website, that impressed internally because whilst appearing to be something seemingly simple (we only have 6 months) it was clear it had significant future potential for The Economist Group, whilst paradoxically outsiders might see it as a fairly small development, unaware of its potential.'

Ludwig: ' Something fun to implement where people say "wow", that gets recognition. Something that's useful to the target group and useful to The Economist Group, that guarantees Project Red Stripe is not just a one-off.'

Stewart: 'Something I'm a serious part of.'

As always, recognition, visibility and making an impression were important for them. And why not? Why come up with an idea that nobody rated? But important to notice that one person's success is getting somewhere, another's is being recognised for it and a third's is being involved along the way.

Clearly, by their own definitions, Project Red Stripe failed. But what if the definitions were wrong in the first place? As Scott Anthony says in a thoughtful piece:

The Economist actually got exactly what it asked for: an innovative idea
that was ready to launch quickly. Had it been clearer up front that a critical
success factor was the ability to generate some kind of economic return, it is
possible that the Red Stripe team would have developed a vastly different
idea.

And that's exactly right. In the weeks they spent developing first the idea known as Bavaria (relating to universal primary education) and then Lughenjo (a broader, philanthropic, not-for-profit) the team were deliberately turning away from commercial innovations. Let The Economist Group, they said, make its next reputation as a doer-of-good and the core business can only benefit. They had come up with a radical innovation in a complete departure from the company's publishing past. They had a product in their sights but moved away from it in large part because of the reaction from the Group Management Committee (GMC).

Nothing they came up with was boring or incremental. Clearly, for the team members individually, the six-month stint was an extraordinary learning opportunity, which they took every advantage of. For The Economist the lessons and opportunities potentially emerging from the project are huge (there's more on this in the practical visionary). As Scott Anthony goes on to say:

Who knows? Perhaps The Economist will learn enough from its failures that
its next autonomous effort will have clearer directions and will follow a more
iterative path. Then Red Stripe will be hailed as a critical learning moment...

And, besides all that, if it is classified as a failure - and we do have a seeming appetite to classify things somehow - Professor Amabile, whom we meet in the last fart of the ferret, says that, 'if people do not perceive any "failure value" for projects that ultimately do not achieve commercial success, they'll become less and less likely to experiment, explore and connect with their work on a personal level. Their intrinsic motivation will evaporate.'

Dilemmas:

Almost everyone writing about creativity and innovation would agree on the importance of allowing, and attaching value to, failure. It's where the greatest learning takes place. But, if you have a one-off project like this and it fails it's almost by definition impossible to be pleased about that: personal learning may thrive on failure; innovation teams don't. So what is your position on failure honestly going to be?

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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