Successful organisations have to encourage their people to ask dangerous questions, learn fast and experiment with their ideas, says Greg Orme
Does anybody think the 2020s is going to be less volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous than the 2010s?
Do you imagine, in the next 10 years, the encroachment of AI on jobs and business models will slow? The unfolding ecological catastrophe will evaporate? The existential threat to the liberal-democratic political consensus will miraculously disappear?
Not likely. If anything, our newly-minted decade looks to be more, not less, disrupted.
The impact of ‘certain uncertainty’ is obvious in my leadership development work with organisations in industries as diverse as automotive, banking, manufacturing, retail, food and beverage, and hospitality. A continuously disrupted world demands almost constant change. To survive, businesses are desperately trying to evolve into agile, resilient and inventive organisations. This is a sea change in the power dynamic between management and staff. Global organisations have spent decades curating cultures in which career success is unlocked by obediently following the rules. Now we need the opposite: employees who are prepared to question the status quo. Ironically, a world of machines is creating a greater demand for human creativity than ever before.
The role of leaders is also being transformed. Psychological research clearly demonstrates you can’t order people to be creative. It just doesn’t work. You have to craft an environment in which people feel sufficiently safe, inspired and engaged to give you their passion, commitment and ideas for free. When it comes to creativity, the employee-employer relationship is a gift economy. I’m often asked by mystified managers: ‘How do you do that?!’ The most crucial first step is for them to look in the mirror. True leaders don’t mandate curiosity and creativity. They model it. Here are four proven behaviours to do that.
1 Ask dangerous questions
The most powerful day-to-day leadership behaviour to catalyse creativity sounds simple: ask more, and better, questions. In theory, asking questions should be easy. In practice, it’s difficult. A boss who asks questions reveals she doesn’t have all the answers. You have to overcome a fear of looking stupid or ill-informed. This is why it’s so crucial that leaders ‘go first’. Their display of audacious humility invites those without power to also probe the status quo. Great questions feel dangerous because you genuinely don’t know the answer. However, when leaders ask questions like: ‘How might we?’ ‘Why do we do it this way?’ What if…?’ and ‘Why Not?’ it opens a world of possibilities in the minds of their team. Just think, what would have happened to infamous corporate failures such as Kodak, Nokia, Xerox, Blockbuster, Yahoo, My Space, Polaroid and Borders if they had developed a culture of persistent questions? Chances are they would have evolved instead of living on as cautionary tales in Business School case studies.
2 Foster Curiosity
In the 2020s, we all need to un-learn and re-learn as swiftly as the world is changing. Curiosity is proven to help you learn more rapidly and effectively. Research shows it’s like a cognitive ‘muscle’. Neglect it, it gets flabby. Exercise makes it bigger and stronger. Of course, curiosity also provides the vital fuel for creative thinking.
We humans catch curiosity like a virus from the people we spend time with. Leaders can kickstart a culture of curiosity by talking publicly about their own self-motivated, personalised learning agenda. Microsoft’s Bill Gates leads the way with his enthusiasm for life-long learning. They can appoint volunteer ‘learning mavens’ who’re recognised for their skill in personal development. They can promote people who encourage curious learning. They can create ‘curiosity badges’ to be displayed on internal digital platforms and LinkedIn profiles. In my new book The Human Edge, I unpack a powerful personal development technique called the ‘Five-Hour Rule’.
This is a way to re-design your working week to liberate an hour each day that’s ring-fenced for reflection and learning. This is a transformational mindset shift, especially for time-poor, harassed executives.
It’s important you learn outside your specialism. Einstein called creativity ‘combinatory play’. He was describing your mind’s magical ability to introduce two previously unacquainted ideas from different domains of knowledge. Take the young computer science students who bought together the way academic papers are ranked through citations with a new-fangled technology called The Internet. The result was a start-up called Google. New thinking happens when ideas jump the fence from one place to another. This is why the animation studio Pixar offers classes on some seemingly crazy subjects. For example, they recommend drawing lessons for finance staff, not because they want accountants to lend a hand with animation, but because it teaches them to be more observant.
3 Experiment relentlessly
New ideas don’t always work out. By definition, being creative risks failure. This is anathema to most organisations whatever their upbeat public pronouncements to the contrary. However, there is a way to smuggle creative risk-taking into organisations by the back door: experimentation. Experiments are small scale and action-based. The objective is to question the world, then create a relatively risk-free route to test your assumptions about a new idea. The art is to deploy the smallest possible amount of time, money and effort to learn the most about what works – and what doesn’t. This way of thinking is summed up by the slogan: ‘Think Big, Start Small, Learn Fast!’. Experiments don’t need to be complicated. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos encourages staff to validate their ideas by simply writing a press release. The release is composed for the first internal discussion of the product rather than, as it is normally is, just prior to launch. The goal is to see the new idea through the eyes of a customer before cash is consumed by months of expensive development and marketing.
4 Make purpose practical
Developing an organisational ‘purpose-beyond-profit’ to encourage risk-taking and innovation has been around for years. However, recent advances in neuroscience prove meaning isn’t just about motivation, it’s built into human biology. When employees are encouraged to be curious, experimental learners at work it releases a neurotransmitter in their brains called Dopamine. This ‘Motivation Molecule’ boosts drive, concentration and, you guessed it, creativity.
The key to unleashing Dopamine in an entire culture means decisively shifting the concept of organisational purpose away from fluffy platitudes and towards something much more tangible. Think about the psychology of recommending a Netflix TV series to a friend. Even if they believe it’s probably entertaining, they won’t recommend it to their friends until they’ve actually watched it for themselves. It’s the same with purpose. It’s not sufficient to ‘recommend’ purpose with an avalanche of inspirational speeches and over-designed PowerPoint slides. People need to experience their impact first-hand. Research into charity fundraisers and restaurant chefs demonstrates that people who actually meet their customers face-to-face are exponentially more motivated than those who don’t. Leaders need to engineer such meetings. Meaning is not rational, or logical. Emotion is only triggered when you connect directly with a fellow human being you have helped.
Successful organisations now have to encourage their people to ask dangerous questions, learn fast, experiment with their ideas – and feel the emotion of their work on a deeply human level. I predict those that succeed in building these into their culture will surf, rather than sink, in the disruptive waves of the 2020s.
By Greg Orme, author of ‘The Human Edge, how curiosity and creativity are your superpowers in the digital economy’ (Pearson, 2019)
