Play is the highest form of research. Albert Einstein

When was the last time you played at work?  When was the last time you spent your workday having fun?  More importantly, if you are a leader, when was the last time you encouraged your employees to play?  If you are having trouble remembering, then you may want to give it a try because fun, play, and playmates are critical ingredients for generating creativity and innovation.

As Tim Brown, CEO of design firm IDEO, asserts, playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions.  When leaders establish an environment of trust where people feel secure enough to be vulnerable, employees will feel secure enough to explore something new, take risks and play.

This is not only critical in jobs where creativity is a primary focus, such as design jobs, it also is increasingly important in any job requiring continuous improvement, operational efficiency or collaborative problem-solving.  And the last time I checked, most jobs in the American economy fit this bill.

When play is connected to an employee’s organizational tasks it facilitates the cognitive, affective and motivational dimensions of the creative process.  But even when play is only a diversion, it fosters the important social dynamics that encourage creativity in the first place.  In other words, play helps people develop relationship skills that take them from their own individual points of view to creative and collaborative solutions.

The importance of this social component to creativity was highlighted recently by Adam Grant of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Jim Berry of the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  In a study appearing in the forthcoming Academy of Management Journal, they share that “managers who are interested in fueling creativity will find it advantageous to create conditions that support prosocial motivation and perspective-taking.”

Prosocial motivation is the desire to have a positive impact on others.  Perspective-taking is the ability to understand the emotions and experience of others, and when that interest in understanding others is driven by a desire to make a positive impact, employees develop ideas that are useful as well as novel.

Play helps us understand and empathize with one another, and that in turn, improves our ability to see the world through another’s eyes, or role play.   And as Tim Brown points out, our ability to role play helps us have empathy for what we are designing or improving.  It helps us create services and experiences that are authentic.  Play helps us think creatively about the perspectives of others and identify new, more effective strategies for helping them.

So, Ideo’s founder, David Kelley, is on to something when he said he wanted to work in a company where “all the employees are my best friends.”  Friendship is a shortcut to fun and play.  And our ability to play improves our ability to relate, connect, understand, and trust that we can take the creative risks needed to innovate and change.

Nobody likes to fail.  We think failure is the opposite of success.  In organization life, failure is unacceptable.  It demands action.  It requires a response.  It gets you fired.  It is better to maintain the status quo and achieve mediocre results than to take a risk and fail.

Unless you are an effective change leader.

If you are an effective change leader, failure is a part of the process of achieving success.  Failure is data.  It’s information that helps you understand more about what it will take, or not take, to create a successful outcome.  It’s a sign that it’s time to make a change.

Get low scores on stakeholder satisfaction surveys?  Maybe it’s time to do a needs analysis or review design specifications.

Continuing to miss project deadlines?  Maybe it’s time to rework the project plan or assess whether you have the right resources.

Project teams not performing?  Maybe it’s time to learn what makes each individual tick or adjust your management style to be more effective.

Failing again and again?  Maybe it’s time to understand the root causes and systemic challenges (rather than continuing to treat problems with band-aids).

Change agents, innovators, entrepreneurs, R&D professionals, athletes and high achievers of every kind see failure as part of the continuous process of improving.  Failure is the feedback we need to adapt our efforts in the direction of our objective.

If you are a change leader who cares about success, then you may want to rethink your response to failure.  Instead of irritation, try curiosity.  Instead of hiding it, highlight it.  Instead of scolding those who fail, embrace them and have them share what they learned.

Failure is achievement because it shows we are reaching for something far beyond our immediate capability.  Even when we falter, we learn, grow and are strengthened for the challenge ahead.

Dave Berzack loves his career.  Check out his website, www.daveberzack.com, and you will see more evidence of the passion, and talent, he has for his chosen profession.  (Shout out to Dan Schawbel for pointing me to this video.)

Droppin science (here’s the secret) for live (for a great) 9 to 5 (career):  It’s about finding your passion.

Said in geeky consultant language:  The key to high levels of performance and achievement is aligning your work with your sources of intrinsic motivation . . . It’s about finding your passion!

When you can get out of bed every morning with the same spirit and sense of fun that Dave shows, you have found your bliss.  And bliss leads to the biggest career reward of all:  satisfaction.  If your goal is to make millions of dollars, well, success will depend upon your career choice, your effort and a bit of luck.  But if your definition of success is to have a sense of purpose and meaning,  to thrive and to have a consistent source of satisfaction, then build your work around what you love.

A young student from my alma mater called me a few months ago to learn more about the consulting profession.  He did a nice job of providing a verbal resume outlining his well-chosen major, his proper corporate summer internship and the reasons why that prepared him for an entry level job in consulting.  Based upon the facts alone, he was a good candidate for a job in the field.  Based upon the level of excitement in his voice, however, I was compelled to ask another question.

“What do you do for fun?”

He responded by saying, “Since I was a little kid I’ve played hockey.”  And for the next ten minutes told me about playing in hockey leagues four seasons every year, reffing for younger leagues when he was in high school and during the summer, coaching hockey at summer camps and meeting his favorite players at various events.  His tone was entirely different.  You could hear the smile in his voice.

“What are you doing with that?”  I asked.  Silence.

Not everyone can be a professional hockey player.  Not everyone can get a job in the hockey industry on a team, a league office, or an equipment manufacturer.  Although the more we talked, the more he discovered his options were much greater than the “conventional” jobs found in the college placement office.  He realized there were countless careers in the hockey world that were not just about playing.

More importantly, the more we talked, the more he realized there were aspects about hockey that could be translated to other potential career choices.  He enjoyed the camaraderie.  He enjoyed the competition, but he really valued the learning and growing and hard work, whether winning or not.  He also really enjoyed the teaching and development of others when reffing and coaching.

We didn’t have to talk any more about consulting.  He was fired up to listen to his heart and think about options that were more closely aligned with his innate talents, interests and joy.  He may yet end up in consulting, but if he does, it will be when he discovers it is the best place to live his purpose.

Oh, yeah, and by the way . . . If you are on the other end of this and looking for the job candidates who are going to knock your socks off, remember that no matter how killa the resume, you have to listen to the heart of the candidate.  It’s the employees who work from a sense of purpose and passion that will always, always kick it.

Ethan Zuckerman is the senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and he studies how the world uses new media to share information and moods across cultures, languages and platforms.  In this talk he identifies a troubling challenge:  While the internet connects the globe, most of us only listen to people just like ourselves.

“The world is, in fact, getting more global.  It’s getting more connected.  More of our problems are global in scale.  More of our economics is global in scale.  And our media is less global by the day.”

Our technological connectivity isn’t helping us understand the world.  It’s helping us become more myopic.  And at a time when the real problems of the world are global in scale and scope, we need to broaden our perspective and our sources of information.

That’s an effective practice even if our “world” is our own smaller workplace and community.  Our ability to solve problems, to innovate and to build sustainable businesses, ecosystems and societies, is entirely dependent upon recognizing our interconnectedness.

Just as there are parts of the world are dark spots in terms of attention, there are parts of our smaller world that are blind spots for us. Our ability to learn and understand these dark spots and to discover how they are vital to us, depends not only on the recommendations of guides, but on our desire to seek to understand the full “width and wonder of the world.”

Listening to global voices requires rewiring our own data gathering systems and taking the time to translate, understand and embrace the richness outside our perspective.

Derek Sivers, the founder and former president of CD Baby, shows in this funny and revealing video that while a leader gets things started, it’s the courageous follower that transforms the “lone nut” into a leader.  It’s the follower’s choice to follow and encourage others to follow that makes the difference between an isolated incident and a trend.  New followers follow the follower as much as, if not more than, the leader.

So, what does this mean if you are the leader?  And what does it mean even if your leadership role doesn’t require that you are a trend-setting innovator?

1. Stay true to your convictions.  It’s your strength and commitment that sets you apart and captures the attention of those around you.  It may take time for your ideas to catch on, but keep at it.
2. Embrace and nurture your followers.  Show abundant appreciation for those with the guts to walk away from the safety of the tried and true to follow you.  And then . . .
3. Collaborate.  Make it about the movement, not you.  Make your followers co-conspirators.  Give them space to shine.

If you really want to create something special—whether you are the leader, an early stage follower, or part of the in-crowd—be courageous.  Step up, show the way and know that your fearless example teaches and inspires.

How to love.  How to live.  How to fix anything.  How to lose weight.  How to stop worrying.  How to find your passion.  How to train your dog, bird, cat or dragon.  How to make money.  How to get into college.  How to stay in college.  How to interview.  How to get a job.  How to get a good paying job.  How to start a business.  How to sell.  How to manage projects.  How to manage time.  How to set goals.  How to influence people.  How to negotiate anything with anybody.  How to teach.  How to train.  How to write.  How to retire.  How to survive the end of the world.

We live in a “How-To” world.  A quick search of “How To” in Amazon.com yields over 300,000 books with the phrase in the title.  The popular For Dummies series has over 1700 titles and the Idiot’s Guide series has nearly as many.  And take a look at your local newsstand and you’ll see magazine covers littered with articles telling you the 5 things you must know, the 3 insider secrets that will guarantee success, or the 7 steps to improved performance.

We love quick solutions that are easy to identify and implement.  It is comforting to think that the answer to all of our problems—with romance, with money, with business—can be provided with a few simple action steps or the application of a “best practice.”

We know through our own experience, however, that the How-To’s don’t always solve the problem because they rarely have the depth required to affect our particular situations.  The quick fix might get us part of the way there or solve the problem momentarily, but inevitably we revisit the same issue again and again looking for another band aid to stop the bleeding.

Here’s the deal . . . Managing change well is not about a quick fix.  It’s about a mindset.  It’s not about a multitasking shortcut or a cell phone app.  It’s about consistently applying the disciplines of listening, understanding, adapting, learning, changing, creating, inventing, and engaging.

So, go ahead and stock up on the tools, templates, technologies and How-To manuals.  They will help you get started and be a reference when you get stuck.  But then, let go.  Roll up your sleeves, dig a little deeper, let your mind take flight, color outside of the lines, play, innovate and have fun with the real, collaborative work required to create sustainable change.

It’s simple, really.  Most “modern” corporations kill human capability the way we strip-mine and deplete the earth of natural resources.

Think about it.  We hire bright, ambitious, enthusiastic young people fresh out of the hope and idealism of school.  We stick them in cubicles under fluorescent lights away from windows so they can’t tell whether it’s day or night, sunny or rainy.  We tell them to dress a certain way, show up at a certain time, eat at a certain time, and stay late enough to make a good impression.  We encourage them to not express emotion, talk with the right jargon and tone, write with a particular style and embrace certain values and principles and mission statements.  And we force them to comply with standardized procedures, criticize their shortcomings when they fail to do so, and threaten their security if they get too far out of line.

It sounds a bit like the way cults program people, doesn’t it?  In fact, it’s not too far from the truth.  Cults program people to be silent, loyal, endure pain (to be “strong”), to do the jobs they’ve been assigned and to subscribe to the spiritual values of the group.

I’m not saying that corporations are cults . . . not really . . . I’m saying that the traditional structures of managerial control are designed for compliance and to produce performance within a steady, predictable, average range.

And that’s not good enough anymore.

While it’s cliché, the world is changing too fast, too dynamically, too organically, too symbiotically.  The old linear, command and control, carrot and stick model may work when you want compliance to routine tasks.  If, on the other hand, you want innovation, creativity and high performance, this doesn’t work.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson argues that we don’t get the best out of people because we educate them to become good workers, rather than to be creative thinkers.  Sir Ken led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements.

Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says.

We can apply the same thinking to the way we manage people in organization life.  Take performance appraisal, for example.  The primary HR methodology pushed on organizations over the last 40 years is a standardized, “fast food” model.  It’s built around standard ratings as well as standard competencies or goals or some other check list for evaluation.  It’s meant to be batch processed once or twice per year and rolled up to higher executive, finance or HR authorities for approval.  The expectation is that our staff will fit a normalized distribution curve and that we won’t have too many people that exceed expectations.  This way the compensation distribution will fit the budget.

What’s the point of that approach?  Certainly not developing people.

To create an environment where people can reach their highest potential, you need the “Zagat or Michelin” approach where development, motivation, and engagement are “customized to local circumstances.”  In other words, talent is incredibly diverse even within the same department or function.  People have different aptitudes, passions and motivation.  To help them apply their unique gifts to their jobs, we have to tailor our approach and create the conditions where they will begin to thrive.

Instead of separating people from their natural talents so they can fit a standardized mode, we have to help them identify and connect those talents to the ways they can contribute.  Developing human potential is not a mechanical process.  It’s an organic process that requires customizing to your circumstances and personalizing our approach to managing to people we are managing.

We can’t do that simply by installing a new technology, rating methodology or competency model.  We do this by developing the ability of organization leaders to listen and identify the talents of employees, and to help them apply their gifts in unique and remarkable ways.

Sorry I’ve been away from blogging for a few weeks.  It has been a busy time and writing, unfortunately, has taken a back seat.  The upside to my absence is that the work I have been doing has provided an abundance of ideas and material to share, particularly with regard to innovation.  It continues to be a hot topic among companies waking from their economic slumber and looking for ways to reinvigorate their business.   

In my previous post, I left you with the thought that while innovation is a critical policy area for our national agenda, there was much that individual managers could do to foster innovation right now, at the micro level in our organizations.  Before I share those ideas, however, I think it is important to define it. 

Innovation, creativity, experimentation and invention are words that often are used interchangeably, but for our purposes—and those of scholars studying the subject—they are defined distinctly.  

• Creativity is the ability to think and act in ways that are new and different. 
• Experimentation is the process by which people become creative.
• Invention is the process of creating something that did not exist before. 
• Innovation is the process of thinking creatively about something that already exists. 

Innovation is about applying creativity for the purpose of improvement.  It may refer to an incremental change, or it may refer to a radical or transformational change.  In business, innovation also implies that the change has increased value.  It’s not change for change’s sake.  It’s purposeful change. 

Based upon these definitions, two things must be present for innovation to occur:  creativity and experimentation.  They are the seeds of innovation.  As a result, to foster an environment that generates innovation, a manager has to: 

• Allow the new and different,
• Allow experimentation and failure.

Unfortunately, most organizations, especially those defined by command and control cultures, don’t like the new and different.  It represents risk.  And they definitely don’t like failure. 

These organizations also are defined by a right-sized, Ready-Fire-Aim mentality where speed is valued over effectiveness.  Action is rewarded, thought of as practical and efficient, and the mantra of many corporate leaders is, “It’s better to keep pushing forward than to get caught up in analysis paralysis.”  

For these organizations, innovation is about applying the latest “best practice” whether or not it makes sense.  “It must be right if others are doing it.”  These organizations are marked by multiple change initiatives happening simultaneously:  technologies du jour; Six Sigma; BPM; restructuring; online leadership training; and an abundance of HR tools.  Before a new project is completed another appears.  There is little focus, little consistency and little follow through. 

Solution.  Solution.  Solution. 

Whenever I encounter one of these organizations—and I do all too often—I can’t help but think of one of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein:  “If I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.”  Most organizations spend 60 minutes of their time finding solutions to problems that just don’t matter. 

So, in addition to creativity and experimentation, a culture that encourages innovation also must be skilled at surfacing, identifying and prioritizing challenges.  It requires listening.  It requires space. 

You can’t innovate if you are always in Fire-Fire-Fire mode (double entendre intended!).  

“The greatest scientists are artists as well,” said Einstein, who in addition to being one of the greatest physicists of all time was also an exceptional pianist and violinst.  For Einstein, insight did not come from logic or mathematics.  It came, as it does for artists, from intuition and inspiration.   

He once told a friend, “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge.” Elaborating, he added, “All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge.”    

It’s curious, isn’t it, that school performance has declined at the same time as academic intensity, homework and testing have increased, and at the same time the arts have been dropped from school programs. 

Google gets this.  They created 20 percent time to enable engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t necessarily part of their job descriptions.  They can use the time to develop something new, or fix something that’s broken.  

Best Buy gets this, too.  An employee-led movement toward results-only metrics has transformed their culture.  The nation’s leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical–if risky–experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for “results-only work environment,” seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours. 

What can managers do to foster innovation? 

Allow the new and different.  Let employees experiment.  Create time, space and autonomy to listen, learn and think.  

Innovative companies, innovative schools, innovative lives are not about more work.  They about more fun.

 

Innovation is a hot topic in the United States, especially now as we search for ways of igniting our economic engines.  From business publications to the main stream press, legions of voices are elevating the attention brought to the subject.   

Based upon the research, it’s clear that innovation is a requirement of healthy, vibrant, growing economies and businesses.  The challenge, however, is how to create an environment that allows it to thrive.   

The fact is that innovation creates mixed feelings.  Looking back, the great innovators are heroic. We put their faces on magazine covers, write books about them, and build statues in their honor.  We salute the visionaries of yesteryear because they stood fast in the face of naysayers and adversity and courageously marched forward to make their dreams real.  Innovators change the world. 

But in the present, what do we do with these unique individuals?  We brand them as irritating malcontents.  They are the reckless idealists who simply won’t be quiet and play by the rules.  They are not team players.  They don’t show much corporate promise because even when all is well with the status quo, they are tinkering with the system.  They are never defined as high potential.

How many of you would hire Thomas Edison or Bill Gates or Steven Jobs or Fred Smith?   Not until Joseph Juran and Edwards Deming created success in the upstart, post war nation of Japan did their ideas catch on back home.  And before Walt Disney created the world’s first media conglomerate, he faced rejection from the Hollywood mainstream that thought Mickey Mouse would never appeal to the public. 

What’s interesting, however, is that no matter how we marginalize innovators, they keep reappearing.  They are persistent, resilient, and unfazed, if not motivated, by those who count them out. 

That’s not just a warning.  It’s an expression of gratitude that should be a strong call to action. 

More than ever, we need innovators to reappear in our businesses, our schools and our nation.  For years, the United States was the world’s dominant innovator.  But as we begin the second decade of the 21^st Century, we can no longer rest on our laurels.  Here are a few facts: 

• Research by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation reported that out of the 40 countries and regions it examined, the U.S. ranked dead last in innovation.
• In 2009, patents issued to American applicants dropped by 2.3 percent. Those granted to foreign-based applicants increased by over 6 percent.
• The WEF ranks the United States third for corporate invest­ments in R&D when relying on its opinion survey, but in comparing 37 nations in corporate R&D spending as a percent of GDP, the United States ranks fifth2 and ranks even worse, 17th, in terms of growth in corporate R&D investment.
• Until 1979, around 50 percent of all research and development funds were provided by the federal government. That number has fallen to 27 percent. And, during the 1990s, the bottom fell out of U.S. funding for applied science, dropping by 40 percent.
• The United States is ranked 29th of 34 in percent growth of scientific researchers in the last decade.
• United States falls behind in several relevant indicators such as:  11th in broadband leadership, 36^th in corporate tax, 32^nd in foreign direct investment (FDI), 32^nd in trade balance, 9^th in higher education, and 5^th in productivi­ty.
• The United States no longer ranks first in venture capi­tal as a share of GDP, but fifth among 37 nations.
• America once led the world in high school graduation rates. We are now ranked 18th out of 24 industrialized countries.
• And the percentage of 15-year-olds performing at the highest levels of math is among the lowest. South Korea, Belgium and the Czech Republic, among others, have at least five times the number the U.S. does.
• Over the past decade, lit­eracy among college graduates has actually declined.  In fact, among recent graduates of four-year colleges, just 34, 38 and 40 percent were proficient in prose, doc­ument, and quantitative literacy, respectively.

We need to get serious about innovation.  There is no doubt that it’s a critical item for our national agenda, but there is much to be done at the ground level, too.  We need to create work environments that allow innovators to thrive.  In part, that’s about recognizing the Joy of Failure.  More importantly, it’s about some simple, yet powerful, changes we can make in the way we manage and engage the people in our organizations.

More on this in my next post . . .