Spark Innovation
Over the weekend I was at a friend’s birthday party. I had an interesting conversation with one of the guests about a young manager. The manager is openly blaming team members for lost deals, mistakes and smilingly stupid questions. As a result, everybody in the team is doing only the minimum required to keep the job. This manager is clearly not doing his job: increasing performance of his team.
Questions over questions
But how can a manager access the vast resources hidden away in the heads of his employees to create innovations? This question I was asking myself since a while now. I have a hunch that this is one of the most important questions any leader interested in building a sustainable business ought to ask. “The quality of your life depends on the quality of questions you ask,” it’s a inspiring quite. I’m a bit obsessed with asking questions and of course finding the answers to one questions leads to many more.
Ask the question out loud
It’s one thing to ask a question in my head and another to ask a person question out loud. The fear of appearing stupid or unknowledgeable in front of somebody else results often not asking a question at all. Even when if the internal voice is screaming it won’t come out. In a relaxed social setting, with people you trust this is happening seldom to never. Maybe we hold back because we don’t want to emotionally hurt someone. In the business context we more careful to the point where sometimes we regret not have raised the question. We need to push ourselves to ask questions to clarify situations in certain settings. We often fear the negative consequences. The fear that relationships will break because we are asking a stupid questions is lingering in our heads.
Stupid questions
Now everybody has heard that there is no such thing as a stupid questions. Well, in a parallel universe this might be true. In the world we live in this depends heavily on the context.
We are conditioned by our schooling and the media we consume that it is normal to be blamed for failures. There is no single day where some people publicly humiliate somebody else for a mistake they made. I also experienced this in my professional life where people seem to invest more energy to point out shortcomings of others than focusing on creating value themselves. It’s definitely easier to criticise somebody else other than yourself and it requires less energy to reason why a project will fail than imagining a future where it will succeed. In negative environments I was often reluctant to speak up.
We only learn from mistakes
If you want people to speak up honestly, you need to create an environment where people don’t fear opening up and asking questions. You need to protect employees in order to spark creativity. Encourage people to tinker, prototype and share ideas and work early in a trustful environment. The first prototype or piece of content usually sucks. It’s important to get feedback early on in order to make it better. Humans don’t learn from similarities, we learn from differences. We only learn from mistakes. Now, time is money as we all know. So failing fast is the right thing to do if you want to create innovations as a business. Teams which are able to create fearless environments will create successful innovations. They will attract talent which will build successful products. They will secure future growth. As Peter Drucker put it:” Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” With this in mind go off and create your failing-fast-learning-fast lab that will lead to value.
Check out the short video of Ed Catmull. He explains the process used at Pixar to spark creativity:
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