Making Ideas Happen (22 page)

Rodriguez attributes much of IDEO’s success to a culture of mutual respect and a desire to be remarkable. The “T” concept enables teams to practice a true meritocracy in the process of idea generation. IDEO’s use of rapid prototyping is al the more effective when people share enough broad knowledge and value for the culture that they can seriously consider solutions from their peers with a different area of expertise.

It is unlikely that IDEO has any greater understanding of electronics than Hewlett-Packard, or of banking than Bank of America (both IDEO clients). The expertise within IDEO likely exists within their clients’ companies as wel . It is the chemistry within teams at IDEO that makes al the difference.

When it comes to work flow and how teams are led, IDEO’s chemistry is a competitive advantage. With careful hiring and a shared understanding, the various project teams at IDEO are spared from the clashes that are al too typical in other teams. Ideas can be pursued unencumbered by the misunderstandings and ego-driven antics that other cross-disciplinary teams must face daily.

Provide Flexibility for Productivity

As you develop some norms and expectations for your team’s work flow, try to elevate true productivity over the appearance of hard work. Managers instinctively measure work ethic with an eye on the clock. Measuring work by time spent working is seductive, because it’s easy and objective. But doing so defies the realities of the creative work flow and wil ultimately damage morale.

In reality, ideas are made to happen in spurts.

The pressure of being required to sit at your desk until a certain time creates a factory-like culture that ignores a few basic laws of idea generation and human nature: (1) When the brain is tired, it doesn’t work wel , (2) Idea generation happens on its own terms, and (3) When you feel forced to execute beyond your capacity, you begin to hate what you are doing.

Rather than focusing on face time, creative teams should embrace transparency and strive to build a fundamental trust between col eagues. As leaders, we must create rules and norms for the sake of efficiency rather than as a result of mistrust. We should measure tangible outputs like actions taken and quality of outcomes.

Some companies have completely departed from the traditional mind-set that butts-in-chairs equals productivity. Best Buy, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and other major firms have implemented programs like ROWE (Results Only Work Environment), which measures performance based on output rather than
sit-put
. In a ROWE environment, employees are compensated based on their achievement of specified goals rather than on the number of hours worked. The ultimate goal is to empower employees to make their own decisions about when and where they work as long as mutual y agreed-upon goals are achieved. This means that bosses stop watching employee calendars and paying attention to when people arrive and leave the office.

In one study conducted by Gal up Inc. reported in
BusinessWeek
, productivity in departments at Best Buy that had adopted the ROWE program was up an average of 35

percent, along with a marked increase in employee satisfaction. It turns out that people thrive when their judgment and autonomy are respected.

Workplace flexibility can be a tricky conundrum—while it helps improve a team’s chemistry, it also requires a certain degree of chemistry going in. There must be a shared level of trust and commitment to ensure that this autonomy is used for good purposes. More important, operating successful y in an autonomous environment requires that a concrete set of goals be established and constantly revisited. ROWE and other attempts at hands-off management fail miserably when objectives and goals are not mutual y agreed upon and tightly managed. Many managers struggle to establish and repeatedly review goals with their teams. And, when a team fal s short on goals, managers must confront it.

If you find yourself hesitant to support flexibility in your team, you should chal enge yourself to find the root cause. Perhaps you’re questioning your team’s commitment to the projects. Or maybe the goals—or deliverables—are not specific enough. When leaders lack confidence in their team’s preparedness and commitment, they compensate through increased control. Instead, you should examine the root cause. If you question your team’s dedication, take a closer look at the chemistry. Are incentives aligned properly? Are their unaired doubts in the plan? Does each member of the team feel chal enged, and ful y empowered to do what he or she does best? Many smal creative teams and start-up companies also suffer from unclear goals. A popular fix is to have regular ten-minute “standing meetings” at which the team reviews the current milestones and deadlines for progress. Another best practice is to have the list of major milestones up on the wal , visible to al . Just a quick checkin—or a glance up at the wal —can refocus an entire team on the priorities.

Admired leaders of creative projects are able to provide flexibility for their teams by keeping a close eye on the team’s chemistry and ensuring that the priorities are clear to everyone. And when you feel the urge to question and control, seek out the root cause.

Often, your own insecurity as a leader might prohibit you from providing the autonomy that your team needs to thrive.

Foster an Immune System That Kills Ideas
A strong chemistry in a team wil not only support the development of new ideas but also help get rid of bad ones. In our bodies, the immune system plays the crucial role of kil ing off harmful viruses and bacteria. Without our immune system, our organs would fail from the constant invasion of new pathogens. Similarly, our ongoing projects face grave risks when new ideas arise during our process. Our ability to extinguish new ideas is critical to productivity and to our capacity to scale existing projects. In a team setting, the skeptics—the ones who always question ideas first rather than fal ing in love with them —are the white blood cel s. The skeptics keep us functioning and help us stay on track.

While our natural tendency may be to not hire, engage with, or empower those with an inclination to poke holes in our ideas, these people are in fact essential to a productive creative environment. As Michael Crooke, president and CEO of outdoor apparel company Patagonia, proudly proclaimed at a Wharton West conference, “The people closest to me are al naysayers.”

As you cultivate your team’s immune system, you wil want to differentiate between skeptics and cynics. Cynics cling to their doubts and are often unwil ing to move away from their convictions. By contrast, skeptics are wil ing to embrace something new—they are just wary and critical at first. Though they are often undervalued, skeptics are an essential component of a healthy team, and leaders should cultivate their respect and influence.

Of course, there wil be times when you wil want to suppress the immune system and help the team play with ideas in an open-minded, blue-sky format—without skepticism.

On such occasions, the skeptical members of the team should know their role and tailor their feedback accordingly.

The great chal enge is to balance idea generation and relentless focus. While you don’t want to behave like a large company that locks down al creativity from the point of production, you also don’t want to act like a fledgling start-up that is always generating new ideas and features that saturate the project, ultimately getting in the way of execution. Finding the right balance requires al ocating time for open idea exchange along with a healthy level of intolerance for idea generation during execution. One approach is to have a bias toward considering ideas during brainstorming sessions and kil ing ideas when they come up randomly during execution. Your resident skeptics can be helpful on this front. Of course, great ideas may stil crop up unexpectedly, but when they do your bias should be to stay focused on the project at hand. With this approach, only the mightiest of ideas—those worthy of deep consideration—wil risk getting you off track.

Fight Your Way to Breakthroughs

Conflict is a common occurrence in any creative process. It is a good sign, a powerful opportunity to refine your ideas and processes. Despite the frustration that friction causes, it wil serve you in the long run if you are able to manage it. The leaders of great creative teams value the friction that results when opinions vary among a passionate group of creative minds. If good chemistry has been cultivated, teams can use disagreements to foster valuable insights that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Yet despite the opportunities that conflict provides, our tendency is to shy away from it.

We wil often completely disengage when a creative process becomes heated.

Conflict happens very easily. For any problem, there are multiple possible solutions —some better than others. In a diverse team, there wil be many different opinions.

Often, the person with the most power or experience just makes the cal . Or sometimes people wil openly disagree but eventual y withdraw as the fight ensues. Conflict is a by-product of different viewpoints, but you cannot let it become a source of apathy.

Fighting is uncomfortable, but consider the benefits of opposing perspectives duking it out. Imagine that the answer to a problem lies somewhere on a spectrum between A and B. The more arguing that takes place about both ends of the spectrum, the more likely it is that the complete terrain of possibilities wil be adequately explored. By contrast, if the advocates for A just give up, then B becomes the default answer without any better solution being discovered in between.

The alternative to healthy disagreement is apathy, a toxic state of mind that only encourages inertia. It is critical that you actively combat the tendency of some team members to withdraw from the dialogue when sparks start to fly—even if it means pul ing col eagues aside and encouraging them to stick with it. The more individuals involved as the team triangulates on the solution, the better.

The best answer to any problem often dwel s in the land of the unknown. If the members of your team have the fortitude to advocate for their perspectives while respectful y considering those of others, then the breakthrough wil reveal itself. A leader’s role is to keep people engaged in the debate and ruthlessly attack apathy.

As the leader of a creative team, try to foster healthy debate between people with different levels of influence and experience. One helpful practice is to get everyone to share proposed solutions or ideas first, prior to having people react. Junior people go first, fol owed by alternative proposals from the more experienced members of the team.

Then, as people share their reactions, be sure that al members of the team stay engaged throughout the exchange. When you notice shortness or impatience, confront it with a question about process—something along the lines of “How can we keep al options on the table?” or “Since we’re al trying to find the best solution, why are we getting impatient with each other?”

Some of the most admired creative teams share a common tenet—they are comfortable fighting out their disagreements and diverse points of view, but they always share conviction after the meeting. These teams recognize that the purpose of disagreement is to more ful y explore the options. Fighting, as it turns out, is an asset for the teams that can stomach it. But the animosity is released when the exercise is over.

Your team is more likely to conceive breakthroughs if its chemistry is strong enough to capitalize on conflict.

Don’t Become Burdened by Consensus

As we debate solutions until we agree, we must also be sure not to become burdened by consensus. The ultimate chal enge in col aborative projects is understanding how to draw on the best input of al without settling on the lowest common denominator.

Consensus can often lead to a lackluster outcome.

To truly distinguish yourself as a creative leader, you must be able to graceful y incorporate a broad spectrum of ideas from the team and constituents of a project while stil preserving the core mission.

Over the course of his career, Tom Hennes, founder of Thinc Design (mentioned earlier), has col aborated with an eclectic range of clients and partners on chal enging projects, including California’s Steinhart Aquarium, Freedom Park in Pretoria, South Africa, and the forthcoming National September 11 Memorial Museum. Each of these landmark projects was commissioned and managed by multiple stakeholders—the government, educational institutions, not-for-profits, donors, historians, and the general public—each with its own agenda.

Acting as an advisory and planning partner for Freedom Park in South Africa was one of Thinc’s most chal enging projects. Both a memorial and a museum, Freedom Park is a national heritage site dedicated to tel ing the stories of those who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom in South Africa. The project revolved around the identity of an entire nation, and many, many different points of view had to be considered.

“Over twenty constituencies had a point of view,” Hennes recounts. “The government, the historians, the spiritual populations, and many factions of the general public . . . each of which needed to be listened to and understood. We listened to the stories, to the struggles, and we listened deeply to their anxieties.” Ultimately, Hennes and the Thinc team spent almost two years listening.

As Hennes described his approach to the project, I imagined the meetings he must have attended throughout the process. Planning a monument to a tragic struggle, a nation’s progress, and lingering inequalities is only further complicated when everyone starts to provide their strong and likely emotional opinions. “Our job as designers,”

Hennes explained, “is to listen to what people are saying and then bring our skil s to bear.”

When working with an extended team of stakeholders, Hennes believes that his job is to listen to the stories, gather knowledge about al of the viewpoints, and then identify what he cal s the “extremes” that wil differentiate the project. Of al the ideas that his team comes up with, Hennes tries to find the few critical extremes that he wants to hold on to, and then commits to compromising on much of the rest. Hennes explained to me that the extremes are the ideas that he feels wil most distinguish the end result. As he endures the inevitable battery of critiques and requests for alterations to his plans for a project, he holds these extremes sacred.