Quirky

by Melissa A Schilling

  To tap the creativity of every member of the organization, it is important to make sure that all employees feel empowered to contribute their ideas—not just those in positions of authority or those in designated creative roles. At Pixar, for example, teams use “dailies,” where artists have their ongoing work reviewed by directors and peers. An informal audience of people from all levels in the organization provides direct feedback about both the creative and technical elements of the project. Brad Bird, Oscar-winning director of films such as The Incredibles and Ratatouille, described the process: “As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth.… We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together. If there is a solution, I want everyone to hear the solution, so everyone adds it to their tool kit.”1 At first people were afraid to speak up, but after two months of seeing artists benefit by hearing the blunt suggestions of Bird and others, people began to feel safe enough to contribute their own suggestions.2

  Pixar is also able to attract and nurture creative people by giving them considerable autonomy. Teams choose their own hours, attire, office arrangements, project management routines, and meeting structure. Teams are also kept small—usually three to seven people, and team leaders are chosen based on their technical expertise and their vision for the project, rather than their seniority. As described by Ed Catmull, president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, “We believe the creative vision propelling each movie comes from one or two people and not from either corporate executives or a development department. Our philosophy is: You get creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support, and you provide them with an environment in which they can get honest feedback from everyone.”3

  If leaders of organizations want employees to embrace challenging the accepted wisdom, it is also important to abolish practices and norms that require people to come to consensus prior to making decisions or moving forward with a project. Requiring consensus can force people to prematurely converge on ideas; if individuals believe that a consensus must be achieved to move forward, they will be more reluctant to dissent and more ready to pile on to the ideas put forward by others, particularly if they seem uncontroversial (and therefore more likely to achieve consensus). Making consensus the objective runs the risk of making orthodox solutions the objective as well. Consider the development of Apple’s first iPod, launched in October 2001. What would have happened if, in the year 2000, Steve Jobs had sought a consensus about where Apple’s development efforts should be focused? Would Apple’s R&D engineers or product managers have achieved consensus that Apple should enter the consumer portable audio device market—a market littered with failed devices and in which Apple had no experience? Even if all team members have ideas for breakthrough innovations, it is extraordinarily unlikely that they will have the same ideas. When you require consensus, you force everyone to focus on the most obvious choices that they think others will agree to, and that is usually an incremental extension of what the organization already does. An organization that seeks more-original ideas should instead make it clear that the objective is breakthrough innovation, not consensus.

  It can also be very useful to let teams that disagree about a solution pursue different—even competing—paths. For example, at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates the Large Hadron Collider), teams of physicists and engineers accelerate and collide particles to simulate the “big bang,” in hopes of advancing our understanding of the origins of the universe. However, groups of scientists often disagree about the best solution to particular problems. Management at CERN recognized that a solution that initially appears to be inferior to others could turn out to be actually better if further development is pursued. This means that if solutions have to “compete” to be accepted early in their development, the organization could end up committing major resources to a solution that appears better initially but might not be the best approach in the long run. CERN thus encourages multiple teams to work on their own solutions separately, and only after the teams have had significant time to develop their solution do the teams meet and compare alternatives. In this way CERN helps teams achieve some of the advantages of separateness that the breakthrough innovators reap from their innate sense of detachment. The teams are encouraged to follow their own paths without being constrained by the beliefs of other teams.

  Providing time alone. It should also be clear that all children need periods of quiet solitude and should be encouraged to read, write, and experiment with things that reflect their personal interests—it helps them develop their ability to think and create and to define what they believe about how the world works. Elon Musk’s escape into science fiction books, and then teaching himself computer programming, helped to craft his independent intellect and ambitious goals. Albert Einstein’s meditative musings on the behavior of a compass needle or a beam of light taught him to use thought experiments with which he would later revolutionize physics. Thomas Edison’s chemistry experiments in the cellar of his parents’ home taught him a patient and persistent method of learning by doing that he would use the rest of his life. Filling up a child’s life with team sports, after-school classes, and other extracurricular activities can be extremely valuable for developing social skills or other capabilities, but it should be balanced with the child’s need to reflect. Furthermore, a child’s nature should inform this balance. If, for example, a child has a naturally introspective or rule-challenging nature, trying to mold her into a charismatic team player through a heavy schedule of participating in team sports or the chorus may not serve her well. It makes much more sense to embrace her unconventionality and help find ways to make it successful for her.

  When I give presentations about my research on breakthrough innovators, the people in the audience often find it a relief to see just how many innovators did not do well in school precisely because of their creativity or tendency toward rule challenging. A surprisingly large portion of breakthrough innovators were autodidacts and excelled much more outside the classroom than inside. Although many people will have heard anecdotally that some innovators did not do well in school, the stories here show why the innovators such as Edison, Kamen, and Einstein did not flourish in school and why they were successful anyway. Some people respond well to structure, but others do much better in a more fluid educational curriculum where they can choose both the direction and pace of their study. I have watched parents become animated and nod eagerly as I described how the very traits that make some people creative also make them struggle with the classroom environment. At the end of my presentations, mothers and fathers have often come up to me to talk about concerns they have had with their children’s social development or school performance and about how valuable it was to see that a sense of separateness can have a positive side. They make a breakthrough of their own when beginning to understand the benefits of embracing their child’s nature and helping her flourish because of it rather than in spite of it.

  Studying these innovators also reveals that when managers want employees to come up with breakthroughs, they should give them some time alone to ponder their craziest of ideas and follow their paths of association into unknown terrain. This type of mental activity will be thwarted in a group brainstorming meeting. Individuals need to be encouraged to come up with ideas freely, without fear of judgment. In both organizations and educational settings, working in teams has become a norm. Teamwork can be very valuable, but to really ensure that individuals bring as much to the team as possible—especially when the objective is a creative solution—individuals need time to work alone before the group effort begins. They should be encouraged to commit their ideas to paper and to flesh each of them out in at least a rudimentary way before they are at risk of being extinguished by social processes. A creative idea can be fragile—easily sw
ept away by the momentum of a group conversation. Almost every team suffers from some degree of groupthink; individuals who are more outspoken or who have forceful personalities can dominate the conversation and the decision making. They can herd a team onto a particular trajectory without even intending to do so. A little isolation and solitude can give other individuals a better chance to develop their creative ideas.

  The payoff value of a person working alone on her own projects, tapping into her intrinsic motivation, has been the source of several of Google’s most famous products. For example, Google research scientist Krishna Bharat created Google News in the aftermath of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center to meet his own needs for keeping up with the rapid emergence of news related to the event. The product was so useful that Google launched a beta version for the public in September 2002. Gmail was also an independent project of an engineer at Google. Paul Buchheit, who had previously worked on Google Groups, began working on Gmail in August 2001. Because Google had a large volume of internal e-mail, he wanted to develop a product that would both enable a user to keep her e-mail indefinitely (requiring large storage capabilities) and enable rapid search so that a particular message of interest could be quickly found. The result was Gmail, which was formally launched in 2004.

  The benefits of isolation can also apply at the team level. Ideas compete for acceptance in firms, and if exposed to competition too early may be killed off before they have had time to develop. An idea that initially seems a bit better than others can sweep through an organization, killing off competing ones that could ultimately be better with some development. The result can be a “monoculture” where there is too little variety left in an organization to generate new solutions. For example, if one R&D team within a pharmaceutical firm discovers a method of identifying drug targets that seems better than other methods being explored within the firm, other groups may quickly adopt this method, eager to reap similar benefits. If all groups within the firm adopt the same method, however, they are likely to experience too much convergence around the same drug targets and leave other opportunities unexplored. A path that has an initial advantage may thus outcompete other paths that may ultimately have superior benefits. Research spanning fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, small-world networks, “skunk works” in innovation, and organizational learning have all shown that dividing the organization into subgroups and buffering them from one another can help to generate more innovation. For example, it can be advantageous to give R&D teams some physical and cultural distance from the larger organization to prevent the paradigms of the larger organization from quashing the R&D division’s heterodox ideas.4 Jobs knew this intuitively when he set up the Macintosh project in a separate building from the rest of Apple and flew a pirate’s flag over its roof.

  Separation from the main organization is also often used to keep a new project secret until it’s ready for the public. When Lockheed was asked by the US military in 1943 if it could quickly develop a jet fighter to counter the German jet threat, it created a separate organization of a team of aircraft engineers called “Skunk Works.” The team was housed in a circus tent next to a manufacturing plant that emitted a pungent smell, leading to the name that the team gave itself. The name came from a running joke in the Li’l Abner comic strip about a malodorous place in the forest where a beverage was brewed from skunks, old shoes, and other peculiar ingredients. The project was extremely successful, designing and building the XP-80 Shooting Star jet fighter in just 143 days.5 Lockheed knew that it had found a winning formula and to this day develops its most revolutionary aircraft in its secretive Palmdale, California, Skunk Works facility, which features a large skunk logo painted on its exterior. Other examples of companies using isolated skunk works to develop breakthrough innovations include Google’s Google X, Boeing’s Phantom Works, Amazon’s Lab126, Ford’s Special Vehicle Team, IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Xerox’s PARC, Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology, and Nike’s Innovation Kitchen.6

  Building self-efficacy. One of the most powerful ways to increase creativity—and other positive outcomes—at both the individual and organizational level is to help people build their sense of self-efficacy. As noted in Chapter 2, creating opportunities for early wins can be extremely valuable for this process. As a young man, when Nikola Tesla proved that his physics professor and the physics texts were wrong, he understood from that moment on that no obstacle could withstand the force of his genius and effort.

  To help people to find their own early wins, we can encourage them to take risks by lowering the price of failure and even celebrating bold-but-intelligent failures. A. G. Lafley, who served two stints as the CEO of Procter & Gamble (from 2000 to 2010 and from 2013 to 2015) and was viewed by many as the most successful executive in the company’s history, made fearlessness in the face of failure a core strategy of breakthrough innovation at the firm. “We learn,” he said, “much more from failure than we do from success.”7 In fact, he celebrates the eleven biggest product failures during his time at the helm in his book, The Game-Changer.8 Similarly, at frog Design, failure is treated as a form of useful progressive experimentation. There is no finger pointing or admonishment; instead, the company uses an end-of-project retrospective framework to rapidly learn from its failures as well as from its successes. Theodore Forbath, Global Vice President of Innovation Strategy at frog Design, notes that “Company leaders can reinforce acceptance of failure by publically celebrating projects that didn’t quite meet expected results, but that were successful in providing new learning.”9 Eli Lilly throws parties to celebrate its biggest failures (the ones that did not meet expected results but led to the greatest learning for the organization), and Tata Group gives an annual prize for the best failures in its organization.10

  Inspiring grand ambitions. The powerful role of idealism highlights the value of cultivating grand goals in the organization that people find personally meaningful. For example, Bristol-Myers Squibb has a slogan referring to “extending and enhancing human life,” and its mission is “To discover, develop and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases.” Google’s well-known mission is “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” These lofty goals, if well ingrained throughout the organization, can become an organizing principle that shapes employee behavior even without direct oversight or incentives. When those goals have a social component that employees embrace as being meaningful or intrinsically valuable (such as improving people’s quality of life), that intrinsic motivation can increase the amount of effort they invest in their activities. Similarly, nurturing idealism in children increases their likelihood of embracing a work ethic, living a purposeful life, and finding their accomplishments more meaningful and satisfying.

  Finding the flow. If managers can tap into people’s intrinsic motivators—those rewards that activate their need for achievement or the activities that enable them to experience flow—it should increase innovation and productivity for the organization while simultaneously increasing the satisfaction of the employee. To do so requires both self-awareness on the part of the employee about what she finds intrinsically motivating and enjoyable, and a willingness on the part of the manager to personalize the employment experience. For example, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has written extensively about flow (described in detail in Chapter 5), gives a detailed example of how one company, Green Cargo, a former division of the Swedish State Railway and Sweden’s longest-running rail freight operator, implemented an unusual management system based on flow. First, all supervisors began to receive daily reports from three or four people who worked directly beneath them. The CEO, Lennart Pihl, chose three or four people, each of those chose three or four people, and so forth. Each person was responsible for making sure that those three or four people felt that they were accomplishing something and were enjoying their work. Initially, managers would receive five to ten daily reports from emplo
yees at random intervals in response to a timed pager, telling them what the employees were doing at that moment. The employees would also report about the sense of creativity, concentration, and challenge they felt at that moment. If the employees weren’t enjoying their work—feeling anxious or bored—the managers needed to ask “What can I do to improve how these people feel?” If certain employees prefer to set their own goals rather than working on a team or prefer to work more with people on a larger team, their jobs are adjusted or their position changed.11