Fortunately, when it comes to getting groups to be creative, there are many lessons to be learned from the successes, with a natural example being Apple. It became good at coming up with new ideas because Steve Jobs was accepting of failure. As the story goes, he would praise attempts that failed as well as attempts that succeeded.
And it’s not just Jobs who found this approach successful – many others have too. There is a certain solid logic to it and it goes like this: if you have a reasonably intelligent approach to ideas, then you know that there’ll be a fairly constant, or reasonably constant, ratio of success to failure. If that’s so, then your number of failures is just as much a measure of your success as your number of successes.
The most common example of this is ‘closing ratios’ in the case of the salesperson getting sales. If 10 attempts at a sale result in one successful sale, then that’s a closing ratio of 10%. And most salespeople in any industry have a reasonably constant closing ratio. So, if that salesperson has a year-end goal of ‘so many sales’ or ‘so many dollars in commission’, then each failed attempt at a sale is just as much a measure of success as a successful attempt.
The pressure paradox box
One thing you can do as a manager is apply pressure to your workforce by saying things like “We need an answer to this” or “We’ll go out of business soon if we don’t solve this” or – and I wish I were joking here – “Come up with some good ideas or you’re fired”. The problem is: sometimes pressure works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Consequently, you end up with a box.
- Quadrant 1 – ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ zone
It is best typified by the pressure that happens in war time. The pressure of World War II brought the world the nuclear age, the jet aircraft, radar and the first electronic computers.
- Quadrant 2 – demoralised workers
This is where the boss is a bully who pushes and punishes and gives little positive feedback. So the workforce feels offended and shifts gear from being creative to ‘just getting through the day’. The funny thing is that there is actually quite a lot of creativity in Quadrant 2; it’s just that it’s more along the line of finding creative excuses for why none of the work is getting done.
- Quadrant 3 – blue sky dreaming
Particularly in high-tech organisations, there will often be groups of people working on ideas with no immediate relevance to day-to-day business. Often their goals are diffuse, and the timelines equally so. For groups like this to work well, there needs to be a special kind of worker with a special kind of boss.
Xerox Corp was a good example of this with the work at its PARC site in the US, which produced the first personal computers, the icon and the mouse (none of which Xerox really developed).
- Quadrant 4 – lazy and clueless
With the wrong workers, the wrong bosses and the wrong concepts, Quadrant 4 situations can happen. But they don’t happen for very long. Groups like this simply can’t survive. They are neither productive nor fun to be in. Consequently they are shut down for the former reason, or people quit for the latter.
Groups can be made to be creative, but there are few, if any, quick fixes. But with the right combination of open-mindedness and patience, groups can really do well. A good example of this was the DuPont Corporation in the early 20th century when it was looking for a ‘synthetic silk’, which we now know as nylon.
Bosses found Wallace Carothers, a chemist who wasn’t exactly social and suffered a good deal from depression, who turned down many of their offers. But DuPont persisted, giving him a free rein and a large amount of freedom. The result was a multi-billion dollar, ground-breaking technology in materials.
Dr Ian Halsall
Part 1 of this article appeared in the previous issue.
