A big shout out to everyone who attended the St. Louis Business Journal’s annual Women’s Conference today! I had a great time hearing all the speakers, and having the opportunity to present on infusing the workplace with creativity and innovation. I’ll be posting my slides here over the weekend, so check back if you are interested!
Creativity and innovation both sound pretty good, and a lot of people report that their work environments are sadly lacking in both. I think in truth, most people use the terms interchangeably, and that’s completely fine.
There are, however, some different definitions that might be interesting to consider. In management science, which is behind most MBA programs, talk about creativity, they are generally referring to the right-brain, colors, shapes, music types – artists, musicians, and let’s face it, those people over in Marketing….. Creativity is about an environment that fosters the right brain thinkers and is generally more open, fluid, and colorful than most traditional workplaces. Innovation is more about process – taking creative ideas and putting them into action. Terwiesch and Ulrich (2010) define innovation as “a new match between a need and a solution” – it is about the matchmaking more than about the dreaming up of something new and different.
In social science, the definitions are actually often the opposite. Innovation is about the spark, the idea generation, and creativity is about how you take that idea and put it into action. Maybe that’s because without the discipline of management, it seems like only someone who is very creative could figure out how to turn something into action.
However you define it, there are two important forces at play – one that opens the brain up to thinking differently about the world and can conceive of new patterns, relationships, and thoughts, and another that matches those dreams to the reality of the workplace and how to effect change for employees or customers by delivering on an idea. Over the next week or so, we’ll talk about both, using the traditional management science perspective that creativity is about ‘the spark’ and innovation is about ‘the action’.
Instagram. Most teens don’t even know Facebooks owns it. A recent Pew Institute report shows that use is accelerating while Facebook use is declining amongst this critical group. The continued gains by Twitter and Instagram give us some great insight into how teens today are choosing to communicate and share.
The New York Times was hacked today, reportedly by a group called the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), who has claimed responsibility for a number of highly visible hacks lately. They claim to be using their methods as a way of getting the word out about their cause. Basically, they take over the domain name of a well known publication like the Times and post their own messages to the site. In this case, they survived about 3 minutes before security kicked in and their messages were blocked. But they took the site down with them – NYTimes.com has been struggling for the last 24 hours to recover.
In old movies the evil antagonist sometimes intercepts the TV news report to say whatever he has to say – captivating the attention of the town, city, nation, or world (depending on his stage and the movie plot). The idea is much the same here – take over the most obvious channel to the public you can find and use it for your own messaging. It is the most complete form of interruption you can create in today’s society for news and information about the world around you.
When we look at the channels of communication that create and reflect culture in an organization, executives often get very excited about using them to push out a message. I’d suggest that can be as inappropriate as taking over a media distribution website to push your own agenda on people who otherwise wouldn’t see your message. If you want to ride a channel, get into the conversation instead of shutting it down. Learn to navigate through the discussions that are being had. Be a part of something instead of demanding that everyone pay attention to you for a moment in time.
I’m not making a political statement about SEA – just using the site hacking practice as an analogy for what I sometimes see happening in companies as they try to make one message stand out amongst a sea of information that is directed at the people who make up the organization. Before you take over, stop and ask yourself ‘is this the best way to use this channel? Is it the best way to connect with these people?’
If a strategy exists, but people don’t use it to make decisions, does it really exist? An existential question? Perhaps, but it is also an important one when thinking about the ROI of investing in a ‘strategy refresh’, or creating a strategy for an organization. The biggest complaint I hear from clients about strategy is that a lot of time and effort (and money) goes into creating it, and it ends up on a shelf somewhere. The people involved in creating it ‘get it’, but they fail to communicate, to role-model, or to apply it. The people who weren’t involved get un-contextualized communications that they can’t hope to apply in a meaningful way.
You need to spend at least as much time helping people understand how to apply a strategy as you do developing it. In today’s VUCA environment of continual change, turnover, market fluctuations, and information moving at warp speed, you can’t afford to have only a few people in the organization who use the strategy to make decisions.
Here’s a presentation I gave recently on the importance of ‘engaged strategy’ – it talks about how to create a different type of strategy that people throughout the organization can use to effectively make decisions: ODF Presentation vf
Employees who feel ‘engaged’ with their workplace – excited about who they work for, enthusiastic about what they do, and interested in the broader organization – are more likely to be productive, innovative, and collaborative. And, they are more likely to stick around and contribute to the work environment both in person and virtually.
I see eight key elements that support engagement – they all challenge the 1990s commitments to efficiency and the assumptions that people can be managed to functional extremes. We need to start managing people as best / most productive when they are social, and machines as best /most productive when they are functional.
We’ve heard a lot in the press recently about Yahoo’s CEO eliminating the work from home policy that has long been a part of the corporate culture. Moves like this harken back to old assumptions about the workplace and the importance of place over space. The idea that the work to provide Yahoo’s core product, which is services based, can only be done in a particular physical location is at best quaint.
These kinds of changes also create challenges to employee engagement, sending messages that employees aren’t to be trusted, that everyone needs to conform to a standard version of work, and that connections can only happen in a physical container known as “the office”. Current thinking on engagement and the value of it would suggest that Yahoo can expect to see a decline in productivity, moral, and retention as a result.
Business Insider is running a close look at the changing leadership and culture at JCP – one of the oldest retailers in the United States.
Check it out here, in particular the disconnect between store employees and management. A good case study on the effect of culture clashes and market drivers. Sometimes radical change means hard times for a while, so what’s happening might actually mean survival for the chain, only time will tell.
After some suggestions, I added a metrics component to the digital engagement framework we discussed last week at the Boardroom Talk series – please see below for the new version.
Engagement with your brand – whether by your customers or your employees – is important. But, it is a qualitative experience, and our corporate/ managerial obsession with measuring it quantitatively is questionable at best. Surveys and other common management tools for measuring how people feel about things are useful for answer some questions, and for working at scale, but for understanding why and how people feel engaged, ti can only get you so far. The “why and how” questions produce somewhat unpredictable results, and require a certain degree of analysis to understand themes and trends. If you want to measure engagement, you have to ask people broader questions than what you get on Liker scale.