Lift or weight: leadership and new ideas
Leadership is inherently hierarchal, which is seen as creativity's death knell. This is an argument for how leaders can add lift, rather than weight, to elevate creativity.
Fresh ideas are essential for 21st century societies and for their leaders. We need new ideas to face a changing world, and it’s impossible to carve out space in crowded sectors without them.
But there’s a problem. Leadership is inherently hierarchal, and hierarchy is seen as the death knell of creativity. It’s impossible to pin down, and if you try, a man called Goodhart comes down from the heavens and causes all kinds of problems. Worse, bad leadership structures mean that leaders miss good ideas, like Bill Gore’s brainwave for how his employer, DuPont, could use a new polymer called PTFE. DuPont wasn’t interested in the idea, so he established his own firm, W.L. Gore & Associates, which now sees revenues of $3bn every year.
Success comes when leaders add lift, rather weight, to elevate creative teams. Leaders play a key role in four crucial concepts:
Empowerment
Esteem
Interdisciplinarity
Alignment
Empowerment
Elevating creativity requires leaders to recast the roles of the people they lead. Traditional, top-down, ‘order and follow’ command chains are ill-equipped to sustain creative teams because they slash the number of people in an organisation who have the ability to pursue new ideas. Bill Gore’s ideas were just one example of many which layers of hierarchy have contrived to ignore. Meanwhile, organisations that empower people to pursue their own ideas have the best chance of finding brilliant ones.
A key practice here is taking that super literally. Letting researchers spend a large portion of time on their own projects was famously employed by 3M, leading to inventions like Art Fry’s Post-it note. Art saw the appeal of a “removable adhesive” when arranging his choir music and started developing the Post-it note with his colleague Spencer Silver in 1974. After they distributed them to all the staff at 3M, the company backed the Post-it note with a massive marketing campaign in Boise, Idaho. 90% of Idahoans said they’d buy it, and 3M launched the workplace icon globally1.
Google’s decision to practise the same empowering approach in the 21st century has led to new offerings like Anurag Acharya’s Google Scholar, whilst MeisterLabs, a productivity solutions firm, runs frequent growth experiments in which every employee across the firm proposes their own idea to improve the business.
Empowerment doesn’t only mean giving people space. It also means listening to people who use the space they are given and being open-minded to new approaches. Without this, empowerment is toothless. The key thing about the Post-It note and Google Scholar is that Art and Anurag were backed by their employers with the resources to go to market with their brilliant ideas.
Esteem
Alongside the ability to pursue new ideas, leaders must ensure that individuals have the will. This all comes down to building a culture where individuals can gain esteem from proposing new ideas and don’t feel intimidated by the risk that their ideas might fail. Organisations must replace risk-aversion with inquisitiveness and leaders must find ways to build a culture that allocates prestige to those who learn from failure, who follow through on entrepreneurship, and speak up with new ideas. In a phrase, leaders must create psychological safety, creating a culture that advocates willingness to take risks, candour, and fearlessness, where people can both challenge authority and ask for help. (Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase, is the thought leader in this area.)
This does not all come from the top, the way leaders engage with innovators is pivotal. First, for people to feel psychologically safe in an organisation, they have to see their leaders embody the right behaviours. Leaders who are humble and admit that they do not have all the answers elevate the resilience, optimism, and collaboration of their teams — the late IKEA CEO, Ingvar Kamprad, was the embodiment of this.
“I could have an office all to myself, but since my collaborators don’t have one, then I am content to have a desk in the shared room.” — Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA
Behaviours must be complemented by systems to truly build psychological safety. Merck and P&G practise the art of ‘killing for quality’ by offering failure rewards to encourage people to take risks in the first place and ditch those which don’t work out. Supercell conducts company-wide post-mortems to learn from past mistakes, which reinforces the idea that failure has as much value as success. In a sense, this is about creating a scientific mentality. A scientist hasn’t failed if their hypothesis turns out to be incorrect. All they have to do to succeed in their work is run experiments and learn from them, generating new hypotheses and better ideas.
Interdisciplinarity
Let’s take stock. With empowered individuals, we have people who are able to take action on great ideas. When they get esteem from this, they becoming willing to do so. To move further, leaders can leverage interdisciplinarity to elevate teams that want to think outside the box. This involves operating at the intersection of multiple perspectives. Embracing interdisciplinarity gives individuals access to fresh perspectives, elevating ideas to a new level of originality and finding solutions that experts from one area may have missed. It took a team of mathematicians, doctors, neuroscientists, and programmers at Brown University’s brain science programme to allow a monkey to move a computer cursor with its mind in 2002. That’s an innovation with enormous potential in our every day lives, particularly for those with physical disabilities.
Leaders looking for radical ideas must push interdisciplinarity as far as possible. The more perspectives you can bring around the table, the more radical their ideas have the potential to be. The barriers we have in our minds get broken down by the real experiences of others and there are ever more ways to look at a problem. Consider the example of the Sealed Air Corporation, which once designed wallpaper textured with air bubbles. Not a commercial success. Then someone realised they could use the product in packaging: Bubble Wrap was born.
At the same time, radical innovation is just one side of the coin. Valuable ideas can also be gained incrementally, with ideas that go deep into an existing practice, rather than trying to invent something completely new. Consider the German company Thermomix, who have been making household appliances since 1961. In their 61 year history, they’ve released just 8 versions of their food processor, and the decades spent on research have been worth it. The Thermomix is an entire kitchen in one incredible £1,200 machine. When in pursuit of incremental innovation, creating teams at the intersection of multiple fields is less useful than building deep expertise in a small number of them. Leaders should keep this trade-off in mind.
Alignment
With all this empowerment, psychological safety, and interdisciplinary experts, you’ll have ideas bouncing off every corner. How does a leader make sure that these ideas meet their goals? Creativity is its own virtue, but leaders eager to have an impact need to leverage creativity towards a target. Leaders need to erect coordination totems that put everyone on the same page.
The ultimate purpose of a coordination totem is to set a parameter for what ideas should achieve. It must be deliberately large, but nonetheless clear. One of the coordination totems at Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, asks “is there a patient whose suffering could be treated with this idea?” If so, spending time on a cure is worthwhile and the company will back them.
It’s easy to identify the conflict that alignment has with empowerment and esteem. It imposes inherent limits on empowerment, and when these limits are enforced, how can that be good for esteem? The answer is that coordination totems are not creative fences. Fences stop people getting out. Totems encourage people to come together. And they bring people together who all want to be aligned around the same vision. Leaders are responsible for establishing this vision that inspires individuals to collaborate and achieve more than they could achieve on their own. It’s coordination totems that explain why 43 million people have contributed to Wikipedia, why tens of thousands pooled $47 million to buy the US Constitution, and why people spent decades building JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth in Minecraft.
“We are buying the United States Constitution.” — ConstitutionDAO’s coordination totem
The Four Horsemen of Ideas
Without good leadership, empowerment, esteem, interdisciplinarity, and alignment cannot exist in harmony. Culture comes from the top, and it’s built on concrete foundations, good teams, and an inspiring vision. Leaders play a critical role in the success of creative teams. By understanding and enacting four key concepts – empowerment, esteem, interdisciplinarity, and alignment – leaders can add lift to their team’s work rather than weight. We’ve seen these concepts in action before; let me know in the comments how you’ve seen them at work in your own life or career!
Note from March 1st, 2022: this article about ‘Structure that’s not Stifling’ is very relevant to the ‘alignment’ dimension.