Innovation Creativity Problem Solving Thinking Blog Applied creativity

Managing for Diversity and Inclusion in our Climate of Change

This post is brought to you by our partners at Leadershipdialogues.com and we are proud to share.

The recent protests in the streets show us that people really want to be heard and included in how we run things. These desires can’t help but spill over into organizational life. Leaders will now need to hear the voices of those who before now have not felt empowered to speak.

So what can effective leaders do?

Creating awareness that minority employees feel marginalized is an important first step. In the past, these employees have experienced some voices being listened to more than others. They have also experienced being excluded from decisions which often seem to be made by a select group of people who are not very diverse.

But creating awareness is not sufficient according to research by the Neuroleadership Institute on Diversity and Inclusion. If training focuses only on what people should or should not say to be culturally sensitive or politically correct, this can backfire. People may feel threatened and worried that they may say the wrong thing, retreat, and become disengaged,

A different approach is to create diverse and inclusive teams who are given important meaningful problems to solve with common objectives with their different perspectives. Research has found that teams that lack diversity are more comfortable working together but teams of diverse members perform better, despite having a less comfortable experience. But research also has proven that they need a common process to guide their problem solving as a unit. This is because each individual has their own unique process of tackling a problem, without understanding their teammates’ approaches. They have to synchronize their approaches using the process to collaborate effectively and begin creating a culture of diversity and inclusion

For the last 40 years, Basadur Applied Innovation has successfully brought its Simplexity Thinking methodology to create diverse experiences, perspectives, and cognitive styles to solve organizations’ most pressing problems. A simple example is their Fact-Finding process in which all team members offer their answers to these six questions. All answers are accepted without judgment and evaluation is applied afterwards.

1. What do you know, or think you know about this fuzzy situation?

2. What don’t you know, but you’d like to know?

3. Why is this a problem for you? Why can’t you make it go away?

4. What have you thought of or already tried?

5. If this problem were to be resolved, what would you have that you don’t

have now?

6. What might you be assuming that you don’t have to assume?

Team members almost always report that these questions open up new ways of looking at the problem they are trying to solve and important perspectives they hadn’t considered. In essence, they are also dispelling some biases they may have had based on limited experience.

After all the answers are exhausted, collaborative evaluation begins. The team proceeds through a “telescoping” process in which each member chooses the few answers seen as most important. Then each member gives voice to why they made those choices. Finally, the group works together to select the critical few answers to explore further. In telescoping, everyone shares the options they most prefer and explains why. Everyone actively listens with an open mind and asks for clarification as needed. Often people say things like “Oh, now I understand what you meant and why you picked it!”. This leads to brand new options emerging even while evaluation is underway. Another good thing about telescoping is that everyone believes their views received a good hearing. This creates consensus and commitment.

Simply using this process in meetings can lead to the possibility of more innovative solutions and a sense of arriving at them together.

How might you try this out with your own teams and see what can happen?

How Design Thinking Fits With Simplexity

My colleague Shannon Wagers , who is a corporate R&D consultant at P&G, sent this sketch to show how he explains Simplexity to those more familiar with Design Thinking as taught at Stanford.

I asked Shannon for a more complete explanation that I could pass along in this blog.

His answer follows: “The Simplexity Process is a universal flexible framework that encompasses all innovation methodologies, including Creative Problem Solving, Lean, and Design Thinking. Using Simplexity for Design Thinking takes you to greater insights and better prototypes with a more robust and deeper process”.

Shannon then added a cleaned up version of the sketch.

We love seeing design thinking integrated with Simplexity

Keep Innovating. Keep Thinking,

Min!

Don’t confuse solutions with innovation.

We live in a world where “solutions” are easy to come by. Advocates, experts and lobbyists offer ready-made answers to complex problems. Politicians take sides and become entrenched in their positions, while people argue back and forth endlessly rather than collaborating.

Many solutions are framed as total opposites — like gas and oil versus solar power — and are viewed through the lens of cancelling each other out rather than fitting together in a long-term energy strategy.

This ineffective form of problem solving typically ends up in a quagmire, accomplishing little beyond frustration. Nothing works because we haven’t taken the time to understand what problem our solution will solve.

Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and need only five to solve it.” Einstein was right. The ability to define a problem skillfully is the key to innovation. And collaboration is the key to skillful problem definition.

We’re reminded of a time when we worked with a consumer products company looking to lower the packaging costs of its potato chip products. While the chips had typically been shipped for delivery standing upright in large boxes, the manufacturing team discovered that it would save the company time and money if the individual bags were laid flat instead. But the new idea encountered resistance from the sales department because it slowed down the receiving process for customers, who typically counted the bags before signing the receiving documents.

Analyzing the situation made it clear that the real problem was, “How might we lay the bags flat but still allow the customer to quickly know how many bags are inside the box?” Several solutions immediately became evident, including providing each customer with a weigh scale so that opening the box and counting was unnecessary.

By defining the problem in a comprehensive way, the team developed innovative options that escaped the “if my solution wins, then your solution loses” approach that often results in stalemate.

Innovation demands disciplined thinking and collaboration. Just as we can see scientists all over the world racing together to create a vaccine to defeat the COVID19 virus, we need to encourage political collaboration on crucial issues.

How might we redefine the problem facing us today so we can move beyond the opposing solutions of either ‘saving lives’ or ‘opening our economies’? Expanding our perspective may inspire innovative solutions that satisfy many priorities.

Innovating in a global crisis: what do you do when you don’t know what to do next?

The tremendous impact of the coronavirus is altering the world for all of us in many ways. No one, including organizational leaders, knows what to do next, where this is going or when it will end. It could be six months or longer before we get back to anything normal and this new normal is expected to include pocket resurgences of coronavirus around the world. The situation we are in might be closer to World War II in magnitude than anything we have had to deal with since. I have worked in the trenches for more than 50 years and the current state of our world has me reflecting on other crises we have faced. We will all get through the next months and years together and out of it will come a new normal. We will innovate. We always do.

The coronavirus situation has me thinking about uncertain times that followed other terrible global events. For what it’s worth, I want to share a story about how the leader of a client organization of ours responded innovatively after the horrific events of September 11, 2001 by starting with the problem, “I don’t know what to do next.”

As CEO and Board Chairman of a global aerospace and airplane engineering company, he was seeing a huge threat to the viability of his company in the aftermath of 9/11. While the company had built itself a great reputation in the aerospace and aircraft field, with 28 business units making parts and systems for a variety of customers, the terrorist attack caused demand for flights to drop, resulted in a number of airlines declaring bankruptcy and no one knew what the impact would be on future aircraft sales. The company’s stock lost more than 80 per cent of its value overnight. Normal strategies and practices could no longer be counted upon to ensure the survival and future viability of the company.

Rather than “hunker down” into a defensive shell, the company made a deliberate decision to use innovation to rebuild. Here’s how. The leader quickly called the top seven senior executives to a meeting and told them, “I don’t know what to do next.” His admission of this problem triggered the team to turn to its innovation training. Relying on a proven innovation process, the team launched into fact finding, then challenge finding, then challenge mapping to develop a strategic plan for moving forward. They identified two higher level challenges as goals supported by four challenges that would drive their business for the next year or more and restore the price of their stock. The goals were: “How might we increase our top line and earnings growth?” and “How might we get the Wall Street analysts excited about our future?” Below these goals were four supporting challenges which were more specific: (1) How might we commercialize more new products every year?; (2) How might we take advantage of the current low stock market prices (of other companies to build up our own sales volume?); (3) How might we change our business mix to improve consistency? (there were gaps in their menu of offerings); and (4) How might we increase cash flow to 100% of net income? (up from the current 80%). They then engaged inter functional and inter divisional teams across the company to begin solving these four key challenges.

The innovation process helped them create and commit to a bold strategic plan. The company became even stronger as a result of the crisis. The stock price was restored in less than two years and the business continued to grow steadily for years to come. So why do I tell this story? Most of us remember the impact of 9/11 and how it reshaped the world we live in. We all felt shell-shocked and uncertain as to all the unknowns in front of us. Starting with a fuzzy challenge like “I don’t know what to do next” is okay. You need a starting point, a problem even as loosely defined as this is something to start fact finding around.

Over my lifetime, I’ve seen a lot of upheaval and amazing innovation in our world. I have no doubt that some amazing innovations will be made in the days ahead, as we come together as one global community. Stay safe but more importantly, stay positive — we are all innovators who can and will rise up during a crisis.

Let teams be the change makers

One indisputable fact for almost all of us is that change is hard. It can be even harder for teams composed of people with many different problem-solving styles and diverse backgrounds. So how do you drive change with teams?

One sure way is to find really important problems that are really vital to the organization. Before you even contemplate making change a priority, here are three vital steps that need to be checked off before getting started:

Get your best people on it, then engage your teams right from the start with a pre-consult: what are we really trying to do? How does it align with organizational goals? Who are the real owners of the problem – how do we make sure they are accountable?
Equip the team with a collaborative process for solving complex problems and teach them the skills, including the training that is needed. Make sure the “super owners” are there and responsible for the outcome. You can’t delegate important stuff, you can let the team get going but if you are the super owner then they have to report to you – how are we doing?
And finally, you can’t purchase innovative collaboration at the top by hiring a high priced external consulting firm. A good leader is going to figure out how to engage people and teams working and aligned with the goals and mission at the top, not hoping magic will happen by some formula.

Large change projects are hard because what usually happens is there are people at high levels in the company who are willing to spend money to bring in outside “experts”. Too often nothing happens because change has to come from within, down below – where the “real experts” do the heavy lifting. To be a real leader you can’t just hire a firm like McKinsey to come in and tell you what to do – that approach doesn’t work because people naturally resist top down changes.

If you really want to succeed, develop your people down below to drive change. Equip them with a strong business case for why it’s so important; provide a robust infrastructure to support those “super owners” responsible for change; and train people in the skills, tools and a creative process (we call this the “secret sauce”) to ensure everyone has ownership and knows they are an integral part of the team’s success.

Last but not least, make sure you can measure the changes, before and after. Use realistic, agreed upon metrics to give people achievable goals.