TALKING HEADS
T
The leader’s creative challenge
I
Adam Kingl
Innovation involves
exploring as many
ideas as possible.
despair when CEOs tell me
that they have finally filled in
their organisation’s creative
deficit by hiring a chief
innovation officer. They abrogate not
only their own responsibility for the
company’s creative output, but that of
every other person in the organisation.
Not to put too fine a point on it — every
leader and every employee is responsible
for maximising innovation. The leader’s
main responsibility, however, isn’t
necessarily always to be an individual
creative contributor but to construct the
environment in which creativity thrives.
If we define ‘creative activity’ as
‘inventing and implementing a new
idea’, then it’s useful to break down
this ideation process into four steps:
generation, evaluation, selection and
implementation. I will focus on the first
two stages here.
With every client with whom I’ve
worked, the first and often most
significant obstacle to unlocking team
creativity is that the team leader does
not distinguish between generation and
evaluation of ideas and stage these two
discussions sequentially.
In other words, if a team attempts to
come up with ideas and to evaluate the
merit of those ideas at the same time,
then each person in the group is turning
up the dial on their inner critic to eleven.
No one wants to be criticised in front of
“Not to put too
fine a point on
it — every leader
and employee
is responsible
for maximising
innovation”
one’s peers, so everyone tends to hold
back on suggesting ideas until they have
one that’s at best magnificent — a once
in a lifetime idea — and at worst one in
which they can’t poke any holes. The
result: lots of uncomfortable silence as
each person’s brain assesses its own
ideas’ potential for perfection.
The leader’s task, therefore, in
enhancing creative output is to
announce that first we are generating
as many ideas as possible without
assessing their merits. If colleagues seek
validation, then they should focus on
volume, not quality. There are at least two
reasons to follow this recommendation.
First, there are reams of research that
tell us that creativity starts with having
a lot of options from which to choose.
Second, too many interesting ideas are
immediately sacrificed at the altar of
perfection. Many, with a tweak or two,
could be brilliant, so better to raise them
and let them gestate for a while. This is
a terribly important role that the leader
must play because so much of corporate
life at its worst has been one-upmanship:
people demonstrating how clever they
are by how swiftly they can shoot down
suggestions.
The leader’s next task is similar to the
first now that the team has produced an
ample list of ideas. Before we consider
which suggestions to eliminate, let us
marinate in the dry rub of the possible.
Rather than beginning with why it won’t
work, an incredibly important question
by the leader is, ‘why and how could this
idea work?’
It’s a subtle but fundamental pivot in
creative conversation. In considering
a world in which an organisation can
launch something genuinely new, begin
by creating ‘idea houses’. In other words,
how tall of a vision can you build from a
foundational idea? These suggestions
are but the tip of the iceberg in terms of
how the leader shapes the environment
in which innovation excels.
Adam Kingl is an author and leadership
consultant.
February – May 2020 // 51