Want more creativity from your team? Do brainstorming right!

 

Creativity, and the innovation that stems from it, are increasingly valuable for all organizations these days. Some folks even go so far as to say that creativity & innovation are “the engine of growth”. But how do we help our teams actually become more creative?  There is lots of advice out there, such as “encouraging a growth mindset”, building greater trust within the team, and reducing meetings to block out time for creativity. These are all helpful ideas, and I’m not disparaging any of them. But another, simpler, strategy is to go back to a technique most of us are familiar with and have used in the past (or so we think): brainstorming.

 

Brainstorming as a tool and technique goes back to the 1940’s and the work of Alex Osborne, an advertising executive. Osborne formalized the technique in his 1953 book Applied Imagination. In this work, he described the brainstorming technique and laid out the 4 rules for effective brainstorming. Now normally, when I tell people that there are “rules” for brainstorming, they are quite surprised. After all, brainstorming is supposed to be about creativity, new ideas, and even breaking down the rules, right? But following the rules helps to ensure an effective brainstorming process. 

The four rules of brainstorming were set out in Osborne’s 1953 book and are relatively simple.

1)    The more ideas, the better. This is an easy principle of brainstorming to accept. The basic idea here is that the more ideas we have to work with, the greater chance we have of finding an idea that meets all of our criteria in the end. So we sit down and get as many ideas out as possible.

2)    The crazier the idea, the better. This is also an easy principle of brainstorming for folks to accept. Indeed, this is what we often are looking for when we set down to “brainstorm”, is for someone to toss out that really crazy, off-the-wall, creative idea that will lead to the next iPhone, Tesla, 3-D printer, or similar. As more ideas come out on the table, we increase our chance of getting these truly innovative ideas. But we also need to explicitly give people permission to come up truly outlandish ideas, as opposed to censoring their ideas to fit into the constraints that we have (or believe we have). 

3)    “Piggy-backing”, or building on someone else’s idea is welcome. As we listen to someone else’s idea, we often have thoughts about how we could add a little twist to it. This may not count as a “new idea” from an intellectual property perspective, or as we think about “who to give credit to”. But from a brainstorming perspective this is encouraged because these slight variants give rise to other ideas as people continue to build on and react to what others have said.  In my experience, some teams are perfectly okay with this rule. Other teams have a harder time with it, often when team members  feel competitive pressure to come up with the “most” creative idea as individuals, or that they are being evaluated or judged based upon the creativity of the ideas that they come up with individually. If this is happening in your team, you need to do some work moving people from a sense of individual performance to team-based performance.  

4)    Deferring judgement on any idea until all the ideas are on the table. This is the rule that most groups tend to have the most difficulty with. Whether the judgement is a simple “oh, that would be too expensive”, or even a positive “hey, that’s a great idea!”. Once anyone within the team evaluates an idea, all the team members start to evaluate their ideas before they share them. This then leads to fewer ideas overall, and fewer truly innovative ideas. Numerous research studies have found that evaluation apprehension (the fear of having our ideas criticized by others) leads to a significant decrease in both the quantity and quality of ideas that come forward in a brainstorming session. 

So what does this mean for you as a leader? First, understand that as a team leader you have some responsibilities in terms of how the brainstorming session is designed. For example, how large and how diverse a group do you want in the brainstorming session? What background information do you want people to be familiar with beforehand? Are you able to bring in an outsider to help facilitate the session or will you do it yourself?

 

Second, make sure that your team members are familiar with, and truly understand, the 4 rules. An effective brainstorming session is more than simply bringing people together and hoping for spontaneous creativity. Make sure to tell them that they won’t be judged by what they say, and that any idea (even those that might seem impractical or even infeasible) are welcome. Talk to them about the role of the facilitator, and that person will be doing during the process. 

 

Finally, follow up on that by your behavior in the brainstorming session. Demonstrate the rules of brainstorming by piggy-backing off others ideas and putting truly crazy ideas out there. If you or your team is relatively new to true brainstorming, consider having a “warm-up round” first where you work on an unrelated problem, to practice the behaviors of putting ideas out there as quickly and with as little filtering as possible. 

 

Finally, remember that while brainstorming can be an excellent tool, there are plenty of variants out there as well that may be more appropriate for you to use in your situation. For example, if you have a large group and you think people will be talking over each other, or putting ideas out faster than they can be captured, you might consider the “nominal group technique”. If you want to use the brainstorming process to have team members realize the connections between their ideas and viewpoints (for example, if members believe there is conflict or tension within the team), consider using team mind mapping. If you want the brainstorming process to help your team get more comfortable with both coming up with and critiquing ideas and plans, consider the “sub-team” approach – break your team into 2 or more smaller sub-teams. Give the sub-teams time to come up with a certain number of ideas, then have each sub-team present what they think is their best idea for discussion, feedback, and improvement in the larger team session. 

 

Ultimately, the idea generation technique you use will depend on your specific goals and the problems or constraints you have to work with. But a common key across all of these techniques is forcing people to suspend judgement for a period of time to let ideas come out. The more you can do as a team leader to cultivate that sort of intellectual openness and psychological safety in your team, the more creative and innovative thinking you will start to see from your team members. 

Questions to ask when your team is having trouble

 

 A recent article in Harvard Business Review titled "6 Questions to Ask Yourself When You're Frustrated with Your Team" provides some excellent advice about how you might change your own behavior as a team leader. But like so many articles on managing people (either as teams or as individuals), it focuses almost entirely on managing interpersonal interactions and not nearly enough on the importance of creating a context that sets people up for success.

A former mentor of mine, Harvard University psychologist Richard Hackman, once opened a keynote speech by saying that managers shouldn't try to motivate people to change. Instead, he said, managers should focus on putting in place conditions that made positive outcomes more likely, and negative outcomes less likely. He described what he meant by this in his book Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, in which he described what he found through his research on teams in a variety of different industries and settings, from airline crews to intelligence teams to symphony orchestras. Through his research, Hackman identified several critical conditions that supported successful teams across all these very different contexts. In this blog post, I will focus on the first three, which Hackman termed "The Essentials". 

1. Having a Real Team. Real teams have well-defined, stable membership. The team and its members have the authority to conduct their work and make critical decisions without always needing "permission" from someone at a higher level. Finally, real teams conduct their work in an interdependent manner - meaning they do much of their work together, as opposed to coming together in periodic meetings to share updates. So as you look at an underperforming team, ask yourself questions like - do they have a core, stable membership that gives them the consistency needed to learn over time? Do they have the authority they need to complete the task without constantly waiting for external approval? If this appears to be the problem, consider helping the team stabilize its membership. This is often done by reducing the size of the team. 
   
   
2. Having a Compelling Direction. Team members are motivated by having a shared task that is clear, challenging, and consequential. They have been charged with completing specific goals, but have not been told to use specific means to reach those goals. As you look at the team, ask yourself if there is a clear, shared endpoint at all the team members are working towards? Will the challenge of reaching that goal require the team members to work with and learn from each other? Does the team have the authority to manage their own work in terms of how they meet the goal? If this is an issue, help the team by providing clarity around the end goal, and explaining the importance of the project to the organization.
   
   
3. Having the Right People. A major reason that teams work well is that they bring together a diverse group of people in terms of backgrounds, perspectives, and skill sets. But to do that, team members need to have (and trust that all other team members have) certain base levels of skill and competence in their own specialties. When teams don't have the right people, it sometimes is because one or more individuals don't have the knowledge, skill, and ability you thought they had. However, just as often it is because there are too many team members who are just too similar in terms of the skills they bring to the table, their training and the way they solve problems, or the perspectives that they bring. Take a close look at how people were selected for this team, who was chosen, and why? Was it truly based on their knowledge, skill, and ability? Or have some individuals become the "go-to" people for your team?

Thinking about improving your teams by focusing on issues of overall team design has multiple benefits. For starters, focusing on team design allows you to improve the team for the long term. By changing one or more underlying conditions, you remove a problem as opposed to trying to "manage" that problem. So it requires less of your time and effort down the road. Importantly, focusing on underlying issues of team design also helps you (and others) think of poor team performance as being caused by poor conditions (which you can fix), as opposed to poor team members (which you can't). This then leads to lower levels of conflict between you and the people on the team, as you aren't thinking of them (or your own leadership) as the "problem". 

I'll be writing more about various aspects of team design in a later post, so keep looking!

3 Steps to Improve Your Team Debriefs

 

After Action Reviews (AARs) were institutionalized as a practice in the 1970’s by the US military to formalize learning from experience and improve team and unit performance. Their use contributed to significant performance increases, causing this innovation to be rapidly adapted outside the armed forces. But is your organization using them correctly?

 

The AAR was developed as a more participatory alternative to a supervisor driven performance critique. The idea being that by having the critique be driven by team members, rather than a supervisor, a more complete picture of events and interactions can be developed and shared. This shared understanding, in turn, leads to the opportunity to make changes in plans, routines, resources, and interactions, leading to improved performance. The good news is that AAR’s have been shown to improve performance by up to 25%. 

 

But what if your team reviews could be helping you even more? Recent research by Angus Fletcher of the Ohio State University, Preston Cline from the University of Pennsylvania, and Matthew Hoffman of the FBI, conducted in partnership with the US Army Special Forces and described in this article from Harvard Business Review, shows a path forward. 

 

The core strategy they identify is to create greater accountability within the team by developing a clear, shared understanding of what happened. To do this, they advocate 3 steps.

 

1)    Focus on people, not process. Addressing an abstract, impersonal process may feel “safe”, especially early in a team’s life. But that impersonal safety also leads to a lack of passion. Instead, they suggest you personalize the impacts of what happened, and what change could achieve. Do this by focusing on team members, customers, and other stakeholders. Bring their experience and perspectives into the review to highlight the importance of improvement.

2)    Focus more on what happened rather than what could be done. Traditionally, AAR participants spend roughly 25% of the review discussing initial expectations and the instance/performance itself, and 75% of the review focused on the performance gap and what to change. Fletcher, Cline, & Hoffman suggest flipping that ratio to spend much more time ensuring that everyone has a clear, shared sense of what actually happened and that everyone shares their perspective – especially those with divergent points of view. Doing this increases available information, decreases defensiveness, and reduces what psychologists refer as Shared Information Bias. This allow problem areas to be defined with greater clarity and develops a shared focus for creative problem solving later on.

3)    Get clarity and triangulation. Whether someone is claiming credit for a positive outcome, or assigning blame for a negative one, make sure they are clear about how/why “behavior A” led to “outcome B”. What other factors might have influenced the outcome? What other outcomes did this behavior cause? Do others who saw or were present for this behavior agree with this logic?

 

Adding these features to your team debriefs may feel uncomfortable at first, but over time will lead to a greater focus on change and accountability for you and your team. 

Problem people, problematic environments

Anyone who has ever taken a class in organizational behavior, teamwork, leadership, etc. knows that frustration that comes when the instructor is asked a question and the answer is some variation of “it depends…”  There are very few truly reliable answers, answers that cut across contexts, in our field.

One of those truly reliable answers, comes from some of the early work of Kurt Lewin (1890-1947). In 1936 Lewin first proposed the theory that B=f(p*e); that is that for any given person, their behavior (B) is a function of the person (p) (or rather their personality) and the environment (e).

While it easy to look at this theory know and say, “of course, that is just common sense.” One needs to remember however that in the early 20^th century, psychologists (and indeed many others) were fully immersed in the “nature vs. nurture” debate. Freudian psychology, advances in psychological testing such as the IQ test, and longer held traditions such as Plato’s philosophy of the mind and religious beliefs about the soul fueled many people to believe that people behaved in certain ways because that was simply “who they were”, that certain behavioral patterns were inherent in an individual because of genetics, early childhood environment, predestination, etc.

In contrast to the “nature” side of the debate, those on the “nurture” side looked to the philosophy of Aristotle, Locke, and the learning theories developed by initially by Pavlov, Thorndike and others. They argued that human beings are highly pragmatic and shape their behavior in response to the environment. These arguments ultimately led to Pavlov’s theory of operant conditioning or behaviorism, that behavior is purely a function of punishment and reward.

Lewin’s “middle road”, that behavior is based upon both an individual’s personality and their environment, helps us to realize how complex human behavior actually is. Not only does a manager need to come up with potentially a different motivation/reward system for every individual (because people are motivated individually), one needs to realize that events will happen in the work environment which will impact the behavior of even the most focused, most dedicated worker. The problem is how does the manager interpret and react to those situations?  Our tendency (as I will talk more about in a later post) is to interpret these incidents by focusing on the “p” in Lewin’s equation – that a person’s behavior is due to their own motivation, personality, goals or values. However it is critical to remember that sometimes people are simply reacting to the environment around them, whether that be reward systems, deadlines, authority figures, or other aspects of their environments.

The solution then, when encountering a person engaged in problematic behavior, is to first understand whether this particular behavior stems primarily from the person or the environment. Only then can you take the appropriate actions to try to change the behavior.

The functions (and liabilities) of hazing

I don’t wan this blog to be dominated by news about sports teams, as they are only one type of team and are not representative of most of the teams that are in the work world. However recent news events from the sports world do periodically provide great opportunities for us to reflect on teams in general, what makes them work, what we expect of team leaders, etc.

Just this past week there has been a flurry of information about hazing in the American National Football League (NFL). For those of you who haven’t followed the story; Jonathan Martin, a player for the Miami Dolphins, threw down his tray in the team cafeteria and left the team practices without speaking to anyone after being the butt end of what some on the team describe as a series of pranks. These “pranks” reportedly ranged from the use of racial slurs and epithets (Martin is black), a staged event where multiple white team members got up and left the table as soon as Martin sat down, and a series of text messages from one team member in particular (Richie Incognito) that included a variety of threats to Martin and his family.

On the sports radio channels, there have been a lot of people calling in and giving their opinions on whether or not the actions by Incognito and other team members or the reactions by Martin are appropriate given this particular context and the “macho” culture of an NFL team.  While many people (and radio hosts) condemn the actions of Incognito in particular; others also condemn the reactions of Martin, stating that he should just accept this as a natural part of the “hazing” that occurs in this type of culture, and that these types of actions are designed to test the “mental toughness” of new players.

I have never played professional football, so I won’t try to speak with authority on the culture within an NFL team, what is or is not appropriate language, etc. I will however talk about the use and function of “hazing” rituals within teams, as these rituals happen in all sorts of different organizations.

Hazing rituals play a valuable role in organizations. They communicate important information about group norms and expectations, establish and enforce status hierarchies, and reinforce key values. But most importantly, these rituals establish a sense of community. In an organization where people enter as a cohort group (for example a fraternity or sorority, or a military boot camp), the hazing rituals help to establish bonds between the members of the cohort as they all go through the experience together.  In other organizations where members enter one at a time, these rituals reinforce that the individual is a junior member of the team; and that while senior members of the team will engage in this hazing of the junior member, they will also protect that junior member of the team from significant threats coming from outside the team.

These rituals are not intended to test the “mental toughness” of team members; and there is an important reason for that. The actions of Incognito and others served to isolate Martin, which does indeed “test” one’s mental toughness. Isolation is used as an interrogation tactic by police, military and intelligence units as a way to break down an individual. In order to build a team, however, you do not want your team members to feel isolated. You want them instead to always believe that they can always count on their team members for help and support. This way, they become more comfortable engaging in risky behavior (for example, putting one’s body in front of multiple 270 pound defensive ends) and committing themselves to the goals of the team, knowing that in turn the other members of the team will protect them.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, made a very interesting point about the importance of feeling like you are a part of a larger unit. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud commented that most military leaders felt that the perception of panic within a military unit led to the dissolution of the unit, and that therefore one must act directly to reassure the members of the unit that they would be successful. Freud however noted that this thinking was backwards. It isn’t that panic leads to the dissolution of the unit. Instead, it is that the realization that we are not in fact a single unit that leads to the perception of panic. From the beginning of human history, one of our biggest advantages against predators that were larger, stronger and faster than us was that we were able to coordinate our collective efforts to act as a single unit, a team if you will. When we act as a team, we become bigger and stronger, and better able to deal with a variety of external threats.

Therefore from the perspective of the Miami Dolphins, the biggest problem with this incident is not that there may be one individual player who is treating others badly, or even that there may be problems with racism within the team. The biggest problem is that there are behaviors going on that are designed to isolate individual players, preventing them from integrating with the team. And when that happens, you are always going to be playing at least one man short.

Sports teams and other work teams

It’s the middle of October and two of my favorite sports teams (the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots) are both playing this weekend (the Sox are hoping to head to the World Series and the Patriots are in the middle of their season). So I thought I would spend a little time talking about some of the differences between the teams that we see on TV and the teams that make up the majority of our working lives.

You may think there are many differences between your team of co-workers and (for example) the New England Patriots. For example: chances are that none of your team members are making in the neighborhood of $10M annually, none of you regularly host televised press conferences, and none of you are married to super-model.  And you probably think that is just the tip of the iceberg.

From my perspective though, the differences between your team and the Patriots, the Red Sox, or any other professional sports team can be summed up in one word: design.

Team design, how the team is tasked, structured, staffed, supported and rewarded can encompass a slew of different variables and several studies suggest that team design is vastly more important to team performance than interpersonal variables such as cohesion, trust, or leadership. However when we talk about what is going right or wrong with our work teams, we often phrase it in terms of these interpersonal variables. Why?

Interestingly, part of the reason we tend to focus on the variables is probably because those are the variables we hear about when we attend to professional sports teams. Broadcasters and color commentators will talk about “the chemistry” between individuals on the team, about the tensions between coaches and key players, about rivalries between players and between franchises, etc. This makes sense for them, partly because this more interesting to listen to than insightful conversations about team design, but mostly because when watching a sports team in action all of the teams share essentially the same design. Think about it, when was the last time you saw a professional basketball team put 12 players on the court at the same time, or baseball team field 3 pitchers at once? Nearly all of the aspects of team design (with the notable exception of actual skill/talent of individual team members) are clearly articulated as “the rules of the game”.

However in our workplace teams, there are no clearly agreed upon “rules of the game”. Your team is tasked with designing a new product. You may know that your competition is trying to design a similar product; but you don’t know what their time frame is, what the size of their team is, what their budget is, what sort of political support they have from their management, or even if they are collaborating with another organization. Additionally within your own team, roles are not always clearly assigned, team members may or may not have the skills that they need, you may or may not have the resources you need to meet your deadline, and team members may not even have the same definition of success.

Imagine what this scenario would like in a sports arena. “And in tonight’s match, we have Tom Brady, Muhammed Ali, Mary Lou Retton, and the entire pitching staff of the Boston Red Sox against Tiger Woods, LeBron James, and Dale Earnhardt Jr.  The match will begin 3 hours ago and will last until the concession stand sells $40,000 worth of diet soda.” In a situation like this, would you be primarily concerned about the disagreements that Tiger and LeBron have been having about which of them is the best at the pole vault? Of course you wouldn’t. You would be concerned about finding out how “success” is going to be measured, and what you can do to help your team turn it’s apparent disadvantage (only 3 players, Tiger, LeBron and Dale) into some sort of advantage (perhaps through faster decision making, making sure that points can only be scored by dunking a basketball, or trying to earn extra points by posting the fastest average lap time at Daytona).

What does this mean for teams in our day to day lives? It means that time and careful consideration up front to make sure all team members are in agreement about appropriate goals (for both the team and individual team members), clear role assignments, performance measures, and the procedures or norms team members will be expected to follow will lead to high payoffs in terms of team success and team member satisfaction.

Learn the rules of the game, then play ball!