Report 103

Your newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

Wednesday, 6 October 2010
Issue 173

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your twice-monthly newsletter on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

As always, if you have news about creativity, imagination, ideas, or innovation please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103. Your comments and feedback are also always welcome.

Information on unsubscribing, archives, reprinting articles, etc can be found at the end of this newsletter.

GLORIOUS MISTAKES

How does your company deal with mistakes? If continuous learning from your employees, innovation and even breakthrough innovation are important to you, it is critical you embrace mistakes – at least as sources for learning and invention.

It is a cliché to say that we learn from our mistakes. Indeed, we tend say it more than we practice it. Consider learning in school. In most cultures, young children are taught correct answers to basic questions, such as maths equations, spelling, grammar and the like. Then they are taught to repeat these answers over and over again until the question and answer pairs are embedded in their young brains and those children can say six times six is 36 without even thinking about it. Moreover, the assumption is that if a child were at some point to start giving an incorrect answer, such as six times six is 38, that wrong answer would embed itself in her mind and she would have to work doubly hard to unlearn the wrong answer and then learn the correct answer. Hence the emphasis on memorising correct responses to such questions.

It’s compelling logic. But it is wrong. Research(1,2) has shown the opposite to be true. Children actually learn better when they are put in situations that increase the likelihood that they will make errors. A number of experiments were designed to test this assumption. In each of these experiments, children were given information to learn. In one group, the children were given tasks in which they first had to attempt to retrieve on their own answers to difficult questions. In this group, most of the children did indeed get their initial answers wrong. Then, they were given the correct answers to the questions. It was found that the children in this group learned the information better than the children the group that was taught the information using the old-fashioned rote-learning method.

Don’t Reach for Google

As an adult, there is a lesson to be learned here. If you believe you do not know the answer to a challenging problem, do not immediately Google the problem. Instead, attempt to work out the answer using your own knowledge, experience and assumptions. Then Google. By so doing, you are more likely to learn the correct solution to the problem. Moreover, the process of correcting yourself is likely to be enlightening as well. Why was your guess wrong? What assumptions did you make in the process of making your guess? Alternatively, you may discover that your solution is more effective than what you have found on Google. That’s even better!

As a manager, the lesson to be learned is not to tell starter employees precisely how to do their tasks. Rather, you should let them attempt to work out for themselves how to solve problems – and then, if they fail, give them instructions. This has a twofold benefit. Firstly, new employees will learn how to perform tasks better this way. Secondly, in attempting to come up with their own approach to solving tasks, they may actually come up with a better approach than your company is currently using. That is the first step in the path to process innovation! It goes without saying that when employees might harm themselves or others, this is not the best approach to take – unless of course you are using simulations or another method to prevent injury.

At a higher level of business, there often are not defined means of accomplishing tasks. Indeed, it is at this level that you want employees to demonstrate creative thinking in order to solve problems. Fortunately, if you have allowed starter employees to learn by making mistakes, experienced employees are likely to be both more knowledgeable and more creative in their thinking. This can only work to your company’s advantage!

Mistakes: an Alternative to Training

There is a story, most likely apocryphal, of a manager who launches a major project only to see it fail spectacularly. Rather than revolutionising the business, his company loses $20 million. The manager sends his letter of resignation to the CEO and is in his office gathering his things when his secretary tells the manager that the CEO would like to see him right now.

The manager goes into the CEO’s office and immediately launches into an apology: “I know I blew it with that project. I’ve sent you my letter of resignation. I am sorry.”

The CEO takes the letter of resignation, tears into pieces and says, “son, that $20 million was the most expensive on-the-job training in the history of this company. If you think I am going to let you leave after all you have learned, you must be out of your mind.”

And the truth is, we do learn from mistakes. I learned a great deal about organisational innovation by spending a number of years working in organisations that did everything they could to hinder innovation. By seeing what did not work, I was able to visualise models that and behaviours that I believed would work better. Then, first by looking at successful innovators as well as social-psychological research, I was able confirm some of my theories (and abandon others). Later, in my current work, I have been able to put these models to the test.

Simply looking at successful innovators would not have been enough to allow me to fully understand what works and what does not work in terms of organisational innovation. Looking at failed innovators taught me much more.

Not Admitting Mistakes More Costly

In organisations where mistakes are considered unacceptable, employees are understandably reluctant to admit it when things go wrong. As a result, when a project is failing, the employee in charge is often inclined to continue the project, rather than admit failure. This can be an expensive waste of resources. A hopeless project killed early will cost the company far less than a hopeless project that is allowed to eat resources for months in hopes a miracle will occur. Clearly, even in companies where mistakes are unwelcome, this is not a desirable approach!

This scenario demonstrates two problems with respect to the fear of mistakes. One is the reluctance of people to admit to a mistake, even when it is clear things are going wrong. The second is a reluctance to ask for help to solve a problem, out of fear that asking for help will flag the mistake. Hence, not only are employees reluctant to admit that a project is failing, they are equally reluctant to ask for help that could prevent, or even reverse a failure!

That is a shame. Not only is there much to learn from mistakes. They can also spark off breakthrough innovations.

Some Mistakes Lead to Great Inventions

Perhaps the most famous story of a great invention being discovered as a result of an accident or mistake is the discovery of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming(3). He had been studying staphylococci , a kind of bacteria that can often cause illness in humans. Just before leaving on holiday, he stacked a number of cultures of staphylococci on his lab table and left them there (apparently, he was notoriously untidy). Upon his return, he observed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus, and that the colonies of staphylococci that had immediately surrounded it had been destroyed, while the colonies further away were normal. The fungus was identified as being of the Penicillium genus and hence the name of the first antibiotic and arguably one of the most important discoveries in medical history.

There are two “what-ifs” to consider here. Firstly, what if Mr. Fleming was working in a large company in which mistakes were not tolerated. Upon returning from holiday and seeing that his lab was a mess, or that something was not right with some of his cultures, his first reaction might have been promptly to clean and sterilise everything before his superiors discovered his mistake.

Alternatively, what if Mr. Fleming did not have the medical knowledge that he did actually have. Or what if he simply did not have an inquisitive mind. In either case, he might not have realised the powerful implications hidden in the Petri dish with the fungus.

However, the world is fortunate that Fleming was not employed in a bureaucratic organisation with zero tolerance for mistakes and that he was a brilliant biologist with an inquisitive mind.

What Your Organisation Can Learn from Mistakes

There is no doubt about it, mistakes are proven learning exercises . So much so that managers should sometimes encourage mistakes, especially during the early learning phase of new employees. When people make mistakes, when projects go wrong, when teams screw up, their errors should not be swept under the corporate carpet and forgotten. Rather, they should be shared so that not only the people making the mistakes, but also their colleagues can learn from those mistakes.

Moreover, you never know. By sharing the events that led up to a mistake and the results, someone in your firm may observe an opportunity to profit. More than one breakthrough innovation has been discovered this way. And many more will be – perhaps some of them will be discovered by you and your colleagues.

References

1) “Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning.” (July 2009) by Kornell, Nate; Hays, Matthew Jensen; Bjork, Robert A.; Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 35(4), 989-998.

2) “The Pretesting Effect: Do Unsuccessful Retrieval Attempts Enhance Learning?” (2009) by Richland, Lindsey; Kornell,Nate and Kao, Liche; Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 15, No. 3, 243–257

3) “Alexander Fleming” (2001-2010); Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming

NOBODY WINS THE BLAME GAME

In the 18 September 2010 The Economist featured a leading article on the state of the US economy. The article noted that America is coming out of the recession more slowly than expected. It cited a number of reasons for this, including: “...the political debate is more about assigning blame for the recession than about suggesting imaginative ways to give more oomph to the recovery.”(1) In other words: in spite of the on-coming election, America’s Democrats and Republicans are focusing on blaming the other party for the problem, when they would do better to suggest solutions. And the American people, if not the world, would benefit even more!

The blame game has no winners. Indeed, recent research shows that, “people who blame others for their mistakes lose status, learn less, and perform worse relative to those who own up to their mistakes. Research also shows that the same applies for organizations. Groups and organizations with a rampant culture of blame have a serious disadvantage when it comes to creativity, learning, innovation, and productive risk-taking.”(2). Moreover, the same research indicates that within a group, blaming others is contagious. When one person attempts to relinquish responsibility for a failure by blaming someone else, others in the group tend to follow that person’s lead and also pass on blame for mistakes – even completely unrelated mistakes!

What Interests Me Is Who Can Solve the Problem

When my employees or children play the blame game, I always tell them: “I don’t care who caused the problem, what interests me is who can solve the problem.” Indeed, until time machines are invented, anyone responsible for a mistake cannot go back in time and undo her error. As a manager, your main responsibility is not to assign blame. That seldom solves problems, but often causes bad feelings. Rather your responsibility is to ensure that the problem is solved as quickly as possible. If the ill-result of an error is costing your firm $10,000 per day, spending a day assigning blame will cost your business $10,000 – which only exacerbates the problem. Rather, your main responsibility is to encourage your team to solve problems.

Creative PROBLEM solving (see http://www.creativejeffrey.com/creative/cps.php) is a great approach to use in such situations. It allows you and your team to use your collective imaginations to solve problems. Indeed, in a best case scenario, you may even come up with a solution that leaves you better off than before the mistake was made. As the previous article observes, a number of great inventions have come out of people analysing mistakes and trying to make the best of them. This does not happen when colleagues are playing the blame game rather than working to solve problems! (Again, referring to the previous article, imagine what would have happened if Alexander Fleming had focused on blaming his lab assistant for the mess, rather than studying it!)

What Can You Do?

What can you do as a manager with respect to the blame game? As the previous article notes, you need to create a culture where making mistakes is acceptable; where mistakes are shared so that all can learn from them. After all, if the consequences of making a mistake are trivial, people are far less likely to focus on blame. And if creativity is rewarded, your colleagues will be more likely to go from mistake to problem solving, rather than blame-laying, mode when things go wrong.

Importantly, as a manager, you need to set the example. When you make a mistake, own up to it! Let your subordinates know that you are not ashamed to admit your errors. Then invite your team to help you generate creative ideas!

On the other hand, when people have made mistakes with consequences, particularly if there are legal, ethical or safety issues at stake, you may have to assign blame. Sometimes this is unavoidable. However, the placement of blame should be part of a learning exercise, rather than a reprimand. If a reprimand is necessary, that should be between you and the employee at fault, rather than a public shaming exercise.

Reward Responsibility and Creativity

By the same token, be sure to publicly reward the people who share their mistakes as well as those who solve the resultant problems. This demonstrates that you truly are interested in creative solutions. Such an approach also encourages people to take a more creative approach to all kinds of problem solving.

In summary, as a manager, you need to discourage your people from playing the blame game. Rather they should learn from mistakes and learn to see mistakes as opportunities to show off their creative thinking skills.

References

1) “Are we there yet?” (18 September 2010); The Economist; 11

2) “How To Stop the Blame Game” (13 May 2010) by Nathanael Fast; Harvard Business Review Blog; http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/05/how-to-stop-the-blame-game.html

WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM

Steven Johnson has recently given a thought provoking talk on where good ideas come from. It’s worth listening to his talk at TED. You can see and hear it here: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html

PODCAST WITH LIZ MASSEY AND JEFFREY BAUMGARTNER

Back in January, Liz Massey interviewed me and we enjoyed a wide ranging discussion on creativity, business innovation and idea generation. The interview is now on-line in Liz’s web site and you can download a podcast of the interview on http://creativeliberty.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/interview-with-an-innovator-jeffrey-baumgartner/

About Liz
Liz Massey is a writer, editor, media producer and a creative agent provocateur. Experienced in artistic disciplines as diverse as music, photography, filmmaking and journalism, Liz has a deep hunger to understand how the creative process works. Read more of her work on http://creativeliberty.wordpress.com/services/

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