It’s no question that innovation is a key factor in a successful business. Very few businesses, if any, are able to remain profitable, grow, and thrive without innovating. Accomplished leaders recognize that their organization’s continued success and position in the market heavily depends on its ability to drive a culture of innovation. Innovation doesn’t just happen – it must be instilled in the culture throughout an entire organization, from senior leadership to the entry-level, in order to have a lasting impact. A study by Gartner found that 91% of marketers surveyed are leading and supporting innovation initiatives, and 62% said they are solely responsible for such initiatives, showcasing the increasing importance of innovation in today’s workplace.  

“Innovation must be disruptive. And by disruptive, I mean disruptive. You gotta fracture and break the rules and disrupt.” – Howard Shultz, former chairman and CEO of Starbucks 

Today’s business environment is very different than it was 50, 20, 10, even 5 years ago as a result of the pandemic, remote work, advancing technology, and the increasing importance of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) initiatives, and many other factors. If companies are not able to adapt to these and future changing circumstances, they will likely face consequences (such as bankruptcy). In this article, you’ll learn how to drive a culture of innovation at your organization not just in general, but in today’s unique environment.

Allow flexible work options whenever possible

As a result of the pandemic and available technology, organizations and employees have realized the benefits of remote and hybrid work options. Various studies have found that distributed teams equal higher efficiency and innovation. It has also been found that companies that have highly engaged employees have 41% lower absenteeism, 40% fewer quality defects, and 21% high profitability. In other words, working remotely is effective and can drive a culture of innovation due to its flexible nature and high employee satisfaction and engagement.

If remote and/or hybrid work is new to your organization, check out our other articles on distributed workforce best practices, virtual meeting best practices, and remote team culture.

Prioritize DEI initiatives

The US workforce faces grim figures when it comes to DEI, but companies across the nation have shown initiative in fixing the problem. Over the past several years, diversity-related job postings have increased significantly. For example, positions with the title “Head of Diversity” increased 10% since 2015. In the US, there has also been 30% year-over-year growth in diversity & inclusion job postings. Diverse teams are also more likely to drive a culture of innovation. A survey of employees in over 1,700 companies found that companies with an above-average diversity score ranked 19% higher in innovation revenue compared to those with below-average scores.

Utilize Innovation Training

Innovation training is an essential process for almost every company to implement in their workflow and operations. The training encompasses a human-centric approach that focuses on the needs of the customer as opposed to metrics or business goals. Successful teams want to see their company address market needs and evolve with our current times. Innovation training is a great way to show teams the company is always looking at ways to move forward, and also that employees play a prominent role in its growth. It teaches leaders and teams creative ways of thinking and working that push individuals to go beyond the status quo, and therefore improves the bottom line and result in more satisfied customers. It also creates better employee engagement and satisfaction. Innovation training will drive a culture of innovation, along with helping teams and organizations keep up with our world’s increasing fast-paced environment. Learn about our 5 innovation training tips here.

Promote autonomy within your team as much as possible

Autonomy breeds innovation. It also results in more productivity. A study of 307 firms on autonomy and innovation supported the following statements:

• “Allowing the staff to pursue their own ideas during work hours provides time to observe, experiment, and speculate with others. These activities are vital for innovation outcomes.”
• “Tightly defined jobs with low autonomy tend to encourage narrow perspectives.”
• “Individuals produce more creative work when they perceive themselves to have choices regarding how to go about accomplishing the tasks they are given.”

By encouraging your team to be autonomous, you are not only driving a culture of innovation but will likely also see increased employee engagement and productivity.

Have an appetite for risk

Taking risks should not only be tolerated but celebrated and encouraged. Driving a culture of innovation means adopting a more experimental approach to working. Accept the fact that not every idea will be successful – there will be some “failures” along the way to truly successful, innovative ideas. Explore ideas, prototype and test them often, learn what works, what doesn’t, and continue from there. Focus on what you can learn rather than becoming focused on first-time success.

Finally…check out our other resources!

Through our own experience and work in the innovation space, we’ve created and compiled multiple resources on this topic. To help get you started in driving a culture of innovation in your team and at your organization, here are a few articles we recommend checking out first:

• 5 Strategies to Promote an Innovative Culture: How to Create and Sustain a Culture of Innovation
• Innovation Exercises: 5 Ways to Spark Innovation on Your Team
• When Inspiration Doesn’t Strike: How to Overcome Ideation Block
• What is Enterprise Design Thinking? The Principles, Practices and Applications of Enterprise Design Thinking
• The Best Design Thinking Exercises for Each Phase of a Project
• 5 Facilitation Methods for Virtual Collaboration Training

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Driving a culture of innovation is more complex today than it was in the past due to many factors including, but not limited to, increased market competition, a distributed workforce and constantly changing technology. This means it’s more important now than ever before to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Using the tactics outlined in this article is a great starting point to driving a culture of innovation and building great teams and products! 

Does your company need Innovation Training? We can help!

Voltage Control offers a range of options for innovation training. We know that no two teams are alike. Companies are complex with their own unique set of structures and company culture. That’s why we build and curate custom workshops to find solutions based on your team’s exact needs.

Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to learn more about innovation training, design sprints, or design thinking facilitation.

The post Driving a Culture of Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

What could you do, how great could you be if you weren’t afraid? The greatest prohibitor of growth in both our personal and professional lives is ourselves; we stand in our own way. Why? Most often it’s because we lack confidence in our abilities, or what is referred to as a confidence gap. We stop ourselves from achieving greatness because we don’t think we have what it takes to do so, however, we are often well equipped. Our disbelief in ourselves, therefore, keeps up from moving forward even if we have the skillset to succeed. 

The Confidence Gap

Everybody talks about a skills gap as the reason people do not reach their potential–the “gap” that exists between what an employee can actually do and the skills they need to do their job effectively. In other words, they need more knowledge to perform well on the job. However, I’ve found so often that it’s a confidence gap that prevents people most from making progress. Individuals fear that they do not know enough (even though they do) and are therefore not competent. For example, I hear facilitators say all of the time that they deal with imposter syndrome or the feeling that they are far less competent than other people perceive them to be. They feel that they are ill-equipped to lead a team or they question if they are the right person for the job. What this boils down to is a lack of confidence–disbelief in one’s own skills and know-how of what they’re doing, how they’re leading, how they’re showing up in the facilitation space. 

I also see this confidence gap in companies as a whole. It was evident in a Design Sprint we ran for Favor, the food delivery app. They already knew all of the information we presented them, but until the Design Sprint, they lacked the confidence to do the work. The workshop helped them get comfortable with doing the necessary work on their own. In this case, and in so many others I see, it’s not that people lack the knowledge or skill to do something, it’s that they’re not assured of their capability to execute it. 

It’s important to acknowledge that there are a lot of stereotypes and threats that can damage an individual’s confidence and therefore performance. Notably, statistics show that there is a confidence gap between men and women–disproportionately favoring men. A study by Cornell psychologist David Dunning and the Washington State University psychologist Joyce Ehrlinger showed that women avoid careers in science because they believe themselves to be less competent than men. In the study, women and men scored equally on a science quiz but women underestimated their performance because they thought less of their scientific reasoning abilities than men did. Linda Baker, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, shares findings in her book Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide that demonstrate how damaging the implications of this confidence divide can be. In studies of business-school students, she found that men negotiate salary four times more than women do, and when women do negotiate they ask for 30% less money.

The Atlantic explored the gender-influenced confidence gap in their article ‘The Confidence Gap’: “Compared with men, women don’t consider themselves as ready for promotions, they predict they’ll do worse on tests, and they generally underestimate their abilities. This disparity stems from factors ranging from upbringing to biology.” It’s important to be aware of underlined factors that affect confidence so that you can help people remove them as roadblocks when necessary. 

Create a Culture of Confidence

Inspiring confidence in others is essential when you’re a leader. Team members that lack confidence do not perform as well and ultimately hold the entire team back. The best way to help people become comfortable with their skills, and thereby gain confidence, is to practice them. If you are leadership looking to help your team build confidence, one approach is to give them moments of practice. You can encourage building and practicing skills by creating groups or cohorts, building community, and/or establishing Slack groups for people to network and learn from each other. One real-world example of this is Cisco’s Change Lab. It’s a community that meets regularly to support and inspire its members. The group maintains momentum on progress and thereby builds confidence in their skills. 

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One way we offer skillset support and help grow confidence in facilitators at Voltage Control is with our weekly Facilitation Lab; it’s our “confidence booster” for the facilitation community. We intentionally create a safe space for facilitators to practice their skills and get comfortable with facilitation so that they can confidently execute their abilities in real-world situations. 

What are different ways you and your team can support one another to practice your craft and build confidence? Let’s look at a few effective ways leadership can instill confidence to get the most out of their team members.

1. Establish agency/authority of confidence in your team

When companies invest in their team, and more importantly transparently demonstrate to them that they are investing in them, it boosts teams’ confidence. Whether it’s investing time, money, or resources, gestures from authority that communicate, “You are worthwhile and I trust you to do this work,” are ultimately saying, “I have confidence in you.” Individuals tend to have more confidence in themselves when they feel supported by leadership. A real-world example is Adobe’s Kickbox program. It’s an initiative to enable employees to take an active role in their company’s innovation process by submitting and validating their own ideas. Team members receive boxes with necessary open-source materials to help them be more individually innovative. Included in the boxes is a credit card with money on it to support individuals’ ideas. Diana Joseph, former Senior Manager of Learning Research at Adobe, now CEO of the Corporate Accelerator Forum, says “the credit card in each Kickbox sends a clear message that the company trusts the employee — to do meaningful things when given the resources and to recognize what’s worth doing in the first place.  In other words, the company trusts you to lead.”

2. Create an intrinsically comfortable environment for people to grow 

While it’s necessary for people to practice their skills in order to get better, many people are afraid to do so. They fear that if they make a mistake it will reflect badly upon their capabilities. The irony is that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only way to practice and build skills is to get comfortable with failing forward. Doing something is the only way to learn how to do it and failure inevitably accompanies it. When leadership creates a safe environment for people to try and fail, team members are more comfortable taking action. People need to know that leadership believes in them. Establish a foundation of psychological safety in your organization. Let team members know that not only is it okay for them to fail, but it’s encouraged because it’s how they grow. Prioritize growth over perfection. Team members feel supported and safe to build their skills when leadership shows that they value their growth and support its evolution. 

3. Break the Learning loop 

It’s one thing to think about what you want to learn or the skills you want to obtain and another thing entirely to actually experience learning them. The best way to learn is to learn by doing. You can know something cognitively, it can theoretically make sense, but it won’t completely “click” for you until you experience it for yourself. For example, say you want to learn how to throw a baseball. You can read about how to throw a baseball and understand how it works, but you won’t know how to do it until you actually try it for yourself. It’s imperative that you prioritize actionable learning–that is, learning skills by exercising them–to help people build confidence. The more people practice, the more capable they feel to execute, and the more confident they feel in their abilities. The more confident and capable they feel, the more they’ll want to practice to get better, and so on. It’s a loop that feeds into itself. You can help team members break the traditional learning loop by offering hands-on training and opportunities for them to learn by doing the work themselves. 

Overconfidence

While success positively correlates with confidence as much as it does competence, it’s important to consider “overconfidence”. Be wary of resistance to learning with people who are overconfident in their abilities. When someone overtly thinks they are an expert on a subject, they are less likely to welcome in new information: “I know everything there is to know; I’m an expert.” This mindset can actually lead to a decrease in performance. If individuals are blocking themselves from practicing and learning, they are not getting the essential learning-by-doing experience they need to continue growing. Someone may talk the talk, but can they walk the walk? Again, the only way to improve your skillset is to practice using it; do what you know to continue learning instead of just talking about what you know.

Now, overconfidence can also be beneficial if combined with humility and practice. When someone overestimates their abilities, is humble about it, and continues to practice their skill set, they are more likely to believe in themselves and therefore execute well. In this way, their overconfidence lays the way for them to continue learning because they feel that they are already competent to do so. Fear or lack of confidence does not stand in their way.  Their belief in themselves positively correlates with their willingness and capability to learn. 

Put on the training wheels, then take them off

So you’ve invested in your team to show them you have confidence in them, you’ve created a psychologically safe environment for them to grow in, and you’ve provided them with the support and tools they need to learn by doing. Now what? It’s important to keep the “training wheels” on–or offer the support team members need–until they feel they can roll without them. However, there is a delicate balance between offering support and holding peoples’ hands to a fault; there is an element of assistance as well as an element of “set them free”. Remember, the best way to learn is by doing. Offer necessary support along the way but leave room for people to try and fail. 

Get the most out of your team members (and yourself!) by intentionally fostering confidence and exercising your skills as often as you can. 

Practice Makes Competent

We offer an array of resources and opportunities for professionals (of all levels) to practice their skills and grow more confidence in them.

Community/Groups

• Weekly Facilitation Lab: a safe and experimental space for facilitators to learn, network, and evolve.
• Control the Room community: share experiences and learn from/with peers in the facilitation community. 

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• Design Thinking Foundations: learn the key foundations in design thinking to better solve problems and seize opportunities.

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• Events calendar: join us for live training workshops and facilitation conferences. 

The post Bridge the Confidence Gap: How to Instill Confidence in Your Team appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Once people have the experience [to step] outside and they’re willing…to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, ‘Oh my, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.’” -Liya James 

In this episode of Control the Room, Liya James and I discuss the value of environment shifts in organizations to unleash creativity and the significance of a creative & courageous mindset in the workplace. We explore the space companies must offer employees so they can be their most authentic selves, and the unique purpose of Liya’s new book, The Get Real Method. Listen in to hear Liya’s perspective on empowering members of your organization to thrive in creativity and courageousness while simultaneously unlocking diversity & meaningful innovation. Liya also explains the impact of manifestation, creating the work-life career you want to live to start now, and sharing the skill sets necessary to living a fulfilled life. 

Show Highlights

[1:33] Liya’s UX Career Start
[9:01] The Environment Shift to Unleashing an Opening 
[16:34] The Creative & Courageous Mindset   
[26:56] Finding the Space 
[29:37] Liya’s Book: The Get Real Method

Links | Resources

Liya’s LinkedIn
Liya James
The Get Real Method

About the Guest

Liya James is a design entrepreneur turned author and speaker. She offers opportunities to help people tap into their creative courage when it matters the most so that they can implement the power of their imagination to create anything they want in business and life. Her approach spans nearly two decades of experience in design innovation. She has worked alongside disruptive startup founders whose collective exits total several billion dollars. Liya has delivered innovation and creativity training to leaders at some of the world’s largest brands, including Mercedes, LinkedIn, AT&T, IBM, and HP. Her book “The Get Real Method: Create The Life You Want And Do Work That Matters” is now available.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, the series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download The Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Today, I’m with Liya James, a design entrepreneur turned author and speaker. Her book The Get Real Method: Create The Life You Want And Do Work That Matters is available now. Welcome to the show, Liya.

Liya James:

Thanks, Douglas. It’s good to be here.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. It’s been a while since we connected and I’m super excited to have this conversation. So let’s get started with just a little background on how you got your start.

Liya James:

That’s a great question. Well, I don’t want to go way back, but I have spent about 20 years working in the UX field, UX problems of all sorts in all kinds of settings, startups, corporate environments, freelancing agency, you name it. That was really how I got my start. And that work was really about focusing on how to make machines more human, so when we interact with them, it works for us.

And essentially I got exposed to a lot of human suffering in that process. I saw teams trying to innovate and bring ideas to the table and designers basically trying to work on their charter of figuring out what’s the next big thing, right? And during this project and, and working with teams, I really saw that the processes that we were using for innovation worked to some extent, but they really failed people. A lot of times we were able to create products and launch them into the market and help our customers, but in the process we leave some bodies behind.

And so that experience helped me thought about… When I moved to Austin, I started a design studio. And as part of that business, we said, “Well, let’s figure this out. Let’s try and see if we can help executives and leaders understand creativity a little bit more and how they can apply it to their businesses.” So we started this, we launched and designed this whole training around design leadership, creative leadership, and all over the world we were teaching it.

And that’s when I really had a big aha moment about the work experience. I saw people reconnect with themselves in these trainings and workshops like where, I mean, I saw grown men cry at the end of the training, and I saw people tap into their creativity imagination. Just in this training, we had people sort of use all their senses to create and understand methods of how you connect with your customers, but also just connect with people at a human level.

And I would push people to tap into their own imagination and just let it go. Because it was a safe environment. You’re not at work. We take you out of that space. Right? And we said, “Just go,” right? Because I know in my teams know at that time that you’re born with creativity and all we have to do is get you to experience it. So you know what your designers and your creative teams are actually going through when they have to stare at a blank piece of paper and do the work you’re asking to do. Right?

And the result of that experience was me actually being present to these intimate moments of seeing people wake up to their own creativity and their God given power of imagination. And sometimes you see corporate executives being shaken by that.

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Liya James:

You just have these glimpses of people doing that.

Douglas:

It’s really fascinating, just this idea of professionalism and how people have been kind of conditioned to almost not be creative because we needed to act in a certain way and behave and say certain things and dress a certain way. And I see so many people that are afraid to step out because that means there’ll be recognized as being a little different. But as soon as they do it, it’s so liberating. And so I’ve seen it a bunch and what you speak to is very powerful and it’s so great to see other people doing this kind of work.

What have you noticed to be kind of the triggers or the moves or prompts that are most effective, when you’re getting pushback or someone’s being a little bit resistant? What’s helpful to get them to basically get up and dance?

Liya James:

Well, sometimes it’s just a little push or shift in your environment, right? So when we were developing this training, I was very adamant that we find places that are natural. Take people out of the conference room. So leaving an environment and just getting a new perspective can sometimes draw people into, “Oh…” For example, in Silicon Valley, we would have the setting where there’s fruit trees everywhere. And it’s not a conference room, it’s like a house, you know?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Liya James:

And so, in fact, the last design studio that I ran, we would often find spaces to have our studios where it doesn’t look like a corporate environment. And we’d bring in a lot of nature because for people to feel safe… I think safe is a really big deal when it comes to creativity. Right? So we want to craft places of belonging and places where people feel like, “Oh, this is like a home.” Right?

And you can do that inside a corporate environment too. Right? We’re seeing a lot of corporations starting to design where they would dedicate creativity spaces to do the work, where it’s not cubicles and it’s not necessarily conference rooms. IBM is a really good example of that. When they established their design studio here in Austin, they put a lot of intention into how the space makes somebody feel, right?

So I think space is one thing. And then the energy is the other thing. So one of the things that I always do in these trainings is I would incorporate things that may not seem like relevant. For breaks between exercises or between modules, where we’re teaching people new ideas, we might meditate for five minutes. So I do a lot of things that people don’t normally do or expect to do in a training setting where you’re in a corporate environment. And we would often hear people say, “We want to bottle up the energy in this training and bring it back to work.” So really paying a lot of attention to the experience side of it and not just the content I think is a big trick in thinking about that.

Douglas:

I think you’re dead on with all of that. The space, the context matters so much. And also this notion of the experience and this comes back to some advice that we give around meetings and how people… The classic advice is always make sure you’re having an agenda. Well, an agenda typically is a list of topics. It’s very content centered, where if we take a moment to step back and look and say, “What’s the experience? How do we want to start? How do we want to end? What kind of journey do we want to take people on?” I think that’s such good advice.

I want to come back to the space piece from a learning science and a retention and integration standpoint. I’ve always struggled with, there’s a risk of when we take someone out of their environment and they go learn some new thing. Now they have to bridge that gap between that place where they discovered these things and try to apply them in the day-to-day. Right?

Liya James:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And so what are some of your go-to approaches for helping people bridge that gap? Because I agree with you, it is helpful to not have the distractions of the office and to give people the courage to actually kind of jump into this new way of being. But once they’re now, they’ve felt that feeling, how do we help them translate that back into the day-to-day?

Liya James:

Well, what’s interesting is that we create an opening, right? And then people get curious, right? So one of the things that we were really intentional in doing, and I still do that to this day. First of all, I want to circle back to something you said, which is, I don’t think about meetings as its own separate thing, because if you think about it, we’re spending all of our time in meetings. So that’s essentially synonymous to work right?

Now, what’s awesome about what you guys are doing, and I think facilitators in general, is that now it’s becoming accepted that somebody can take the role of design in that experience for people so that we can go from elevate these okay or maybe not even okay meetings to amazing experiences. And to me, doing that is actually about elevating the human experience. Because it’s purely just because of how much time we’re spending in meetings in our lives in general. So I want to say that.

And then the second thing is it doesn’t take that much. That’s the great thing about shifting environment. So we shift the environment, take people out of their work so that they can open up, but once they open up that opening stays there. Right? And so for example, in a lot of the trainings and facilitation I do, I assemble kits. And in those kits are really simple things like Play-Doh, pipe cleaners, Post-its glue sticks, things that you’d find around your house, that your kids are playing with all the time. So it’s very accessible, right?

So once people have the experience outside and they’re willing to use these things to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, “Oh my God, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.” Right? Then what they can do is, at the end of the training, we always say, “It’s really simple. You don’t even have to have dedicated space. Put some big foam board up. Suddenly you have creative space. Buy eight pieces of foam core, put it up around your office, wherever, outside of your cubicle, put stuff up. Here’s a box.” And we actually let people take it home.

We usually give them a bag at the end, and we’re like, “Put all this stuff in there because we want you to have…” I actually created diagrams of what the things are, what are they good for and where they can go and buy them, pretty much at Michael’s or any store, Target. So we make it really accessible, right? So it’s not saying you have to invest tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in order to have innovation and creativity. All you have to do is have the willingness, but that connection to the self is super important, I think, in order for that opening to be there.

Douglas:

It also makes me think of, you mentioned creating this opening and creating this curiosity, and it made me think about how that negativity is addictive, right? If someone starts getting negative, all of a sudden you start seeing the negativity brewing because people love to commiserate. Curiosity is also addictive. If we start all actively practicing curiosity, everyone starts to kind of do it. Right? And so as leaders, if we can kind of shape the direction of kind of where we want our organizations to grow, it has a way of kind of infecting things in a good way, right? That curiosity can go viral.

And likewise, when you were talking about all you had to do is put up some foam core, et cetera. It made me think about this notion of exhaust. Activities have exhaust. They require supplies, they create artifacts, and that is a reminder of what we’ve been doing. And also if the supplies are laying around, then it’s really easy to go back into those activities. Right? We’ve got it. It’s at our fingertips. It’s not in a closet somewhere.

So just bringing those things out and honoring the fact that this is what we want to do. This is how we want to spend our time and making it easy to be curious and explore. I think that is so much more powerful than worrying about like, “Do we have the best view and is it all glass?” And all these kinds of things, right? Is it just comfortable to think and do people have stuff available to them?

Liya James:

Yeah, and I think a lot of… In the old days, I think it’s more accepted now to play. Playing at work, serious play is a bit more, I think, accepted in the corporate environment. But we also have this just limiting belief about work, that it has to be serious, quote-unquote. Right? But on the other hand, we’re demanding of every department at the company should be innovating. And unfortunately, if we’re not tapped in to our ability to have ideas and come up with new ways of thinking. If we’re not tapped into that, we really can’t be innovative. Right?

Douglas:

That strikes a big chord with me, Liya. What’s the classic place where everyone thinks of ideas? It’s the shower, right? That’s the classic example, right?

Liya James:

Yes.

Douglas:

I came up with it when I was… Why is that? Right? Well, it’s because I took a moment away from everything else and the idea came to me.

Liya James:

Right.

Douglas:

And so where does innovation and ideas come from? It comes from free space.

Liya James:

Yes, yes.

Douglas:

When you create space, innovation rushes in. Yet companies are so fearful of their need to change and move fast that they just literally cram their schedules full of activities, and they don’t leave that room for innovation to creep in. And what you say resonates with me deeply because it’s like if we don’t allow ourselves that ability in that space, then we’re just kind of just stamping stuff and just on repetition.

It brings me back to something you mentioned in the pre-show chat, which is this kind of conundrum around when we’re faced with this idea of serious play or kind of just letting loose a little bit of this kind of pre-conceived notion of what is work. People are confronted with this question of: Is this professional? And how can people move past that moment of maybe anxiety and actually bring their best self to work? I mean, you told me that that is the only way that people can be truly courageous.

Liya James:

Yeah. So we were talking earlier about this pyramid that I’m developing with belonging on the bottom, creativity, courage and innovation… Innovation ultimately at the very top, right? If there was a hierarchy of company culture and on the other side, you get innovation. The company’s self-actualization, right? I think that belonging’s on the bottom and you have to have creativity and courage in the middle.

And the reason for that is that feature parity is such a common thing still, right? If a competitor’s doing that so we have to do that. We have to do more than that. Right? But we all know though that deep inside that’s not how innovation happens and that’s not how you beat the competition. Okay? And it does sound counterintuitive to go back to belonging. How does that even belong in the conversation of innovation, right?

And the more I’m studying this, the more I’m realizing that the experience of work has to allow for the whole person to come to it. And because why? Because creativity, the root of innovation, has to do with lots of ideas. Where do lots of ideas come from? Diversity. And if people can’t bring their whole selves to work, you have uniformity. Uniformity, it is the opposite of diversity.

So as facilitators and designers and leaders of all kinds, our mission then is really to say, “How do we create an inclusive culture where people feel comfortable bringing themselves to work, their whole selves, all of their perspectives, all of their background and knowledge and lived experience?” Because without that, you’re not going to get unique perspectives. And guess what? The world, the people you’re selling to, are made up of people with all of these unique experiences, shared experiences as well as unique experiences, right? It’s a very intersectional world out there.

And if we’re not tapping into these perspectives, innovation’s not really possible, because we’re just recycling the same ideas over and over again, and sure there’s a place for remixing. Right? But there’s definitely… You and I both know because we’ve been in this space for so long. There’s definitely limits to that. Right? So I think right now there’s just a really amazing opening right now where people are asking corporations, organizations of all kinds are asking, how can we be more inclusive? And what I would say is start with allowing people to bring their whole selves to work and be creatively courageous. Right?

Douglas:

Yeah. The thing that really jumps to me, it was a quote that I’ve lived by for years now, which is, if we’re all thinking the same, nobody’s thinking.

Liya James:

Yeah, yeah, that fish bowl effect.

Douglas:

It’s not condemning anybody. It’s actually condemning the system if anything. Because if we’ve created a culture or a system where people don’t feel safe, the psychological safety is just so abysmal that they can’t bring their whole self and they’re not able to even let those thoughts surface because they’ve got barriers in place, protective barriers. They’ve had to set boundaries just so that they can even show up. And that’s very dysfunctional and we may be doing just fine as a company, but we might be missing out on excellence, right?

Liya James:

Yes.

Douglas:

And that’s where it’s sometimes hard for people to really understand or factor these things in. But any leader will tell you their number one expense is payroll. And you hire and spend so much time recruiting these amazing people. Why would you want them functioning at 50%, 60, 70, even 80%? When we could be functioning at 80% and it’s not that hard to do. It’s just to your point about making people feel safe, including them, making sure they’re seen, heard, and respected. And next thing you know, the things start flourishing.

And if someone’s not flourishing in that environment, that’s a really healthy thing. It becomes very clear and we can understand, “Hey, you’re going to flourish somewhere else. The values are mismatch here and our work to create more belonging has made that more apparent. Let’s find a place that you’ll be better fit for.” And then we can likewise find someone that’s going to thrive in this environment. And so belonging is not about, in my mind, not about just kind of changing the company to suit everybody, but it’s about making sure that we create space for everyone to thrive that aligns with the values.

So anyway, I get really passionate about this and I love that your work has focused on it now. I want to come back to, I started thinking a bit during this conversation about maybe how courage and curiosity kind of work together in an interesting way. And I hadn’t thought about this much before, but during this conversation that’s been coming up a bunch for me. And because the curiosity that opened that door for folks in the example you gave, gave them the courage to change their thinking and change their behaviors. And so I’d just be interested to hear your thoughts on this kind of connection between curiosity and courage,

Liya James:

Curiosity and courage, they go hand in hand. So I’m so glad you made that connection. Actually, there was a book, I think it came out in the ’80s called Tribal Leadership. Have you come across that book? And it was a really cool study that they did with like 12,000 people in all different corporate environments. And they were looking at groups of people and how they form effective tribes at work. Okay?

And in that finding, they put tribes in different levels. And what they found is level five, which not even Apple as a company can stay in, in that space. But one of the key indicators of top performing teams from the study is that they have this really interesting thing where everybody in the company have access to what they call innocent wonderment. And what that means… David Kelly talks about it, the IDEO founder, about sort of this childlike, innocent, creative opening to thinking about ideas. And it’s connected to our ability to not always be thinking about who are we competing with, but what is our ultimate kind of purpose and goal for existing, right?

So we all know that the why is really important at work. But I think people have a really hard time tapping into that like, “How do I connect my work with the why? How do I be productive?” Right? And what’s really cool about this skillset, I think it’s a skillset, innocent wonderment, is to be able to have the space to say, “What if? What if this happened? What if I were to combine this and that?” And to say, “You know what, I don’t have data to support that. But my company says it’s okay for me to tap into my courage and try things anyway.”

Because as you and I both know, innovation isn’t… When you come up with ideas that actually work in the market and in a way that it blows everybody’s mind, the path there is never bulletproof data. Right? It’s courage. You wrote a book on remix, right? So it’s our ability to put ideas that normally don’t go together together and try it. And then you create data along the way. So in order for us to have real creative courage, that possibility, that safety to be able to do this, to sometimes tap into that creative wonderment or that innocent wonderment is really important.

Douglas:

This concept of innocent wonderment’s so beautiful. And it comes back to what we were talking about earlier on space and slack time, because I don’t think you can find that innocent wonderment if your cortisol levels are just totally jacked up and you’re just high anxiety and running from task to task. It’s just like that space for innovation. Right? We can’t find that momentum unless we kind of nurture it and give space for it to emerge.

And likewise, there’s an element of courage that comes from, I would say, endorsement, or when authority gives permission so to speak. And that might sound a bit too controlling, but it can be kind of almost inherent permission or just the culture is set up to where everyone feels like they have permission. That gives you courage, right? Versus feeling like you have to get things approved or everything gets shut down.

And then it also reminds me of a topic that’s very prevalent in the innovation space, which is creating a learning culture, right? Or some people will talk about fast to fail or safe to fail. But to me it’s really about learning versus failure, but still the point is if we develop a culture where we’re really focused on learning and we get excited about what we learn, that creates courage, because then we don’t have any fear about repercussions or failing.

Liya James:

And I want to go back to one more point that you were trying to get at before too, is this idea of how do we give people space? How do we give people permission? And sometimes it’s really from a leadership perspective and a facilitator perspective, because I don’t see the difference between the two, is sometimes it’s a one minute thing, right? So about five years ago, I shifted my practice to primarily work with mission-based companies. And one of the first ones that I worked with really changed my perspective because I was really struggling with this idea of like, “Well, how do you be professional and do all these things I know works?”

And we’re all really secretive about it. We don’t talk about it at work, but we do it at home, right? Like you said, we do yoga, we meditate or we journal, we do all these things that we know helps us tap into our creativity and our thinking. Right? But we don’t do it at work because we don’t think there’s a place for it. But I was working with this company and they happened to be in the space of meditation. And so oftentimes I would be part of really important meetings, because we were consulting on some strategic work.

And they often would open an important meeting with a meditation. It’s not hierarchical. Anybody who would feel called to do it would lead it. And sometimes it’s about intention setting with the meditation. And it really puts you in this place of like, “Oh yeah, this is what we’re here to do. This is our intention.” And sometimes, for example, if there’s like major world events going on or during this time with pandemic and racism and all this stuff going, sometimes we would do wellness scans at a check-in. We just go around and say, “Okay, how are we feeling at a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual level?” And people can just go around and check in on that, 30 seconds, a minute per person. Right?

And since then I’ve worked with a lot of companies that have different cultures like this, not all the same and not all the same methodologies, but it’s a reflection of what the group wants at work. And what I noticed is that it does not take away from the productivity and the professionalism. In fact, it’s key to it. And it’s addictive like you said. I look forward to seeing these groups of people instead of… Sometimes I’ve had experiences with client work where you just dread it, like, “Ugh, Wednesday, there’s a meeting and I’m dreading it.”

Douglas:

So I want to move into a bit of a closer and we haven’t had much opportunity to talk about The Get Real Method and the book is out now. And I’d love just to hear a little bit about what’s it all about and what should our listeners know? Is there any tidbit that you might think that they’ll find especially helpful? What’s it all about?

Liya James:

Yeah. So The Get Real Method, so on my journey of figuring out this innovation thing and how belonging plays into it, what I realized is that right now we have this great turning, great opening where organizations are saying, “We want people to feel a sense of belonging. McKinsey is telling us this is good and there’s data to support it.” Well, if people aren’t used to that, it will be really hard for them to bring their full selves to work. And so this book was actually the beginning of this pyramid.

So I wanted to arm people with the techniques and tools that we designers actually know very well. So the book is actually really about arming people with the skillsets to find their whole selves, what it means for them individually to be fulfilled, to do meaningful work. Who are you? I have a three-step method in there that talks about how do you sense where you are, how to attune, use attunement to understand where you want to go next and manifesting your visions.

And this is actually all the same methodologies we use in design thinking. And so the book is really how to be your own design strategist in life and be powerful at work. Right? How to stand for something, and also at the end of the day, what it’s really about is to be able to show up with your full self, wherever you are, whether at home, at work at play. Right? So The Get Real Method is really about the first step in that creative courage, innovation journey.

And I’m hoping that, for your audience, I think when I say the word design strategist, that they’ll get it. And there’s a little sprinkle of ancient wisdom in there too. So it should be really fun and it’s filled with workshops and step-by-step how-tos, so I’m not leaving you with just ideas and concepts, but it’s very practical.

Douglas:

Yeah. So good. I love this idea of an environment scan and then kind of just checking in and attuning and going, “Well, what’s really going on here?” And then also kind of this future casting. Well, if I want this bad enough, what does it really mean to manifest it? And it’s important work if we really want to shape our future versus just sitting around and waiting for it just to happen to us.

Liya James:

Yeah. There’s no reason to wait.

Douglas:

No doubt. Liya, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on today. I want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Liya James:

Well, creative courage means doing what it takes to make a vision real, even if you don’t have all the answers. So I would encourage everyone to not wait for the answers. Don’t do a whole lot of planning and go for it, whatever it is you’re searching for and whatever you’re trying to make happen.

Douglas:

And how can they find the book and maybe connect with you or learn more about the work that you continue to do?

Liya James:

Definitely. I am on LinkedIn. That’s my only social media platform. So Liya James, look me up. I think I’m the only Liya James, and then liyajames.com is where I share all of my latest thinking and the book is available on Amazon now so definitely go get it.

Douglas:

Yeah, definitely check out The Get Real Method. And, Liya, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for joining me.

Liya James:

Thanks, Douglas.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. Voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 53: Create a Courageous Culture appeared first on Voltage Control.

Christina Wodtke, author of best-selling book Radical Focus and a lecturer at Stanford University, has helped grow companies such as LinkedIn, Zynga, Yahoo, and The New York Times. She speaks worldwide about humanity, teamwork, and the journey to excellence. Christina describes herself as a “curious human with a serious resume.”

I had the pleasure of speaking with Christina about the work she does with her students, the importance of lining up one’s values with the values of the company they choose to work for, and the ethics of innovation.

Douglas: Let’s start with this – tell me a little bit about how you got started in the work that you do.

Christina: Oh, that’s a very difficult question considering that I’ve taken the scenic route to get here.

Douglas: Yeah, that’s great.

Christina: I went to art school and moved to San Francisco, and painted, and waited tables for a few years, just chilling out until the internet showed up and a friend of my boyfriend said, “CNET’s building a Yahoo killer. Do you want to work on it?” I was like, “I’m sick of what I’m doing. I’ll try it.” I was reviewing 50 websites a week for the directory and I just fell in love with the web so hard. It was the best way in the world to find this universe where people are creating things as fast as you discover them one day I wondered, just how hard is it to make a webpage?  So, I taught myself some HTML and I started working at eGreetings and from there, I became an information architect and a design manager at Yahoo, and built a startup and sold it to LinkedIn.

Douglas: Oh, cool. What startup?

Christina: It was a tool for blogs that have many people working together in an editing process. At the time, we were looking at all the blogs and we figured the ones that made money… like say Tech Crunch, which I don’t think anybody thinks of as a blog anymore, but they had editing processes and no blog software supported it. So, we built PublicSquare and then… I actually have a silly story, which is I just read Four Steps to Epiphany, and this is a long time ago. This is before lean startup, before all that stuff. I’d read it and I was like, “Shoot! I think we’re doomed.” I’ve always felt that authors are just people, which means I have a hope of talking to them.

So, I try to look up Steve Blank and I find a phone number for him and I call and it turns out it’s his home phone number. His wife answers it, she goes, “I think it’s one of your students, Steve.” I talked to him and he says, “Do you want to come out to my place in Half Moon Bay?” I drove out there. I must’ve talked to him for two hours and at the end, I was like, “I’m definitely doomed. I think I’m going to try to sell it.” So, I shopped around and I was lucky enough that LinkedIn was under 200 people then. I met with Alan Blue, and met with Reid Hoffman and just really loved them. They mostly just wanted me and my engineer, although we ended up using the base of the software to build an events product, which is now gone. Funnily enough, they just released another events platform. Anyhow, it all started with me saying, why not try talking to Steve Blank?

Douglas: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’ve recently stumbled on that just in the journey of writing and looking for mentors and I found that it’s really fascinating. I guess maybe not many people reach out to them. Especially when you tell them that you’re writing, then they’re like, “Oh, yes. I want to talk about writing. No one else seems to talk about writing.”

Christina: Oh, yeah. And it helps that you have platforms like social media. In my case, I’ve just always felt really comfortable reaching out to whomever. And people do respond, as long as I do the research and get all the dumb questions out of the way. I find that almost anybody will talk to you if you’re asking really smart questions.

So after I worked at LinkedIn, I worked at MySpace, and I worked at Zynga. I got so burned out and I quit Zynga. This was the first time I quit without having the next thing lined up.  I was like, “Oh god, what am I going to do? I hate everything and I hate everybody.” I was really burned out. But I’ve been a lean startup person most of my life and I started coming up with hypotheses for my future like maybe I’d work in the food industry. So, I took the six-week culinary program and I’m like, “No, this is too hard on the body.” And I’m like, “Maybe I want to work in a food startup,” and then I worked as an adviser for a food startup. I’m like, “No! This is ruining my love of food.” Margins are really tight in the food industry.

And then I thought, “Maybe I’d like to teach.” So, I taught a night class at General Assembly and I’m like, “Yes! I love teaching.” So, from there, I went to CCA, California College of the Arts, and now I’m at Stanford. I feel like a lot of people would be like, “I hate my industry. I’m going to go become a teacher,” and then get a PhD. I found that it made a lot more sense to figure out if I like teaching before I went down that six-year path and it turned out it wasn’t really needed. I feel so much like a imposter at Stanford, but my life experience was enough for them to feel like I had something to give to students.

Douglas: Very cool. What do you think the work you’re doing with students, how is that different than what you see in the industry? Because I’m always fascinated by the stuff that academia is looking at versus what practitioners are doing and startups are actually up to.

Christina: I think a lot in my current life has more in common with my past life than different in a lot of ways, although I miss launching things. I really love putting product into the world. That’s why I write books, I think, is because there’s no feeling in the world better than having something that you’ve worked on for months, and months, and months and then release it to the world and see what happens. I think books scratch that itch for me now. But a lot of what I was doing … by the time I joined LinkedIn I was a product manager and then I was a general manager and if you’re a manager, so much of your work is about understanding people and growing people that I feel like there’s a lot of connections between managing people, teaching people, and coaching people. I’ve managed to take a lot of techniques from managing and from coaching into the classroom.

So, a lot of people think that you learn by being talked at and that has been proven not to be true at all. We don’t learn with our ears, we learn with our hands. So, I teach in this classic art school method of studio where I give students projects and they have to go out and interview potential users, and understand what their needs are and what their problems are, and then turn that into an idea for a product to design. But within that structure, it’s always about being really committed to the individuals who have come into your classroom, and understand what their goals are, and how they want to grow, and who do they want to become and then teach them the things that they don’t even know they need to be successful.

It makes me think about back when I was managing, the difference is I can’t fire a student. I can flunk them, but I can’t fire them. But when I was managing people, a lot of times, I’d have a problem person and just like with a problem student, you want to get down to why aren’t they succeeding in the way that they want to? They want to be good at their job. I want them to be good at their job. So, there’s this interesting mystery of what’s going on here, right? Are our goals misaligned? Did they not fully understand what the goal from the project is? Are they missing some skills? Do they need a little extra help? Is there some cultural divide where their model of how the world works is not matching my model of how the world works?

So much of what we do in tech is working with large teams, right? And so, when you’re in the classroom, it’s still the same question of how do you try to make sure that everybody’s meeting their goal? My goal for them and their goal for them. I think that if people would change how they think about management and stop thinking of it as do what I tell you to, but think of it more as a group of really smart, amazing individuals that you are providing leadership and coaching to, I think most companies would do better as well.

Douglas: Yeah. It made me think of more complexity in formed organizations and self-organizing teams. I’m curious how that … I mean, because I’m totally a fan of everything you just said and so I’m curious how that relates to self-organizing teams because they have that extra dynamic of there’s maybe not a person that is in charge of figuring that out.

Christina: Well, I’m also a fan of self-organizing teams to the degree that after my first book, Radical Focus, did well, a lot of people came and said, “Well, what about this and what about that? How do we deal with conflict and how do we deal with performance reviews?” So, my new book, The Team that Managed Itself, is much more about that and it is … How can I put this? You always have to be aligned with something, right? So, if you have a self-organizing team, they are organized, brought into a team in service to the company in some way. So, if you’re a team that’s been brought together to improve the acquisition of new customers or if you’re a team that’s been brought together to perhaps create a new offering and a new market that you’ve never seen before, teams are usually organized for some purpose, but then often you have to reflect back to your manager, your boss. What does that really mean? How do we make that concrete?

That’s a good place for OKRs where you say, “Okay, our objective is to move into France.” Well, it’s not enough just to be in France, you’ve got to actually have customers who love you, and are excited by you, and doing good word of mouth, and you have to be making money. That way, if you say be embraced by France, you can say it’s going to like … one key result is going to be word of mouth and another key result is going to be revenue, et cetera. You can bring that to your boss and the boss will say, “I agree with this, but I don’t trust this metric or I don’t think that’s important. Don’t worry about revenue right now. Let’s really focus on awareness in the market.” And it becomes this healthy conversation where the team still owns the goal, but they’re not misaligning with what the company needs from them.

In the classroom, you’ll get a team and they’ll be working on a project and I think a lot of teachers make the mistake of just saying, “Okay, go. I’m going to grade you later.” And I feel like it’s the same thing. I need to check in with them and say, “Okay, here’s our learning goals. Are you really thinking about this,” or, “Is interviewing really the right thing to be doing here? Maybe we want to do a cultural probe instead.” But I think that in every case, even though the manager is not telling you what to do, the manager is constantly chewing you, making sure that you’re pointed in a good direction and that you’re aligned with whatever organization you’ve attached yourself too, right?

Douglas: That’s interesting. It reminds me of General McChrystal’s talking about in this space, the leadership becomes more like a gardener. And you’ve been talking about the chewing, made me think of topiaries. Like you don’t actually make it grow but you push in that direction and it doesn’t sting.

Christina: My daughter just got into bonsais recently, which is crazy, she’s 14, and it’s really interesting to watch her learn because you don’t water bonsais. You put them into water and they soak up what they need. You put them in a couple of inches of water and let them sit there and then you give them a little bit of plant food because they’re in such a weird environment that they’re not getting a lot of nourishment, so you have to give them plant food because they’re in that little pot. And you get to choose whether you want to trim them or not. Do you want to let them grow in their natural way or do you want to take back the bad habits?

And I feel like so much of that sounds like teaching or managing where you provide resources, you support people as they need to be supported considering the situation. Like maybe you’re a good team in a toxic company while you as a manager might need to provide a little more coaching and support about how to navigate the complexities of an unhealthy situation. And then the question is do you have somebody who can just let go? Not let go like fire, but let them just go crazy and be their own beautiful self. There’s people like that, but then there’s other people you really have to be giving clear feedback because their behavior is perhaps not serving the needs of the team and the organization. So, I thought of bonsais as being a lot more hands on and it turns out they are and it turns out that it’s really about coaxing them and supporting them much more than trimming them and cutting them back.

Douglas: Yeah, that’s great. You hit it on purpose gracefully and that’s something that I think is so important and so critical. Sometimes I think it comes from a sense of insecurity or laziness. But you encountered so many students and you mentioned purpose, so I wanted to just hear any experiences you have around that.

Christina: Yeah. Well, one of the first reasons I got into OKRs is because before that, if you have a KPI, it’s like, “Oh, we needed to make $5 million in revenue,” and you’re like, “Uh-huh, okay, $5 million in revenue.” It doesn’t feel very purpose driven. But if you say that you want to delight customers or you want to reinvent healthcare so it’s more humane, that’s a purpose and then you still have the metrics to know whether you’d achieved it or not. So, that’s one thing that I like about OKRs.

I think finding purpose is always tricky. I see with my students, while they’re here, they so want to make the world better. Sometimes they’re angry, and sometimes they’re frustrated, and sometimes they’re excited. The students I have are just full of all this energy and they want to make the world so much better and then when they try to step into the work world, they really struggle to keep that and it’s so hard for them because they’re like, “I guess I’m working on the AdSense team at Google now to pay my student debts,” and they just get deflated because they went from, “Hey, how do we make meaningful text that’s going to fix the electoral system,” in some sort of class project and then you go to like, “Is this shade of blue or is it that shade of blue?” It’s monetized.

It’s heartbreaking and I think that it’s really important as a person new in the workplace to try to find the meaning within your work and if you can’t find the meaning, really ask yourself, “Can I wait a little bit longer before I take that first job?” As an example, maybe you’re working at AdSense, which maybe you hate because you think ads are evil, well … let’s say you’re very excited to be part of Google and you know that they’re doing these crazy, amazing things with machine learning to do early detection of health disease, which a friend of mine’s over in another corner of Google, they’re doing that, and you’re like, “Wow, I’m on AdSense.” You could be depressed. But on the on the other hand, the only reason Google has money to do these really amazing, speculative projects that could save lives is because they’re making money off of AdSense.

So sometimes, you have to recontextualize yourself and say, “The work is not directly positively impacting, but I’m part of something that’s good.” The problem is when you’re part of something that’s bad and that can be a lot harder. I see students who join big companies and then they quit because they’re like, “Oh my god, I had mixed feelings about this company before I went there, but then after I got there I realized that this is a company that just doesn’t want to make the world better and isn’t interested in that as a problem.”

If your values are misaligned with your company’s core values, you will experience cognitive dissonance and you will eventually become ill and even quit. I’ve seen it so often. I experienced it when I worked in Zynga. A student experienced it. I don’t want to say one set of values is bad, one set of values is good, but if you’re working somewhere where people are very interested in just making money because they want to feel safe and have stability for their family but your values are all about making everybody in the world safe or providing healthcare for somebody, you’re just going to have stressors. You’re just always going to be exhausted and frustrated because you don’t share the same core values as your company.

So, we talked about purpose, but I don’t think we talk enough about values. Purpose is borne out of values and I think it’s well worth it to spend the time looking at a framework, perhaps like Shalom Schwartz’s 12 Universal Human Values, and ask yourself, what are the ones I really value? Do I value safety? Do I value making the world better for everybody? Do I value security? What is it that matters to me? And then look at these companies and say, “Considering the choices they make in everything from financial structure to what products they ship, what do I think their values are and am I going to have a hard time being there?” I know that everybody gets a choice of work, but if you can find your way to working somewhere that shares your values, you will be happier, you will be healthier, and you will be more successful.

Douglas: Absolutely. Is that something that you actively work with students on?

Christina: Yeah, this is something that I’ve … it’s actually a fairly recent development over the last year or so where I’ve been using Schwartz’s 12 Universal Values to start talking about what are your values and what are company values. And I’m really interested in going further in exploring software values. So, let’s take Twitter, for example. They clearly value an individual’s right to express themselves way, way higher than everybody’s need to feel safe. They choose to allow very controversial individuals who say things that are very hateful and very painful for a lot of people. They give them a platform to speak and that results in a lot of women and underrepresented minorities who end up shut down and leaving the platform.

For me, that’s not my values at all. My values are getting a lot of diverse voices and a lot of different points of view, and making sure everybody has enough psychological safety to express themselves. And so, I should never ever work for Twitter, but it doesn’t mean that somebody else who believes so much in the freedom of speech and believes that it’s just words and you got to figure out how to take care of yourself in this hard world, that could totally be a value somebody else has and that could be the best place in the world for them to work.

It’s really hard to get out of the judging business where you say, “These values are good and these values are bad,” and move into a place where instead, you respect people and respect their values. For working with students, it’s absolutely vital that even if I don’t share their values, I have to respect that they have them, and that they matter to them, and it’s going to be part of who they are and as they go on their journey, those values may evolve. But I try to help them see and understand other students’ values and learn how to work with people who aren’t necessarily like you. I feel like I’m the first person who has to model that every day. If I’d come in and go, “Damn republicans, blah, blah, blah, blah,” then I’m going to lose some of my students.

So, I’d rather just speak much more thoughtfully and cautiously about being respectful of different people’s values. I do think there is something called the truth, and I do think there is something called science, and there are something called facts. That’s not the same as disagreeing with people’s values. But I don’t want to cast anybody as a bad guy just because they don’t share my value system.

Douglas: Yeah. I always like to catch myself if I feel like I’m painting someone as the villain. That’s a dangerous territory.

Christina: Yeah. Once we start othering, down that path leads genocide, literally.

Douglas: Yeah. That is the dead end of that, you’re right.

Christina: That’s where we’ve seen it go before. So, I think in a workplace … It’s so funny, my friend Laura Klein, who I think you’ve spoken to, she’s working on some interesting questions about the problems between product managers and user experience designers and I think a lot of that comes down to values as well. The product manager is like, “Hey, if this product doesn’t meet its numbers, I’m not going to have a job anymore. I need this to happen,” and the UX designer might be like, “But I don’t want to hurt users even if that’s the right thing financially.”

If they dismiss each other’s values, they’re just going to yell at each other. But if they say, “Oh, your value of really needing some safety and security is a real thing. You got family, you got kids. And my value of being good to people is a real thing. Why don’t we work together and try to find a solution that’s going to reflect both of our values and create something that’s going to create real value for the business and the customer?” Instead, you see these like, “They’re terrible. PMs suck. Designers are such big babies,” blah, blah, blah. It’s useless, right? You’re not moving forward.

Douglas: I feel like when you apply those constraints, that’s one of the amazing things. Not all these solutions present themselves.

Christina: Oh, yeah. The Eames said design is constraints and I always liked that. If you don’t have a dozen constraints, then you’re probably not doing design work. But yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s when you have a really hard problem that you get really extraordinary solutions and so, making sure that the product hits everybody’s values is a really hard problem and it will create extraordinary, extraordinary things. New business models, better technology, all sorts of wonderful things.

Douglas: Yeah. And another thing that struck me is that it was fresh because a lot of folks when I’m talking about innovation or the future work business transformation stuff, culture comes up a ton and as you were talking about values, the thing that struck me is more a nuanced way of talking about the importance of culture because when people hear culture they can think, here’s this like, “Do we have ping pong tables?” These more superficial things whereas like I think the values are a way to really get at that.

Christina: I think all culture is a collection of norms and a norm is an unspoken rule of behavior. So, one of the things I do when I do work with clients is I get them to get their norms out in the open where they could say, “Yeah, this is great,” or, “Ooh, we actually really don’t want things to be this way.” And so, I think we all struggle a lot to talk about culture, but if we know what our company’s values are and then we look at the behaviors that come out of those values, we’ve basically described our culture and it’s up to us.

Okay, here’s the thing, technical digital products are never finished. In the old days, you used to spec something out, and then you build it, and then you’d send it, and you’d sell it. But now, we have these things online that are constantly getting updated and growing as the markets change, the features change, as your customer base changes, you evolve it. But we’re not doing the same thing for our companies and the reality is that there’s a small startup and it will set a company culture and then that culture will drift off in all these strange directions and we don’t spend enough time to just stop and say, “Okay, are we really being the people we want to be? What do our employees need? What does the market need? What do our stockholders need?”

Really treat the company culture as if it was a really critical product that you constantly have to be caretaking and evolving. You can never just leave it there and go, “We’re done now.” And that’s something that I think is really overlooked and forgotten is that culture, especially if you want to change it, like say Uber, is something that needs to be actively taken care of like a bonsai.

Douglas: That’s incredible. I love that. I’ve been seeing a lot of HR folks showing up to conferences and it’s really fascinating to me. I started thinking along the lines of you could see these design practices work really well for some of that work and as it starts getting pointed inward, you could potentially see it bifurcate. Here are the tools and the approaches that work really well for the products and here are the tools and the approaches that work really well for our culture and for our internal structures.

Christina: Yeah. I love a lot of things about design thinking, but I think the way it’s mostly taught, it is like let’s just get together and have a big sprint and then we’ll have this solution. A lot of the design thinking literature and workshops and stuff don’t recognize the ongoing process. I agree completely with you that there’s so many tools and techniques out there that are so good at getting at what do people really need, ideating more widely, evaluating what you’ve got. But we have to accept that that is never done. Our products are never done. Our culture is never done. It’s something we have to keep growing and evolving all the time or else this is going to devolve.

Douglas: It’s also interesting, you talked about a great example of a product manager versus the UX designer. I think it happens in other areas too. I even see it happen between sales and engineering or vice versa. So, when you have these stovepipes, these silos, you end up with what I would say is a mismatch in values or maybe there’s different cultures in each place. In fact, I remember this startup in Austin where they had tons of sales people because it was part of their model and it was just bad. It was a very frat boy culture that in order to retain and grow a serious engineering organization, they had to put them in a separate building enduring an entirely different culture.

I thought that was a really strange solution to that problem because it’s like we realized we have this problem so let’s just isolate it rather than fixing the problem … because they were benefiting from it, right? It’s like, I don’t know. Anyway, I’m just curious about your thoughts on this notion that the company can have multiple cultures and that seems like a bad thing to me, but what are your thoughts there?

Christina: I mean, companies can definitely have their own cultures and there can be problems by trying to standardize them too much. A couple of quick examples from Zynga. I feel like I can finally talk about Zynga because it was eight years ago when I was there and I hear it’s a different company now so I’m like, “So, here are some things I liked and some things I didn’t care for.” But on Fridays, around say 4 o’clock, people would celebrate whatever they’d accomplished this week. It’s an agile culture, so there’s the whole idea of Friday demos and usually, in our group, we were working on platform stuff and so we called it wine down and they’d bring some wine, and cheese, and fruit, and we’d demo, and we’d chat.

One day at that time, I had to go find somebody in biz dev so I went down to the biz dev group and they were standing in a circle and each of them had a shot of tequila and everybody had to brag and if you bragged about something you’d accomplished that week you’d do your shot, but if you didn’t have anything to brag about, somebody else would steal your shot. It was a very, very different culture because the platform work is inherently super collaborative, so our Friday was all about celebrating. But these biz dev folks, much like sales folks, were very much about closing deals, and competing with each other, and constantly trying to be the best at things.

And so, the different celebrations took different tones based on the way the culture of a given group was. As long as I can respect that biz dev is all about winning, and crushing it, and closing deals, and making relationships happen, and they can respect that us platform folks are about connecting the company together and looking at the big picture, as long as we both respect that the cultures are both valuable, and valid, and just not like yours but not yours in a way that makes sense, then we could always talk to each other. We could always get on just fine. The problem is when you’re like, “Well, you folks should be more cutthroat.”

At the time, I don’t know what it’s like now, Mark was compensating everybody in the company the same way you compensate sales people, which is if your numbers go up, you get bonuses. But the problem is really, really creative people, like a lot of the game designers, don’t work that way. As soon as you start putting a financial number in front of them, their creativity shuts down. And there’s a lot of writing about this in books like Punished by Rewards where you can look at the way reward systems can backfire and can actually be terrible, terrible, terrible for getting quality work out of people.

And that was one of the things where they thought, “Well, everybody likes a nice bonus,” which is true, but there was no thought to realizing that creative people work in a very different way. They’re very intrinsically motivated and it became this paycheck gun to their head – make us something brilliant that makes a lot of money or you can’t feed your family. People can’t really be creative like that. So, using a sales culture in a creative culture was a giant backfire. I wish I could just say, “It’s very simple.” The only thing that really matters is having empathy for people who are very different from you and the better you can get at that, the more likely you are to get the company to work better.

Douglas: I want to ask a few questions about innovation programs. What approaches to innovation or what about innovation programs can be wrong-headed or potentially backfire?

Christina: Oh gosh. From what I’ve experienced, things that are really deadly are these ideas that there are … I just said there were creative people and you have to treat them differently. Well, I think you do have to realize that creativity can be everywhere in the company and that there shouldn’t be one special group that’s like, “Okay, this is our innovation group. They’re the ones who come up with innovation and everybody else just keeps the lights on.” I think innovation programs need to include the breadth of people in the company. I mean, maybe somebody in PR only has one good idea but damn it, one good idea can make you a lot of money and make the company amazing. So, you need to make sure that everybody has access to it.

I think the best way to do it is what I’ve seen in quite a few companies…they treat innovation programs like investments. So, you go in, you pitch your idea and they’ll invest in it, but they’ll often invest in it with human beings. So, let’s say you’re a product manager, you got a great idea for a new product. They’ll say, “Okay, we’ll give you a fourth of this designer’s time and one engineer,” or whatever, however that works. And then you go off and you get a little bit of proof, lean startup style. Maybe you do some customer validation, maybe you put out an MVP and then that gets refunded. That system where anybody can pitch, anybody can get funded and then once you’re funded it gets built out and then you may need new skills.

You may need somebody with more management experience if the group gets bigger, et cetera. Just because you have the idea it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the skills to bring it to market or the skills to scale it. But really I think the company’s acting almost like a VC except with employees rather than just raw cash. That approach seems to work very well in companies I’ve worked at as well as other companies.

Douglas: Yeah, the portfolio approach.

Christina: Yeah. I guess I didn’t say anything particularly innovative, but sometimes appropriate is better than innovative.

Don’t do something new just because it’s new. Do something new because it’s something better or it has the potential to be radically better.

Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. I’m always curious about how people thought on how to measure innovation because if we focus too much on short-term gains, line revenue and things, then programs can get shut down. If we focus on the number of ideas generated, that’s not necessarily great. So, how do we measure it?

Christina: Number of ideas. Good lord, does anybody do that? That’s just … that’s up there with page views for the worst ideas ever.

How do you measure the success of an innovation program? I’d say are there things coming out of it? Are there products coming out of it that are getting adapted by users? I think you have to again think like a VC, which is if you talk to a VC, they’re going to tell you that they’re going to look at hundreds and hundreds of companies, and then they’re going to take a second look at a handful, and then they’re going to invest in a smaller handful, and then they’re going to reinvest in a still smaller handful. So, you just have to realize that the percentage of individuals that will produce something that’s going to be super successful, it’s going to be small and of course, a unicorn, as a VC would call it, a billion dollar company, those are going to be every more rare.

So, it’s hard for companies because they want to micromanage processes, but you really can’t. You have to be like a VC. And I have friends that are VCs because I live in Silicon Valley and their attitude is you got to look at the people and look at the idea and say, “are these the kind of people that I’m going to have a leap of faith in? Are these the kind of people that I believe are going to be able to bring something to market?” So, it’s a trust then verify point of view where you basically leave them alone. You give them their head, you give them the money and then you say, “go to town,” and then you check in and see where they are. And then if they failed at the end of that deadline, six months, one year, what have you, you just don’t reinvest in those people. In an entrepreneurship situation, those people can go back to their day job. But maybe you do reinvest because they’ve proven whatever their hypothesis is.

And this is one of those places where getting the team to name what their goal is and what success will look like is absolutely vital because if the team can’t say what success will look like, the manager will make something silly up like 10 million dollars or whatever revenue. So, it’s worth taking the time to really set smart goals, really good OKRs really, and then be really good at measurement, and then decide at regular intervals whether to continue. I’ve worked with a lot of startups in my life and one of the things that I’ve noticed, and nobody talks about this, one of the hardest things about being in a startup is knowing when to quit, right?

You’re like, “I’ve got a little traction, but not that much traction. I’m not out of money but gosh, I’m getting tired of ramen.”

Douglas: Yup. We call that the walking dead.

Christina: Yeah, the walking dead, and that’s the thing is in a bigger company, you don’t want the walking dead either. So, that’s why really clear goals and really clear check-in periods is just vital.

Douglas: Yeah. That’s something I’m a big fan of. The people that are doing metrics, I mean the people that are just missing the bone entirely, but the ones that do it seem to focus on the positive outcomes they’re trying to seek and I think that there’s room to actually look at documenting how we will determine if we’re going to pull the plug. So, when you get there, you know, “well, we said we’re going to pull the plugs, so here we are.”

Christina: Yeah, time to … And this is one of the places where I think it is easier to be an entrepreneur because your boss is like, “Oh no, you’re done now.” You’re an entrepreneur, you’re like, “well, I didn’t get any more funding, but I’ve got a credit card.” It’s too easy to lie to yourself. Your boss isn’t going to lie to you.

Douglas: Yeah, no doubt. Let me just ask you one final question, which is what excites you right now?

Christina: I’m really, really, really excited by the rise of ethics. So, the students I have, they are asking so many extraordinary questions about what should get built and how do we know if this is actually going to be good or not and how do we start thinking about unintended consequences. And the students themselves are just so committed to not putting worse things into the world and my faculty colleagues are so stoked to integrate ethics into the classroom, even places where it’s going to be a little bit harder. I’m in the CS building and they’re like, “what does ethics look like for systems and what does ethics look like for security?” How do we work in the question of how we know what the right thing to do is.

Technology is not neutral. That’s a lie. And again, I’m going to use the word values, all technology is the productization of values. Our values are written into the code and if we don’t examine our values, and question them, and say, “are these the values of a bunch of weird ass, rich, white people in the Silicon Valley? Are we imposing our values and culture on people who have a very different idea of the world? Do we have the right to do that? What does that look like?” This is such an amazing moment and I feel like I’ve been waiting for it forever. But I’m so happy that we’re working on these really hard questions and anybody who thinks it’s boring, I think this … if I try to choose between machine learning and figuring out how to make ethical products, I think figuring out how to make ethical products is way harder.

You have to be a futurist. You have to be a studier of different cultures. It’s just the complexity of bringing something into the world that makes the world a little better and not a little worse is really hard and I think it’s exciting, and magnificent, and interesting. And dare I say it, it’s even going to be a producer of much more innovation because it’s a massive constraint and I think right now, that’s what really gets me excited is people are starting to really ask, “am I making the world better or am I making the world worse?” And that’s a question everybody needs to be asking. So, I’m so excited, I’m so thrilled even if it means that we get into long, stupid, semantic arguments. It’s worth paying that price if we can just make a few better decisions for the future.

Douglas: You know, this is awesome to hear because I don’t spend any time inside academia. I see what’s happening culturally with just the backlash of startups, bad behavior, as well as politicians, and movie executives, et cetera. So, it’s interesting to hear that this is going into … and it makes sense that it’s on top of mind for students. It’s great to hear that you guys are having that conversation.

Christina: Oh, yeah. We’re in the ’60s again, people. Students are like, “No. We need change. We need it now.” It’s really an exciting moment to be here.

Douglas: And it also made me think like doctors have the do no harm pledge, but there’s no pledge for the work that we do, especially if you think about how software is eating the people’s brain. I think we could see that there’s not that big of a divide between some software and some medical procedures and the impact they could have.

Christina: Most medical procedures are software these days.

Douglas: Yeah, exactly.

Christina: It’s just everywhere. It’s really fun to be somewhere too where you get really crazy, weird projects like the lab down the street has been analyzing 18th century texts and they discover – and they can only do this with software and algorithms – is times when authors are pretending to sound like textbooks. You can say, “well, who cares if Sherlock Holmes right now sounds like an anthropology textbook,” and then it goes back to sounding like a mystery. But I think there’s something wonderful about something that’s so old as literary criticism that’s getting a new lens through work that is just too boring and too slow for humans, analyzing thousands of lines of texts, and it’s providing a lens for us to look at our own humanity and I think that’s really exciting too.

So, I think the way technology is getting distributed across all of these other disciplines, there’s so much cool stuff that’s going to come out of that, but of course then ethics become important as well because well, you don’t want to put crazy technology in the hands of somebody who hasn’t really thought about the consequences of what it could do to various other peoples. So, I think that we need to go together with ethics so that as we’re shipping out all this cool technology stuff, like AI machine learning, that we’re also shipping with that algorithm saying, “Hey, training data, are you sure you’re using something that’s not just reinforcing the same old bullshit?” We’re in a place right now where I feel like as we export our CS we’ve got to export ethics, which means we’ve got to freaking have some.

Douglas: Amen. So, let me ask you one other … this has got me really thinking. So, you made a comment there around shipping this getting in the hands of folks that might misuse it…

Christina: Yeah. There’s so much cool stuff that people can do in their fields with it, but they have to know basic stuff that tech people grew up with like garbage in, garbage out, right? That’s the answer to the mystery of why various AIs are racist. It’s like garbage in, garbage out training data. So, there’s like a bunch of …a lot of people are going to be adopting it, period. We’re not even shipping it to them. They’re coming and saying, “Give it to me.” So, people are adapting it like crazy but we want to make sure that we also know those core concepts about the technology and how to work with it.

Douglas: Yeah, I was thinking that it’s like a lot of the encryption capabilities can’t be … you know, job encryption libraries couldn’t be exported outside of the US and that sort of thing. And I guess when we think about … it’s this interesting conundrum because I think the young folks, like you’re talking about we’re in the ’60s again, very concerned about ethics and very concerned about maybe some of the actions, and beliefs, and behaviors of the government and, at the same time, the government does provide a shield for those things, potentially not getting in the hands of people who might do things against us. And so, I guess to me that’s a bit of a conundrum because it’s like there is some protection there, there is a mistrust there, and then there’s like are they the right stewards to the ethics but if not, who is?

So, I guess I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that because I did a workshop for the special operations command once and before I did that, someone asked me, “Are you concerned about your work that’s appropriated?” I got to think long and hard about that. So, I guess I’m curious because to me that’s a conundrum.

Christina: Oh, it’s one of the hardest things in the world. I mean, I was at a salon, the AI salon here, which is a meeting of the people working in AI and they have four people working in AI ethics and the topic was secondary use scenarios. In other words, you design this for this. For example, you designed a machine learning algorithm to understand the spread of disease so that we can hopefully stop them from spreading, but a terrorist could use it to understand the best place to drop a disease. Every single thing that we do always has secondary use scenarios and we live in this world where borders are really not very firm. Some can talk about building a wall all day long, but there’s so much stuff that goes over the internet then you see countries that are desperately trying to keep the internet out and losing always.

So, we live in a moment in time where every single thing we do will be found by somebody and they probably will try to use it in the worst possible way and you just can’t assume anything else. You can’t say, “we’re going to lock this up where nobody can get at it,” because that’s not viable anymore. So then, it raises the question of what can we do? And I think that’s a question we’re still really wrestling with very hard, which is we can do a lot with making other people smarter. We need to get a lot more education, especially into elementary school about how technology works and what’s the appropriate use of it. We just … god, it’s just so hard. Talk about a conundrum. There is no solution there.

If you want a really good, juicy, wicked problem to work on, figure out how to keep technology that has amazing value in a good world from abuse in other people’s hands. I think we haven’t even begun to take a small step down that road of solving it because when I go to these salons, and panels, and discussions of ethics, we know how to say, “here’s how I’m going to try to be a better person,” but there don’t seem to be a lot of solutions about how to handle bad actors and you see it in things like Twitter. It used to be there were some crazy ass racists in one small town and they were terrible, but mostly they just cuss at the TV and now, they’re going online, they’re doxxing people, they’re crashing people’s computers, they’re organizing marches and acts of violence. The internet may be the first original technology that made wonderful things happen and now enables dreadful things.

I think it’s going to be a really difficult time for us for a long time and the only solution, it’s a lot like what we’re talking about earlier with innovation, is we need all hands on deck. We need everybody who might have an idea about how to work on this problem to work on this problem because I’m not going to come up with a solution, I’m just one woman. You’re not going to come up with a solution, you’re just one guy. But if we’re all working on it, maybe we’ll get to the other side of this strange time and just like with the Industrial Revolution where there were pea soup fogs, and there was ground collapsing underneath people because of overmining. Maybe we’ll get to the other side of this and hopefully we’ll have a better answer of how all this technology gets reintegrated into our lives in a sane way. But it’s going to take everybody. It’s going to take everybody working on it.

The post Empathy, Ethics, & Value Systems in Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

I was with my dad and my cousins at a shopping mall in Odessa, Texas when we walked past a man dressed in all black with black painted fingernails, black lipstick and black eyeshadow. He had chains dangling from his pants and spikes fastened around his neck and stuck through his ears.

He looked intently at the space directly in front of him and manipulated his hands around a floating cigarette. He’d twitch his fingers slightly and it would move back and forth. Finally, he willed it to float toward his mouth where he then lit it, produced a quarter from thin air and stuck the burning cigarette through the middle of the coin, let it be examined, then removed the cigarette and repaired the hole in the coin.

After a quiet moment, my father grabbed my shoulders and said, “I don’t feel right about this — let’s go,” and he ushered me and my cousins away from the evil man saying something under his breath about the devil.

Years after saving me and my cousins from the angel of death, my father returned from a business trip in Las Vegas where he had seen the same trick performed. He went to a magic shop to buy the apparatus for me — relieved witchcraft, at least in west Texas, was merely an illusion.

After understanding how the trick was done, I was embarrassed I wasn’t able to figure out the gimmick before. Then something very sad happened. The second I understood how to create the same effect I saw in the shopping mall years earlier, I became less interested in magic. I almost felt foolish for being so enamored in the first place.

Of course there’s an explanation for that trick, my adolescent brain told me — there’s an explanation for everything.

I was in the beginning stages of realizing adults find more identity in doubt than in believing.

This is what happens to us when we get older. When we experience a moment of awe or wonder, the cruel world increasingly points out how foolish we are to believe in the magic of a moment. Of course there’s an explanation!

We get burned, so we condition ourselves to expect moments in which we might look foolish and avoid them at all costs. Better to never have played the game, bought into the vision, or widened our eyes at something beautiful or mysterious — because adults don’t let their guard down.

To be smart means to be cautions. To be effective means to be efficient — and magic, beauty, awe and wonder are not efficient.

This isn’t just about magic tricks, it’s about how we live our lives and do our work. Think about it — we once trusted more easily. We once danced more readily. We once experienced joy without caution. We once believed in the magic of interactions, belonging and trust in ways we’ve conditioned ourselves to now repress.

This has broader context for the way we run businesses. Think about it. Any moment people are gathered together in a room presents an opportunity for magic to occur – but most leaders and organizations blow this opportunity on a daily basis.

But even though we’re grown up and wounded now, we still want to believe in magic.

We still long for the feeling we felt when we were completely present, excited with anticipation, and a part of some larger awe-inspiring experience.

Don’t the feelings listed above sound like a healthy, award-winning organizational culture? Don’t you want to belong to a team where individuals are present and invested in the potential of each moment, excited for the possibilities in front of them, and totally bought-in to a grander vision?

Yes, that’s what we all want. And don’t be shy about calling it magical.

And here’s the beautiful and most important thing about magic — it has no effect in isolation.

Magic happens most powerfully when experienced with others; the gift of magic is the bond of experiencing awe together.

If my fledgling career as a teenage illusionist taught me anything, it’s this: Magic exists beyond the belief that something is real or not, and past the understanding of how something works.

Magic is about surrender to the moment — a willingness to be fully present and participate without the fear your belief in a grander vision will be undermined.

When we believe in magic, we risk looking like fools for having hope, but we’re OK with the consequences.

When people experience magic on teams it looks like this:

• A willingness to suspend disbelief in a process and jump in the ring and play
• Excitement about the idea of uncovering things yet unseen together
• Bravery — the ability to smile and laugh and risk looking foolish
• Trust that their team members have their best interest at heart

If we want to create magical moments in our organizations it begins with developing a sense of safety, trust and belonging.

So how does one begin to infuse more meaning and magic into meetings and interactions? Return to the wonder and awe we once danced with, but have since written off because it’s too childish.

Try this:

• Start meetings with gratitude — ask people what’s going well in their lives
• Put toys on the table for people to play with during meetings
• Ask someone to start each meeting with a joke or a story
• Speaking of more stories — have a storytelling hour each week where a team member tells everyone a story about themselves no one would have ever known
• Bring in an actual magician — seriously
• Do improv exercises to loosen up your team
• Cook together as a team once a week

What else has worked for your team?

Believing in magic as adults is simply a return to a place of innocence where we believe anything might be possible, and we’re not afraid of our imaginations.

We’re not talking about disappearing the Statue of Liberty — we’re talking forging human connection. If we can learn to believe in the magic hidden in the real moments of office conversations, our teams can accomplish something truly magical together.

Looking for a partner in Facilitation?

Voltage Control facilitates design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out at info@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

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