Dormant creativity and therapies in the business of innovation
Collecting notions and attempting experiments on creativity were deep-seated tendencies long before I became a user experience designer. As the understanding of these processes gathered velocity so did my desire to intimately understand the quirks and gimmicks of the mind.
Upon leaving the academic circles, however, it has been quite a different thing to observe how those mechanisms, tactics if you will, bustle about within the confines of a business. And then, how does it happen that incredibly talented people offer their creativity to ventures and enterprises yet often get misguided by false objectives or, even worse, see their ideas squandered? Infamously, the crux of the issue may not be that hard to identify. After all aren’t ideas worthless without execution? Well, maybe (I encourage innovation classicists to forgive the audacity of a broader take on this matter).
The wreck of innovation
Working inside creative design studios I have become more sensitive (and with it, interested) to picking the minutiae of the relationship between a business that is creative by trade and the pulling forces of the market. As Joseph Schumpeter postulated, it is as much of a duty for a business to innovate as it is for an evolutionary trait to prosper in a given environmental condition. But do businesses truly have an understanding of what it means to innovate, do they know the recipe? What I have come to learn is that a culture may easily grow dissimilar to those guiding principles that businesses lay out in their employee on-boarding brochures.
Notoriously, innovation labs (which still remains the term of choice beyond all possible nomenclature interpolations) have been set up to tackle the incessant pressure to remain ever relevant within an ever shifting market. The positive expression of such initiatives, however, gets completely eclipsed by the figures reported by Capgemini that estimated the rate of failure to be as high as 90%. Simone Bhan Ahuja points the finger at the frequent inability of the innovation team to align with the business as well as the substantial lack of diagnostic or tracking mechanisms. More in tune with the discussion brought forward in this article is perhaps the third and final reason for havoc: the lack of balance in the team. The argument is that it is necessary to equip everyone within an organisation with problem solving skills, as well as enabling balanced teams that are purpose driven and can output beyond the premise of business as usual.
Right to fail, fail to right
It is symptomatic of how incredibly easy it can be to shut down a culture of innovation that you don’t have to look any further than one of the biggest controversies of our times. I have very little doubt that some of the brightest minds in design are at play in the handful of companies that govern our digital lives, so why is it that some of the outcomes are so utterly dysfunctional, from both an ethics and design perspective? This is because companies fail to practice what they preach in most cases and employees are simply left to self organise as opposed to being exposed directly to what users have to face. It is the very basic externalisation of behaviours and practices that can more easily be placed under the microscope in contrast to any attempt at dwelling on how a culture evolves or is even born.
Shifting a company mindset to that of problem solvers has been repeatedly attempted and continuously adapted. A number of different studies on creativity have been analysed in the context of physical space and have highlighted how clutter, sitting more or less passively, endows creativity with plasticity and creates dialogues between individuals. It is not a case that at IDEO, as described by Tom Kelley in his book “The art of innovation”, materials and tools are left to linger freely within the office space and are sometimes gathered together in designated “trolleys” that are literally up for grabs to anyone. This is the mindset of teams that achieve innovation via freely available and pervasive artefacts that exist in different configurations of abstraction.
Less on the side of physical space is the notion that creation may as well be enabled by explorative tendencies and therefore is more the characteristic of those individuals that feel confident enough to venture down uncertain paths. I don’t claim my creativity came pre-packaged, it was also trained and augmented, so it was dear to me to understand how it took on new connotations over time. A crucial role is played by giving experimentation more adequate pertinence, mainly via the ability of knowing how to pick its subtleties and capitalise on the products of seemingly chaotic mental processes (now is a good time to pause and check the work of Chris Noessel on randomness and semiotics).
We as designers have to face pretty much immediately the dreaded moment of failure and learn that it is already embedded in the process, but what about the definition of failure granted by our organisations? Businesses should strive to endow teams with a right to fail as it is only by failing that we can right our design wrongs.
Hack to the Future, a Brilliant Basics first
It should not come as a surprise that profound change is not obtained overnight, it requires strenuous practice, passion and focus. Change, as I have experienced with my work at the Brilliant Basics London studio, is mostly perceived via the organic expansion and contraction of the fabric of relations between individuals, not like a top down imposition that would hardly work as intended. When it comes to experimentation, similarly to culture, it is predominantly an organic phenomenon. And so it happened that by amplifying the choir of voices in the design team some talented people and myself presented our hackathon to the business for the first time. Be mindful though, a hackathon is diametrically different from an innovation lab, however, it goes a long way to forming the vital components of a mindset; its primordial gene pool if you will.
As we were close to reaching the 150 people mark we opened up the gathering of insights to the entire company and then distilled the main themes that would later inform the proposed challenge. In the end, as it turned out, a single theme could not encapsulate all diversity and proposed three pathways instead. Those pathways included workforce empowerment, company DNA and wellbeing and not only did they revolve around us as employees but also the work that we deliver for and with our clients, aiming to close the gap between evangelism and practice.
“Hack to the Future”, as we finally named it, took place during the course of a day and convinced about ten percent of our colleagues to take part. We all learnt how hard it is to tame initiative within restrictive time constraints. Keen creators willing to work on the weekend aside, this effort set a precedent for the business, investing resources beyond client work was fundamentally a winning strategy. As we prepare for the next hackathon (while our witty ideas for a new title get to an all time high) here are the learnings I feel are worth sharing:
- There is no progress without perseverance;
- Starting something is better than planning it (then of course you’ll need some planning);
- Invite others to collaborate early on in the process;
- Keep your list of objectives manageable and traceable;
- Doing something for the first time will always cause perplexities;
- Acknowledge people’s efforts;
- Engineering repeatability and sustainability is the most difficult challenge (be ready);
Final remarks
In conclusion, as innovation cannot be discounted to a single way of doing things, companies need to learn how to harness what is already there, in latent form. Plasticity exists in all environments so it must be illusory to believe that this mindset is unattainable.
As a spin-off to this topic I suggest reading this article by Haydn Shaughnessy covering Von Hippel’s elucidation on user-driven innovation, I argue too few know about these staggering figures.
This article was inspired by one of our Brilliant Basics podcast episodes, in which the Founder & CEO Anand Verma and myself discuss about the role of innovation within the company and the design industry as a whole. Click here for the podcast.
About the author
Christian Contemori is User Experience Lead at Brilliant Basics — Infosys’ design and innovation studio.
Edited by Anand Verma who is the Founder and CEO at Brilliant Basics — Infosys’ design and innovation studio.
