Is our organisational OCD is becoming life-threatening?
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a debiliatating anxiety disorder that can have devastating consequences for individuals that suffer from it.
I think there is a similar disorder that organisations suffer from … I call it Obsessive Certainty Disorder. It too is linked with anxiety and the need for control. And it too has devastating consequences, especially when it comes to organisational responsiveness and innovation.
We have outsourced our relationship with uncertainty to certainty merchants. (author unknown)
While many people focus on creativity training and installing innovation systems, I have been more interested in in exploring the conditions that enable creativity and innovation in organisations to emerge. A counter-intuitive discovery has been that the very things organisations need in order to enable creativity are the things they typically work really hard to get rid of.
For example; organisations value certainty and stability so they remove tension, paradox, risk. They want answers, not questions; compliance and conformity, not curiosity. They optimise for efficiency and thereby remove slack, boredom and play.
Leaders say they want transformation, engagement, innovation, creativity and agility … but their actions and the environments they create say otherwise: that what they actually value are the status quo, sameness, safety, certainty, busyness and consensus. Ambiguity isn’t tolerated, things must be black or white, no grey.
The irony is that creativity is often born in discomfort i.e. in the midst of tension, boredom or ambiguity. Take boredom: Children make up new games when they are bored, employing their imagination to turn ordinary things around them into something new and extra-ordinary. In our constantly busy and distracted world, not even children get to be bored anymore. Also, boredom is an uncomfortable feeling and discomfort cannot be tolerated so we think we’re doing people a favor when we stick a tablet in their hands to keep them occupied. We’ve all become seduced by the need to be constantly occupied with work, or distracted by entertainment. As Jesko von den Steinen says: we need to be “in tune with boredom”; we must see it as a signpost that something new needs to emerge. We need to sit in it, not run away from it.
Or take ambiguity: The September edition of the Harvard Business Review celebrates curiosity on the cover. In a piece on the business case for curiosity, the Francesca Gino lists multiple business benefits of curiosity including incresed innovation, better decision-making, increased collaboration, but then writes: “In a recent survey I conducted of 520 chief learning officers and chief talent development officers, I found that they often shy away from encouraging curiosity because they believe the company would be harder to manage if people were allowed to explore their own interests. They also believe that disagreements would arise and making and executing decisions would slow down, raising the cost of doing business”
“We run this company on questions, not answers.” — Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011
Ambiguity stirs curiosity, Jesko explained how in theatre they play with ambiguity, with conscious abstraction. You cannot explain everything, so you leave breadcrumbs, and the viewer elaborates or fill in the blanks. You always leave something for the imagination. Abstraction forces the brain to make connections and stimulates curiosity, but in todays business world we want everything to be practical and clear; “conceptual” is often used as a dirty word.
Here is the problem: creativity and innovation often lie on the other side of discomfort — in the midst of ambiguity, uncertainty, tension and risk. Or on the other side of the socalled “inappropriate or silly” — in imagination, play and serendipity. Neither of these is welcome in our serious and sterile (but stable) work environments.
I had the privelege of attending a Cynefin retreat in Whistler last year, where we got to spend time with some extraordinarily creative people. We engaged in a highly ambiguous process that didn’t resolve into any clear-cut take-aways. We left with questions, not answers. For some participants this is a problem: if we have no clear answers or solutions that we can implement then surely we didn’t achieve a good ROI. However in complexity, answers have fleeting value but questions persist. Surely a good question that stimulates curiosity and imagination is worth much more than a temporary answer?
It’s ironic that in a world where most CEO’s list innovation as a top priority, they do their best to rid their organisations of the conditions that could actually unleash the creativity of their people.
Referenced:
https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-importance-of-being-bored-in-a-digital-age/
Jesko von den Steinen: Business needs more circus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAypnnVqph4
