3 Leadership Lessons from IDEO U

Leading for creativity comes in multiple forms

Day One Agency encourages the continuing education of the team. I was lucky enough to recently participate in an online course taught by IDEO U called Leading for Creativity. The multi-week course was extremely valuable. It explored different leadership tactics to get the most out of your team. It was full of strategies to help consistently deliver the most creative results. During the course, my perspective on leadership shifted dramatically.

Below are three big takeaways:

1. Leaders Ask Questions

Before taking this course, I definitely did not put enough time into thinking about questions. I thought leaders have answers. This course made me realize, as a leader, your job is not to have the answers, it’s to ask the right questions.

This begins with listening better. Then, identifying the right questions to push the team to discover answers.

Great questions: Create clarity, build trust, invite critical thinking, challenge assumptions, and encourage ownership.

2. Leaders Design Rituals

Culture is all about beliefs and behaviors within a team. No culture is perfect. The best teams are made up of diverse individuals. But this strength can also be a place of tension. This is where rituals come in.

IDEO has a beautiful suggestion that invites teams to dive into the pressure points of their culture. They recommend designing rituals. From tea time, to casual collisions, to one-song workouts, rituals bring people together.

To design a ritual, start by identifying a tension point. Next, flip that tension into a question: How might we design a ritual that counter-acts this tension? Brainstorm different ways to answer this question with the group. Then, try it out. After trying the ritual, reflect. Keep testing and learning until you have a ritual that properly addresses your challenge.

3. Leaders Clarify Chaos

Brainstorming is an art. In our job, we need to be creative on-demand and under a deadline. So, we spend a lot of time perfecting the art of generating ideas under pressure. IDEO has a great way of thinking about what happens in a brainstorm. Leaders, they say, manage the tension between the chaos and the clarity. Leaders guide the thought process towards an idea.

A brainstorm is about divergent and convergent thinking. First, we begin by going wide and generating as many wild ideas as possible. Then, we look for themes in the many concepts. We sculpt everything down until something emerges. The art of navigating divergent and convergent thinking is what the best creative leaders do.

Leading for creativity is a worthy endeavor. It is a craft that is never fully perfected and a task that is never complete. It requires empathy, listening, and serious thoughtfulness. It is about cultivation rather than top-down management. It is about being at eye-level with your team and being obsessed with empowering others.

In the words of Paul Bennett, IDEO’s Chief Creative Officer,

“Your job is to have the great questions. Your job is to stir the embers; it is not to start the fire.”