How to keep an innovation team mentally strong…
For the people involved in an innovation project, working in completely new ways can be bewildering and at times stressful. So what are the best ways to innovate mindfully?
Innovation is a journey most people shy away from. To innovate and make change requires the willingness to feel uncomfortable, the strength to fail, and the resilience to push on through.
Time and time again we’ve experienced the ups and downs of an innovation project — from the euphoric moment an idea strikes to the depths of frustration in overcoming obstacles.
Innovation is incredibly exciting and rewarding, but to achieve ambitious goals teams (and the individuals involved) need to stay grounded, focussed and, ultimately, headstrong.
For those drawn to innovation, this is especially important. Recent research from the University of California found that entrepreneurial types have a higher prevalence of mental health challenges than a comparison population — 49% of entrepreneurs reported having a mental health condition.
Just as the products and services we develop are always designed around a customer, it’s imperative that the innovation process is designed around the needs of the team involved.
Step 1: Creating cohesion from the start
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. For some, the start of a project is a breeze. However, for those who don’t have ‘omnipotent being’ listed as a LinkedIn skill, the start of a project can be daunting.
Figuring out where to start and how to focus is hard. You have to rally the troops and begin defining and delving into the problem(s) you’re going to tackle.
For cohesion from the get-go, it’s crucial that everyone is on the same page. To commence a project, we spend at least an hour discussing team norms, ways of working and personal goals. It’s a great way to build a team’s focus and trust. See Jenn Torry’s piece on this process.
Once the team is aligned, it’s time to go into depth about the nature of the problem and who it impacts. This will help overcome any initial confusion and begin to uncover insights from which ideas can be generated. As a wise Greek philosopher once said, ‘confusion is the beginning of wisdom’.
Step 2: Having the confidence to share bad ideas
Having an idea is invigorating, but sharing it with others can be unnerving. The moment you say, ‘I have an idea,’ all eyes are on you. Speaking your mind requires confidence; you’re exposed and vulnerable, about to give away a piece of you.
It’s also very easy to dismiss an idea before it’s been tried and tested. It takes little more than an ill-timed look to put someone’s idea down and, in turn, crush their willingness to contribute in the future. But at the same time, it’s unhelpful to treat all ideas as good ideas.
At Fluxx, every idea is a bad idea before it’s been tried and tested (and proven good). This way all ideas are equal at the start, which we find encourages the willingness to share. They’re considered something to nurture, twist, modify, and often discard, as research and experiments reveal customer needs and opportunities to guide the development process.
Step 3: Overcoming the fear of failure
We’ve all squirmed through an article about the 21-year-old billionaire founder who launched their business one year and sold out to Google the next. Wild success stories are common, but they are also anomalies. Tales of failure often go amiss, but failure is an essential part of making change.
If you become emotionally attached to your idea, it can be rough. And knowing most ideas fail doesn’t always make things easier.
The way to mitigate the business risks and mental stigma around failure is to test lots of ideas, in measurable ways, to establish which ideas are desirable, viable and feasible. The ideas that don’t pass are scrapped — the ones that do are developed further.
Taking on a test-and-learn approach shifts the perception of failure towards something positive.
Check out Simon Garrard’s article on why embracing the unknown is essential to innovation.
Step 4: Keeping the faith through feedback
According to TechCrunch, 58% of tech workers suffer from Imposter Syndrome: feeling like a fraud and that you’ll eventually be found out. It’s common amongst founders who can attribute success to luck, whilst also taking all the blame for failures.
Dr Pei-Han Cheng, a psychologist at St. John’s University in New York, claims “the worst thing that people with imposter syndrome can do is to isolate themselves from receiving accurate and validating feedback from other people”.
A healthy feedback culture is key to an individual’s success and the success of the project. This doesn’t have to involve feedback on every task — “you’ve done a fantastic job on the photocopying, Joe”. But leaders need to set an example of giving and requesting feedback regularly throughout a project. The benefits of overcoming any initial awkwardness are huge.
Reflecting as a group is also key. On a Fluxx project, we run a retrospective after each stage in a project; a simple team meeting where we celebrate successes and discuss what we should Drop, Add, Keep or Improve from our ways of working.
Innovation isn’t just about creating new products and services. Real change, as cliched as it sounds, is about the people behind the projects. It’s vital we design innovation processes around the team involved — processes which help individuals have the willingness to feel uncomfortable, keep the strength to fail and retain the resilience to push on through. Our methodologies are built around communication and collaboration in order to radically improve pace and efficiency. But at its heart, communication and collaboration are what makes teams function and keep them headstrong. Innovation is hard work, and acknowledging the psychological toll helps cultivate resilient, resourceful teams.
Innovation consultant Rory Keddie also contributed to this article. He and Adam are Innovation consultants at Fluxx, which is a company that uses experiments to understand customers, helping clients to transform their businesses. We work with organisations such as Atkins, National Grid, the Parliamentary Digital Service and the Royal Society of Arts.
If you’d like to see ways we’ve helped companies and could help yours, take a look at our site: Fluxx.uk.com, subscribe to our newsletter or download your free copy of the latest book. You can also check out more of our articles on Fluxx Studio Notes.
