Are our Teams truly Thinking Outside-the-box?
This week I spent some time in airplanes, flying to visit a client. As usual, I carried several books to enjoy during the traveling time. Two books that I read were “Seeing What Others Don’t” by psychologist Gary Klein and “The Misinformation Age: How false beliefs Spread” by Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall. I have previously enjoyed reading Klein’s books so I picked this one up at the bookstore on sale. I decided to read O’Connor after I heard a marvelous NPR podcast where she was interviewed by Shankar Vedantam (https://n.pr/2S3onzK) and reading two of her most recent articles (which she also co-wrote with Weatherall)[1]. The third book was also magnificent — “Executive Presence” by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and her colleagues at the Center for Talent Innovation[2]- an outstanding book as well but not relevant to this blog (I will write about CTI´s research another time).
What I found fascinating about the first two books was that they both tackled in some way, the topic of closed versus open network, a well-research subject by a former colleague at the Center for Creative Leadership, Phil Willburn[3]. In a very synthesized and summarized manner, as we develop our professional network, we have to adjust to the changes within our working environment in order to optimize those networks. One of the most practical approaches to improve the productivity of our networks is to ensure that the network is as open as possible, meaning, that we have the greatest number of independent “nodes”, those points in our network that do not connect to each other. When too many nodes connect to each other, we increase the risk of having recycled ideas and feedback — as we introduce an idea through one of our network liaisons, the idea travels through different individuals until it goes back to us through another liaison as if it was a new idea. That’s when we tell ourselves, “well, if such and such individual thinks that this concept is a good idea, I must be heading in the right direction since that’s what I was also thinking”… we do not realize that it is the same idea that we first voiced boomeranging to us through our closed network.
The other concept introduced by O’Connor and Weatherall had to do with the conformity within scientific networks. In one of their examples, a researcher (A) introduces a hypothesis that travels through his or her closed researcher network until someone else figures out that if A had the same idea, it must be worth researching, without realizing that all the researchers are feeding their insights from the same source. In addition, O’Connor mentioned the resistance faced by those outside those networks to introduce new ideas that challenge the “recycled” beliefs of those networked researchers. The closeness of those networks is such that when outside elements approach the network with challenging hypothesis or theories, the network feels attacked and, as an organism would, responds by marginalizing and isolating that new threatening element. After all, challenging the network’s ideas is like attacking their core values, norms and beliefs and it quickly evolves into a personal attack. Personal attacks usually triggered our “reptilian” side of the brain, the amygdala close to the hippocampus, triggering the fight-flee-freeze emotions and behaviors.
Klein’s book centered around how one develops insights, in the process of personal and professional development. Klein focuses his research on the creation of insights, those coherent and unambiguous ideas that bring the solution to a new challenge or a new opportunity to expand ourselves professionally and/or personally. He argues that, to positively affect the performance of an organization, we need maximize the insight incidences while allowing a reasonable amount of errors (some errors inspire insights). One of the topics that caught my attention was his reference to outliers, those ideas or points of data that do not exactly fit the normal pattern of behavior, action, strategy, business… of an individual or organization. Shawn Achor, the author of “The Happiness Advantage” makes a comedic (but very true) reference to these outliers in science in his TedTalk (https://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work). He shows a graph with data collected and a clear concentration of data by which to extrapolate a line, pointing at several points outside the common cloud, identifies those as “the red dots” or outliers and states “There is one weird red dot above the curve […] that’s no problem […] I can delete that dot because that’s clearly a measurement error. And we know that’s a measurement error because it’s messing up my data.” When someone expresses an idea that is an outside-the-box idea, we would accept and consider that idea only if the idea falls within the acceptable cloud of points by which we will draw our curve … if the idea is the “red dot above the curve”, or the outlier, then it is not welcome and we have a tendency to ignore it, thinking of the dot as “an error”. O’Connor provided in her papers and book several examples of those “red dots”. For example, she identifies a medical red dot as the idea first introduced in 1846 by the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. Semmelweis argued that surgeons should wash their hands between surgeries to avoid cross-contamination among patients. That idea was highly insulting to his colleagues that felt offended by the idea that their noble hands were unclean.
As inclusive leaders, we need to be aware and cultivate those “red dots” as potential insights that would push our teams towards a more effective and productive development. Just because those outliers fall outside the invisible box created by our assumptions, norms and beliefs, does not mean that we should not give proper consideration to those insights. One of the benefits of team diversity is the fact that we have a fertile ground for cultivating different perspectives, different “red dots”. Those perspectives provide us with a different perception of a challenge and could identify new opportunities. Just as science evolves, our business approach and theories should also evolve. Listening to those different perspectives could provide us with the “red dots above the curve” that would take our business to the next level.
Some of you may be familiar with Hamel and Prahalad’s definition of what a core competence is and how it could take us into the mega opportunity that would ensure future prosperity [4]. The HBS professors identified a mega opportunity as one where we have a new core competence within our organization that allows us to enter into a new market. That’s what Kim and Mauborgne called a decade later, the Blue Ocean strategy — the strategy where we develop a level of value for the client that makes the competition irrelevant[5]. Those “red dots” are all potential gates to the Blue Ocean.
Thinking outside the box means also challenging the social trust that exists within our organization. We may be tempted to believe a concept just because it comes from an individual identified as an expert. Experts usually have more experiences and knowledge on a specific area, and just as that expertise could be a benefit, it could also be a handicap — too many anchors to the cloud of dots, to the normal curve, and too much suppression of “red dots” could also be occurring. As inclusive leaders, we need to ensure that our teams use their diversity to ask questions that challenge those established assumptions that limit our actions. We need to use the different perspectives to push the boundaries and truly think outside the box, cultivating as many “red dots” as possible.
[1] Weatherall, J. O., & O’Connor, C. (2018). Do as I say, not as I do, or, conformity in scientific networks.
Weatherall, J. O., O’Connor, C., & Bruner, J. (2018). How to Beat Science and Influence People: Policy Makers and Propaganda in Epistemic Networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.01239.
[2] Hewlett, S. A., Leader-Chivée, L., Sherbin, L., Gordon, J., & Dieudonné, F. (2012). Executive presence. Center for Talent Innovation.
[3] Cullen, K., Willburn, P., Chrobot-Mason, D., & Palus, C. (2014). Networks: How collective leadership really works. Centre for Creative Leadership.
[4] Hammel, G., & Prahalad, C. K. (1996). Competing for the Future. Harvard Business School Press.
[5] Kim, W. C. (2005). Blue ocean strategy: from theory to practice. California management review, 47(3), 105–121.
