Why doing what we are told is so often a poor idea
 

Looking around, the evidence that conformity has brought us nearly to economic and financial ruin is overwhelming. Yet people still do it. I suspect it’s a much more common way to behave than its opposite—being independent and non-conformist—even here in the ‘Land of the Free’. So there has to be a reason, since the benefits of making your own decisions and choosing your own path through life are both obvious and logical.

Thinking about it, I find four reasons for the rampant conformity in our society and business world. None of them are good, but all are understandable in human terms. Maybe, by listing them and discussing them in depth, it will help people see that they are neither necessary nor desirable—even for ‘respectable’ people like you and me.

1. We are raised to conform and follow orders, so many of us get to like it.

From our birth, we are surrounded by people telling us what to do: when to eat, when to sleep, what to wear and how to behave. From parents, through other older family members, schoolteachers and anyone in charge of an activity we took part in, there is always someone who claims to know what’s best for us and is ready to make sure we do as we are told.

In fact, one of the earliest lessons we learn is that being loved and assisted by others—an essential requirement for any child—depends pretty much on doing what you are told. When, like all children, we try a little rebellion, we discover punishments can go beyond mere withdrawal of approval on a temporary basis. A small number of people refuse to follow this system, but most find it quickly becomes ‘normal’.

There’s another benefit too: it saves us having to make our own decisions and live by the consequences. By doing what we are told, we can shift responsibility for mistakes onto someone else. The excuse, “I was only following orders” probably began with the person who loaded the Ark and didn’t have the wit to make sure the two houseflies were trodden on by the elephants.

2. We tend to trust what the biggest crowd says is right

You would think we should have realized long before now that fashion is an extremely poor guide to sensible living, but no; we still rush to jump into every type of nonsense, rather than risk feeling left out. If the current recession should cause people to re-assess any of their beliefs, it is surely this one. Every cycle of boom and bust arises directly from the tendency people have to follow a crowd. There’s a famous book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It was written by Charles Mackay (1841-1889) and quickly became the classic work on popular manias of all kinds, financial and otherwise. If you haven’t already, read it.

Democracy may be based on following the wishes of the majority, but that is not a good guide in other areas of life. The government of a country needs to be based on making sure minorities and individuals, be they rich aristocrats or party members, can’t hi-jack the levers of power for their own purposes. In most of our personal life, we shouldn’t want to be part of the majority—we should want to stand out in some way.

3. We put far too much trust in ‘experts’ and authority figures

Nice, respectable people—like everyone who reads this article, naturally—don’t question authority or cause trouble. That’s why we do what officials of all kinds tell us to, from the police to the tax man. We are also brought up to respect obvious ‘experts’ like doctors (never mind that many are paid by drug companies to prescribe specific drugs or write papers proving they work), lawyers (who are never, of course, motivated by sordid motives like money), pastors and the clergy (I’ll say no more) and even media types and self-appointed gurus.

This deference to authority quickly spills over to include almost anyone who seems to know what they doing when we don’t. We therefore trusted bankers, mortgage ‘experts’ and financial advisers to look after our money. Look where that got us.

4. We are nearly all creatures of habit

Why do people buy the same brand for decades, despite evidence it costs more than it should and is no better than any of the others—even worse? Why do people drive to work by more or less the same route, at the same time, each day? Why do they watch the same TV channels, take the same type of vacation and spend their weekends doing the same things?

Why do organizations persist with products long after they have started to lose market share? Or follow approaches to management that have been in place for decades? Or refuse to change the way they operate until competitors force them to?

People frequently know what they are doing isn’t effective, healthy, logical, or even remotely sensible, yet they still do it. Why? It feels comfortable. They’re used to doing it that way. That’s the way things are done around here. Besides, many are terrified of change—usually because they’ve never done it except in the most dire emergency.

If you don’t use a muscle for years, or ever, then suddenly do something that demands you put some strain on it, it’s going to hurt badly. If you never change willingly, it will hurt terribly when you do. In both cases, it’s not the new activity that is the problem; it’s the total lack of use that went before.

Why you shouldn’t conform for the sake of it

• Making up your own mind ‘exercises’ your mental muscles, keeps your mind fit and encourages you to stay abreast of events. If you need any of those facilities (and you will), it’s better to keep them in trim than suddenly find they’re too rusty to work.
• There’s really no evidence that anyone knows what is right for you better than you do. After all, you’re the only one who knows what is going on inside your head and what matters to you most.
• Nearly everyone who is eager to tell you what to do is coming from their agenda, not yours. They want you to do what suits them. You probably ought to do what suits you.
• Following fashion and obeying orders without question leaves you wide open to manipulation and fraud.
• If you want to get on in life and do something important, you won’t do either by being like everyone else. The word ‘mediocre’ comes from the Latin word ‘medius’, meaning ‘in the middle’. No one ever stood out by fitting in.
• Being a conformist blocks any change until it’s too late to change easily or in your own time. Conformists go through life experiencing periods of monotony, interspersed with crises when they frantically try to find some one to tell them what to do as their world crashes around their ears.
• Organizations that follow ‘industry best practice’, benchmarking and other mechanistic ways of making sure they stay with the crowd, lay themselves wide open to being wrong-footed by any competitor willing to do something new and different.

If we learn nothing else from our recent brush with economic chaos and disaster it should be this: do what everyone else does and you’ll end up where everyone else is—in the ditch on the side of the road, watching the tail lights of the new leaders speeding into the distance.

Technorati Tags: conformity, obedience, control, following the crowd, fitting-in

The secret to enjoying what you have lies mostly in letting it go
 

Our human tendency to want to possess things has been a source of trouble from dim antiquity. As soon as we have something pleasant, we want to hang onto it—to catch the butterfly of joy and pin it onto a cork slab along with the rest of our collection. The fact that we can only do this by killing it never seems to occur to us in time.

I awoke the other morning from a delightful dream and, of course, spent several moments trying to hold onto it. That’s when it occurred to me that, even if I had been able to do so, what would have been left was an empty shell, devoid of life and the capacity to grow.

The damnable urge to collect things

This tendency to grab and hold on—to acquire for the sake of acquisition—is just as clear in the workplace. People grasp at bits of knowledge and hug them to themselves. Maybe they hint that they have them—few collectors can resist the tendency to brag about what they ‘own’—but they are careful to keep everything to themselves if they can. In the process, their knowledge goes from being ‘live’ data that could lead to action to dead information that serves only to bolster its owner’s ego.

Managers try to amass patronage and influence, building up a web of political power with little or no idea what they might use it for except making them feel big. CEOs and corporate boards leap into mergers and acquisitions, despite the high failure rate, because . . . well, it’s what ‘big cheeses’ do and they don’t want to be left out. In their private lives, they collect art, or yachts, or huge houses they cannot possibly need—all the while amassing a vast store of dead ‘stuff’ that serves mostly to display their importance to other dead-stuff collectors.

What happens when you let go?

For a start, you no longer need to worry about protecting your collection of data, influence or rare Persian carpets from decay or theft. You are also freed from the notion that all this ‘stuff’ must not be used. It took so much time and effort—not to say expense—to gather together, even the thought of using any of it becomes intolerable.

Whatever you have can be used freely, or even given away, because there will always be more. If you don’t need to ‘own’ it, the supply of interesting and potentially useful information in the world is infinite. It’s the same with influence. Using it for a good purpose will quickly bring you more. Even something in finite supply, like great art, can be enjoyed by anyone willing to step inside a gallery and concentrate less on wishing they owned what they find, than on enjoying it for its own sake.

The poet William Blake expressed it best:

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingéd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

Holding onto a corpse is bad for your health

In the world of work, kissing an achievement as it flies into—and out of—your life lets you taste the pleasure, then leaves you free to pursue the next one without looking back. Enjoying the success of a project, then letting it go, frees you up for the next set of tasks.

Many organizations develop toxic environments because the people within them are grimly holding on to decaying achievements from their distant past. They cannot change, because their energies are directed to what once brought them success—even though it is now dead and poisonous. Marketers keep trying to resurrect a dying flagship product line, rather than admitting they need something new. Old products are given a quick surface skim of polish and sent out yet again, though the public are already aware they are little but walking, painted corpses.

Instead of recognizing that new times need new approaches, leaders too keep repeating what worked in the past—usually until it destroys them. The business schools too—who surely should know better—base their teaching on old, discredited theories and case studies from decades ago.

Let it all go. Stop clinging, even to the best of it. When the butterfly of success and joy flits into your life, enjoy it for what it is without thinking about possessing it. Let it live to produce a new generation of similar joys.

No one ever found their collection of preserved butterfly specimens producing eggs or caterpillars.

Technorati Tags: letting go, living in the moment, enjoying what comes, giving up possessiveness

Most leaders act as if creativity is a disease they hope won’t affect their part of the operation. Why?
 

There seems to be no end to the number of situations where organizations claim to want something, then act in ways that make it clear they don’t. This thought came to me again as I was musing about some more management basics.

Take creativity. If the best things in life are free, as the old song has it, the best things in work—the creative activities that employees tend to enjoy the most and find most satisfaction in doing—seem to be regarded by many bosses and organizations as unnecessary. That’s certainly true of innovation or thinking for yourself.

Making the sale is important. Completing that report is said to be essential. Checking your data is ready and submitting it on schedule will earn you a friendly nod from the boss—at least if it’s done right—and a furious dressing down if it’s late and there are mistakes.

But, despite all the claims to the contrary, you will find that corporate life goes on very smoothly if you never have a new idea, never display any imagination, never produce anything creative, and never question the established ways of doing things. Perhaps you won’t be regarded as brilliant, but you’ll be seen as ‘a safe pair of hands’—which is almost certainly better, if you want to be promoted.

So which is right, the value organizations say they put on creativity, or the value demonstrated by the actions of their executives? Words are cheap. If there is a mismatch between what someone says and what they do, it’s usually best to believe the action represents their true desires.

“Just do as you’re told and don’t get fancy!”

If you ignore what and leaders corporations claim, and look purely at what they do, you have to reach the conclusion that creativity is not only treated as unnecessary, it is often actively resented.

Creativity messes up the schedule and interferes with the smooth progress of routine. In the short term, it doesn’t make money. More often, it requires additional expenditure. It doesn’t cut costs (at least in the short term again) and it doesn’t show up as an asset on the balance sheet.

The very people who claim to want creative subordinates—the executives—are typically those who are most irritated when creativity intrudes on their neatly ordered day. As those with the most to gain from preserving the status quo, they are least happy to see it challenged. To parody the words of the Church of England wedding service, “What I, in the past, have put together, let no man put asunder.”

“Not another weirdo!“

There’s another problem. The people most likely to produce creative ideas are often on the edge of acceptability.

Many creative people don’t restrict their questioning and innovations to workplace issues. They don’t fit in with corporate norms. They’re untidy, they don’t dress well, they don’t spend time socializing or brown-nosing those above them. Even worse, they keep asking difficult questions and are often visibly unimpressed by the answers. They waste time thinking when they should be taking action, and wanting to change things when they should be humbly obedient.

Most executives will put up with a great deal from people they think they need badly enough. Many up-and-coming macho managers are arrogant, pushy and not very trustworthy, but they get away with it because they ‘deliver the goods’. In an emergency, creative people will be also accepted easily; but once the emergency is over, it’s not unusual to find the organization starts re-applying pressure to force conformity to various petty rules and expectations.

“Who’s in charge here?”

Command-and-control, macho management and creative thinking don’t mix. The essence of creativity is individuality. The essence of control is doing everything my way—or else.

In conventional management thinking, all the emphasis is on doing things quickly, cheaply and predictably. The ideal is to establish a set of systems and procedures that require little or no maintenance. Once you have set up them, you leave well alone. Doing anything else increases costs—and cutting costs is usually seen as the best way to ensure profits. In fact, in the ideal management world, you would become the lowest-cost (and highest-profit) producer by establishing a mechanistic, take-it-or-leave-it system in a monopolistic environment—rather as Microsoft has been attempting to do for a number of years.

Creativity and innovation mess this up. If your competitors shift the nature of the business in their favor—as they will certainly try to do—you have to fight back to undermine their attempt at industry and world domination in the same way. But once you have done that (if you can), it’s time to put away the creative ideas (and people) and get back to business as usual: repetitive, predictable and smoothly profitable.

If you must retain some creative people, the simplest way to keep them out of the way until you need them next (hopefully, not for a long time), is to put them in a separate building on another site and try to forget about them.

Turning the tap off

Most organizations today are actively resisting creativity, not promoting it. The current economic crisis gives further evidence of this. Faced with the breakdown of existing systems, executives are making enormous efforts to put the status quo back into place—to go back to business as usual—where they should be using the opportunity to re-think the fundamentals of their business models.

They want creativity to be like water: something you can turn off when you don’t immediately need it, but which will be there to turn back on when you do. Since it doesn’t work like that, they try to spend as little time, attention and money on it as they can most of the time—then complain loudly when they need innovation and it’s not available in an instant.

They also want creativity only where they want it (which is safely away from affecting them) and nowhere else—least of all where it might require them to do anything new, or where it might show them up for being ineffective and out-of-touch. Like all aspects of change, it’s fine when it affects someone else and damnably infuriating (and quite unnecessary) if it might affect me.

The conclusion that best fits the evidence is that creativity and change mostly come about in organizations in spite of those in charge, not because of them; and that all the talk about needing creative people who think and ask questions is just that—talk.

Depressing, isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: creativity, change, innovation, new ideas, fresh thinking

Working Your Daydreams for Ideas and Solutions

(This is a guest article from Amy Fries, author of Daydreams at Work: Wake Up Your Creative Powers)

When do you get your best ideas? When you’re sitting at your desk striving for an answer, or when you’re doing something off-task like driving, walking, or puttering around the house? Though many of us have sensed the connection between daydreaming and creativity, recent scientific studies are combining with an abundance of anecdotal evidence to establish that when daydreaming we are in our most creative state of mind, tapping into and connecting complex regions of the brain.

On the surface, daydreaming seems like the antithesis of “work,” yet it’s at the core of our most important type of productivity—creative problem-solving. Daydreams are not just wishful thinking. They are the nursery for ideas and our best mental state for tackling complex problems.

Visionaries of every sort, from Einstein to Walt Disney, credit daydreams as the source of their moments of insight. Some of the most innovative companies in the world feature programs that give key employees the time and space to think creatively and daydream. Google offers a 20% program, 3M has a 15% program, and Gore & Associates (Gore-Tex) features “dabble time.” All three companies credit these programs as the source of their most successful products.

“. . . for a daydream believer . . .”

While many of us can see the relationship between daydreaming and creativity in the arts and even science, we’ve been slower to come around to its usefulness in business. Say the word “visionary” however, and people understand how having a vision—a mental image or plan—can help start a breakthrough company or service.

A “vision” is just an upscale word for “daydream” and “visionary” an upscale word for “daydreamer.”

I know all the work and focus must follow to have an idea come to fruition. I am not against focusing in any way, shape, or form. But the original idea and the motivation to fulfill that idea are born in a daydreaming state, and we do our most creative problem solving when our mind wanders.

Why daydreaming Is the most creative state of mind

• While daydreaming, we can envision—we can see things, people, and events in our mind’s eye. This ability to simulate the known and unknown is an unrivaled creative skill, available to you only in a daydreaming state. While daydreaming, you’re able to see the see the big picture, something you’re unable to do when locked in the tunnel vision of focus.
• The daydreaming mind is completely uncensored, which gives you the freedom to explore a wide—and sometimes wild—variety of options without an internal critic hovering. It’s the brain’s own critic-free R&D time. This freedom to explore and take risks with your thinking are key to innovation.
• You are able to free-associate when daydreaming, making seemingly random connections, which in turn enable you to come up with novel solutions. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of struggling to remember a name or word, and you can’t get it despite focusing on it. Suddenly it will come back to you when you’re doing something off-task like walking to your car. That’s free association at work. In fact, the ability to make new and inventive associations, as we do in a daydreaming state, is so valuable to creativity and problem solving that computer scientists are incorporating the ability into software programs. One such program is called Daydreamer for its ability to free associate in its down time.
• Recent studies using brain scans show that while daydreaming we are using the most complex regions of the brain, tapping into stores of knowledge and experience unavailable when focusing on one thing only.

The truth about creativity at work

The new economy demands it. Global competition and the fast pace of technological change have left many of us scrambling. In addition, we’re become much more of a thought-based economy than a widget-based one. Such an economy has a voracious appetite for ideas and innovation.

None of us can rest on our laurels. It used to be a person worked their way up the ladder, starting as an apprentice and eventually becoming the wise elder of their trade. Now we all have to scramble just to stay relevant. Those who want to be ahead of the curve have to be visionary. Those businesses or individuals lost only in the tunnel vision of task will be left behind.

Encouraging creativity is good for attracting and retaining quality employees—always an issue, even in this bad economy. Encouraging your employees to think creatively also helps to ensure that ideas stay under your roof, instead of having them take their ideas somewhere else or start a competing business.

Ideas for sparking creativity in the workplace

• Tell people you want their ideas. Give them some amount of time and space to think creatively and daydream. Instead of fearing that you’re losing an employee’s clocked-in time to creative thinking, look at it from another angle. You are gaining much wider access to that person’s creative energies by encouraging them to explore ideas whenever the inspiration strikes. Offering up as little as thirty minutes a week could send a powerful message that creative thought is valued, not viewed with suspicion as time-wasting.
• Ask “what if” questions and encourage speculative thinking.
• Accept risk and a certain amount of failure. I believe it was Edison who said, “to have one good idea, have a lot of them.”
• Provide a forum for sharing ideas. Give feedback on what you hear.
• Get rid of your old-school ideas about daydreaming, and start doing it. Go ahead. I’m giving you permission. Among the many benefits of daydreaming is that it’s fun—and we can all use some of that.

Amy Fries’s new book Daydreams at Work: Wake Up Your Creative Powers (Capital Books, 2009) shows you how to tap into your daydreams for ideas, energy, solutions, and motivation for both work and life.

Amy is a writer and editor whose articles have been published in newspapers, magazines, and trade publications. Amy began her research into daydreaming and creativity while working on her masters at Johns Hopkins University. To contact Amy, visit her website and click on the contact form ( www.DaydreamsAtWork.com).

Technorati Tags: creativity, innovation, coming up with ideas, daydreaming, finding new ideas

Recession’s storms provide the dormant period you need to prepare fresh growth.
 

Photo credit: Jon Worth

Today, I came across an interesting thought from John Baldoni, writing for the Harvard Business Publishing blog (“Adopt a Fresh Take on the Recession”).

He writes: “One thing this recession can provide executives is more time. Typically the pace of business slows during a recession, so it creates opportunity for dialogue and reflection. This gives business leaders an opportunity to adopt a ‘fresh take’.”

That seems a genuinely good idea. Since all the frantic rushing to make bundles of money during the boom time, and the crazy, short-term thinking it brought on, were major causes of the recession, it makes sense for the opposite to be worth doing to find a way out again. Besides, when things get slow and energy seems depleted, creating future plans can be therapeutic as well as useful in career or business terms.

Advice to use any ‘spare’ time to slow down and think hard works as well for individuals as organizations. Why not use any slowing as a time to stand back and take a good look at your priorities and direction? Where should you be using whatever resources are still available? What should you be working on that could be to your best advantage?

There are times when we all press on with a strategy we’ve begun to question, or stick with career choices that don’t appear to be working out, purely because there never seems time to work on a new direction. If you have that time now, deploy it wisely.

Like a plant driven underground by winter storms, use any ‘dormant’ period in your progress to put down stronger roots and get ready to ready to burst back above ground when conditions improve.

Technorati Tags: change, personal growth, strategy, priorities, new directions

“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”—e.e cummings
 

Curiosity is timeless. It always was and always will be. It transcends race, religion, politics, finance, culture, bias and prejudice. It allows us to look beyond our eyes, “out there,” and arrive at a place of originality; to see reality from an untainted perspective. It lets us see new truths that support our evolution and that of our communities and institutions.

So what is curiosity for you? How does it show up in your life?

One way to know if curiosity is part of the fabric of your life is to look at how you live. Do you work in a place where people are openly encouraged to think, discover and try out new ideas? Is it a culture where curiosity can thrive? Is spontaneity squashed by overbearing routines and structure?

What about you? How much of your life is habitual? Are you a risk taker? What is your attitude to discovery and exploration? Are you comfortable trying what you are afraid of, or doing something that’s ‘not like me’? Or do you generally come from a place of having it ‘all figured out’, mechanical, conventional, predictable? Is there no room for curiosity or inquisitiveness?

The loss of childhood wonder

When was the last time you re-invented your career, your business or yourself? How do you feel about the notion of re-inventing? Does it make you feel exhilarated or fearful?

As a young child, each of us was curious—the consummate explorer. We were open to the new, the magical, the aliveness and the wonder of life. We had no settled mis-perceptions, no mis-conceptions of reality, no expectations or paradigms to limit or prescribe our view of the world. Just curiosity and wonderment.

As we get older, all that stops. We are taught how to think and act in ways that are ‘appropriate’ for our age and the society in which we live. The fortunate ones subvert the brainwashing and find ways to allow their curiosity and wonderment to thrive. All the rest give in and allow their curiosity and sense of adventure to wither away. As Albert Einstein said, “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”

As we grow older still, we fall easily into habitual ways of living. We grow tired and slip into the comfort of a routine. We no longer choose to take risks, to look beyond the immediate and step off the well-worn path of the ‘tried and true’, the familiar, the comfortable, the safe. Ours is a culture rife with boredom: lots of repetitive activity, little curiosity. What there is in the way of curiosity is blocked by hubris—that obsessive pride based on an “I know it all” approach to life that closes down the imagination, stifles innovation and leaves us always where we have already been.

Facing down the forces of convention

We have all encountered individuals in organizations who see the curious as nuisances: people who want only to “fix what isn’t broken” and upset so-called stability; people who can’t see sense and leave things the way they are.

Too many of our businesses lack curiosity. They don’t see that it is the ‘secret sauce’ of moving forward. A magic ingredient that serves to promote a healthy sense of renewal and regeneration. Life-promoting where convention brings only the numb acceptance of waiting around for death.

All curiosity demands is innocence, yet few are willing to take on being innocent. They are too fearful of seeing life with a “beginner’s mind.” They cannot face not knowing anything in advance. They need to have all the answers now.

Curiosity is a necessary conversation to have with yourself today

You don’t need to wait for some ‘mid-life crisis’ to have this conversation. Any time is good for re-evaluating your place in the grand scheme of things and fostering your curiosity.

The beauty of being curious is you don’t need to be an expert. All that is required is an inquiring mind to inspire wonder, imagination, investigation and openness to the new. You simply have to ask questions and accept that the answers may not be what you expected.

The upside to the downside in both our current economic world and our world of unhealthy and unhappy relationships is that the stress we are experiencing can serve as an impetus. It gets easier to be curious about how to make things work better. Stress can become a motivator to seek positive change and transformation.

Why we need more curiosity, not less

Going forward, the organizations that will survive and thrive will be those who accept and value the curious as unique sources of benefit to the organization through their probing, inquiring and exploring. Successful businesses are always adapting and inventing new strategies—becoming smarter, better, healthier and happier in the process.

We are all facing serious challenges. That’s why we need more than ever to be curious about where we are headed. Such curiosity can lead us to ‘right knowing’, ‘right understanding’ and ‘right action’—but only if we enter into the journey of curiosity with an open mind, free from preconceived notions or expectations.

Our $10-food-for-thought questions this week are:

• Would you describe yourself as a curious person? Would your family, your friends, your colleagues at work?
• Has your curiosity lead you to new ideas, insights, discoveries? Are you a risk-taker? Did your parents or primary caregivers encourage your curiosity and imagination?
• Do you resist being curious? Do you prefer routine? Do you need to have all the answers? If so, why do you think this is?
• Does your organization support curiosity? How does this feel?

Technorati Tags: Curiosity, wonder, innovation, creativity, moving on, looking forward

(This is another guest article from Michael Taplin.)

Creativity is the source of renewal. It lies at the heart of the human spirit, and it is the source of all progress. We cannot kill it, because creative people will leave the organization rather than have their spirit suffocated. Yet history is littered with the bones of organizations that have died in the attempt to remove creativity. Renewal of systems and processes is essential if the organization is to contribute to the society it feeds and feeds upon. Innovation of product and service is the way we create a new, and hopefully better, future.

But creativity has a down side too. Unguided creativity leads to anarchy and management becomes a random walk, finding a crisis at every turn. To flourish, organizations need a degree of consistency and creativity is its enemy. If the business that values consistency over creativity will surely die as it becomes irrelevant to its customers, so a business that values creativity over consistency will fail to provide reliable performance for those same customers. Constant innovation without direction and purpose is unlikely to generate customer value. The challenge is to achieve the right balance.

Consistency matters

We see the importance of consistency in successful branding strategies. Changes that add value to the brand, by reinforcing the brand image and extending the franchise, are vital to long term growth strategies. Otherwise good, creative ideas need to be assessed against established brand criteria and rejected if they do not fit.¹

Another dimension of consistency that has long-term survival value is quality: ‘fit for purpose’ performance. Deming showed us that 90% of errors are system failure and only 10% human error. We should not behave as if all errors are due to incompetent or ill-motivated people. Too many managers and business owners are reluctant to accept that the management system itself is flawed and cannot produce the consistent quality needed for success.

Yin and yang

I suggest the best metaphor we can use to understand the true relationship between creativity and consistency is the oriental concept of Yin and Yang. This idea illustrates their essential duality. One has to be balanced by the other. Creativity and consistency are equally essential elements that must coexist and run in parallel. Flipping from one to the other can only create doubt and uncertainty in the minds of the very people whose commitment is necessary for prosperity.

Finding the right balance between creativity and consistency isn’t always easy. Decisions that are inconsistent with the values of the business or the brand as perceived by customers will detract from the businesses survival prospects. Decisions that inhibit creativity will destroy the spirit that renews the organization to meet the challenges of the ever-changing environment. But leaders have an obligation to balance the yin of creativity with the yang of consistency. It is their job.

Finding the right balance

Unless the leaders of an organization can promote this balance and provide a clear point of reference for everyone, there will always be problems.

One way is through the much-maligned statement of values. If a decision is consistent with the agreed and adopted values of the organization, it may not do much good, but it can do little or no harm. That’s why decisions that are inconsistent with these values should be rejected.

Maintenance of this standard is a key responsibility of leadership. If managers want to become leaders, they should be prepared to breathe life into the organization’s statement of values so that it becomes the beacon by which the course is set and progress is measured. Only then can an organization be consistent and creative. Only then will it have a basis for setting the right balance between these qualities and making sure its actions fit that balance.

Note:
¹ For a pithy discussion of how getting this wrong puts the business at risk, check out The Cola War in “Marketing Warfare”by Ries and Trout.

Michael Taplin is the driving force behind bizlearn.biz. He spent 25 years as an independent consultant, owning and running successful businesses that trained thousands of people in large organizations. 12 years ago he left the Australian corporate scene behind to move to rural New Zealand, where he got close to the small business culture and has been a volunteer business mentor working through Business Mentor NZ. As a Teaching Fellow of the Graduate School of Business at Massey University , he has taught in both the MBA and Public Sector Management programs and worked in the small island nations of the Pacific where he made many friends.

Technorati Tags: creativity, consistency, managing change, quality, leadership, keeping balance

Don’t waste the opportunities to change that mistakes and setbacks offer you
 

Whenever something goes wrong, in your private life, career or business, to individuals or organizations, it represents an opportunity to stand back, evaluate past actions and start again with beneficial changes. To choose a new track. So why do so many of us try instead to get back to ‘business as usual’ as quickly as we can?

I find this attitude especially depressing in our current mess. Faced with clear evidence that ‘business as usual’ caused the worst financial and economic melt-down in living memory, there are still people out there who can’t wait to get back to it. They are lost in a state of denial. They can’t accept things got so bad. They won’t acknowledge that there were so many abuses. They won’t allow themselves to see the need for even the most obvious changes. Their only argument is that, if we can somehow get back to ‘business as usual’, it will all go away by itself. The past felt good and the present does not. Back to the past!

The trouble with ‘business as usual’ is just that . . . it’s usual. There’s nothing different or distinctive about it. It’s doing the ‘same old, same old’, again and again. Yes, it’s comfortable. You know where you are with ‘business as usual’, even if it’s the same place you have been stuck in for years.

But is that where you want to be? If things have collapsed into a mess, is that the best way out—to go back to where you were and risk repeating the pain and the losses in another few years?

Get out of that comfort zone

Comfort is the lure that ‘business as usual’ uses to keep you in your rut. Like wearing shabby, old clothes, being dressed in ‘business as usual’ marks you out as someone who has given up on aiming for progress and is content to live in memories of the past. In time, that old-fashioned style will make you a joke; someone left behind trying to re-capture their youth when the world has passed on.

If you want to grow and develop, it’s essential to let go of wherever you are now and let the future through. Allow the universe to change you. Don’t try to force it into channels that you think are safe or acceptable because you’ve been in them before.

The only result of that will be to repeat the mistakes of the past, along with attempts to re-create the triumphs. But the triumphs rarely come, because they depend on the circumstances also being what they were back then, which they can never be. All you get are the old mistakes, with some new ones thrown in.

You cannot stand still until the world does so too, and that hasn’t happened in its whole, multi-billion-year history. The only way to be without change is to be dead and buried in the ground. That’s what trying to get back to ‘business as usual’ does for you. It makes you into a fossil.

Stop picking at the scabs

What is most odd is they way so many people try to find a way back to the kind of ‘business as usual’ that they never enjoyed in the first place. It’s as if even that is less frightening than risking change. Many also spend their time picking at the scabs of their wounds, instead of letting them heal enough to move on to something better; prolonging the pain, because they cannot forget what it has done to them.

Look around you. Sure, there’s plenty of cause for anger in the way ordinary people have had their lives ruined by the greedy and the selfish. But will the fury of wordy condemnations actually change anything? Are we laying out vast sums of money to make a better future, or to help those organizations that benefited from the past few years get back to ‘business as usual’ as quickly as they can?

Is it fear—or laziness? Do we have so little confidence in our ability to improve or grow that going back to how things were is the best option? Since ‘business as usual’ caused the problem, because it was never really adequate in the first place, why go back there, even if we could?

You have to dare to change

We all have a tendency to hang on to the past; to cling to ‘what works’ and go on repeating it as long as we can. You have to resist that. Times change and what used to work so well gradually becomes less and less effective. Like a medicine people take too much, you then have to increase the ‘dose’ of past actions to get any response at all. After a while, they will stop working altogether.

Breakthrough cannot come until you deliberately walk away from the comfortable and the predictable. If you lack the courage to let go and move on, you’ll never make any kind of breakthrough, whether in your career or your life. Even your greatest achievements won’t last, however much you try to repeat them.

The achievements people cling to often become their greatest mistakes of all. Say “thanks” and start again. When bad luck or bad judgment knock you down, don’t sweat the failures either. The more you dwell on them, the worse they will make you feel and the longer they will hold you back. Good things happen. Shit happens. That’s the way of the world.

Let it all go to make way for the future. Forget ‘business as usual’ and make space for new ideas instead. Stand up and move on.

Technorati Tags: change, starting again, moving on, doing better, progress, business as usual, rebuilding your career

Counter-factualism—asking “What if . . .?”—may be far more useful than many people think.
 

When leaders fall prey to hubris, arrogance and unforced errors, their natural tendency is to look back and indulge in frenzied self-justification. “We could not have known,” they say. “You shouldn’t criticize us on the basis of hindsight.” Maybe not, but saying you could not have known is not the same as saying that you might not have at least considered the possibility and what you might do about it. In our measurement-and-numbers-obsessed, “just give me the facts” business culture, we’ve lost sight of the enormous benefits of deliberately considering what might happen if the ‘facts’ turn out to be untrue or inadequate.

Macho management leads to a deterministic view of life: a notion that everything that happens can be explained in terms of simple ‘laws’ and known causes; that we already know nearly all the answers to the problems we face. If troubles still arise, it is only because people are not rigorous enough, or not courageous enough, to stick to well-proved ways of doing things. Its headlong pace and fear of anything ‘intellectual’ won’t allow time for reflection.

“Just the facts, Ma’am”

In many ways, Charles Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind, the philistine schoolmaster in Hard Times, is the patron saint of modern management. Here’s an example of his philosophy:

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”

In most areas of business, spending time asking “what if . . . ?” is seen as a silly self-indulgence. Yet much of today’s business is founded on myths of invulnerability and the importance of maintaining an unquestioning faith in a few management ‘principles’. The fact that they often fail never seems to diminish some people’s total belief that, next time, they will surely be proved right.

What facts?

“What it . . . ?” is one of the best ways of puncturing all myths of certain knowledge. What if our competitors don’t do what we expect? What if someone enters the market with an entirely new product? What if the assumptions behind our plans turn out to be false? What if none of us are half as clever as we believe today? What if our measures and ratios are mirages and our statisticians have confused arithmetic accuracy with the truth?

We badly need to remind ourselves about the limits of planning and the dangers of determinism. Too many people still fall into the sloppy thinking that equates the ‘cause’ of an event with something that happened immediately before it. We lazily apply folk tales and rules of thumb, instead of seeking out the true long-term determinants of events. We assume knowledge where none exists. We delude ourselves like this every day.

“What if I had acted differently?”

That simple question is the basis of all learning from experience. Without it, failures sting just as badly, but we are likely to repeat them, because we consider only what went wrong and not what else we might have done. Without “what if . . . ?” there can be no creativity, no change, no progress—only the weary repetition of the past in the hope that, somehow, it will continue to be sufficient.

In our moments of triumph, “what if . . . ?” offers an essential antidote to the blindness brought on by arrogance. Asking it of ourselves will nearly always reveal just how much of our victory is little save pure chance. Failing to ask it allows people to propagate the comforting myth of their own brilliance, where none was present.

Did you win, or was it only because the other person made more mistakes than you did? Knowing the answer to that might suggest you have further to go before you can be certain of winning as often as you wish. Thinking, especially thinking about what did not happen (but could have), is an essential skill in all learning. As George Bernard Shaw said: “One man who has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.”

Risking an open mind

Introspection has a bad name in a macho business culture devoted, blindly, to the virtues of extroverts who focus only on getting things done. Asking questions—especially counter-factual, hypothetical questions—is viewed with deep suspicion. After all, if people ask questions, they might reach answers you don’t like. Far better to stick to the facts—at least, to your version of them—than risk someone proving you wrong.

“The past,” it has been said, “is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The present may be just as foreign; at least the alternative presents that “what if . . . ?” questions will throw up. Maybe, to broaden our minds sufficiently, we all need rather more mental ‘foreign travel’ than our macho management culture has been allowing us.

Technorati Tags: thinking, creativity, open-mindedness, asking questions, change, innovation

We all hanker for creativity within our teams, but often find that it is hard to unearth and encourage. Following some examples from other industries can provide leaders with fresh places to look. Each of these industries promotes the individuality of team members and validates and encourages their broad creative participation in business. What can you learn from them?

The creative people you need are probably there in your office somewhere—the ones with a gleam in their eyes, a zing in their step, a perspective that surprises. While we all consider ourselves to be creative on some level, there are those who really do walk to a different tune.

In a recent article, Gill Corkindale suggests looking to the so-called “creative industries” as a way of breaking out of the standard models of business that we often find ourselves trapped in. By looking at the worlds of fashion, advertising and publishing, she suggests, we can out-think the limiting structures that we labor under, and unearth the creativity embedded within our businesses and our people:

1. Fashion. While managers in the fashion industry are typically clear about the business direction and focus of their roles, they also value ideas, difference, self-expression and personal growth. These additional focus areas ensure that leadership teams are vital, energetic and individual.
2. Advertising. The open spaces of advertising agencies contribute to shared experiences and easier interactions amongst staff. As an industry, advertising values self-expression, with all team members encouraged to display their individuality and personal interests.
3. Publishing. Publishing is about creativity with deadlines. Wrapping rigor around the creative process allows publishers to focus on business imperatives and creative output at the same time.

Technorati Tags: creativity, empowerment, finding new ideas, individuality