11 ▪ Developing and Maintaining a Culture and Processes that Encourage Breakthrough Solutions
Constructive debates don’t just happen because people read a book or attend a class, though the will and the skill are both important and necessary. Rather, they should take place within the larger system of the organization. Organizations that wish to nurture and develop breakthrough solutions and bring them to market need to develop a culture and a set of processes that reshape the way the leaders go about exploring, developing, and deciding to move an idea forward to implementation. Organizational culture involves a complex set of systems; we can only touch on the topic briefly here. Culture is hard to see when you’re inside it—the “what is water to a fish?” metaphor is relevant. Yet we can’t ignore the role of organizational culture any more than fish can avoid the presence of water, for without it we can’t actually exist. Given this combination of complexity and omnipresence, the work of changing an organization’s culture is daunting—and many people give up before they even begin. But system change can begin with tweaks or “hacks”: small changes that provide a “nudge” to leaders, managers, and others—a slight prod that makes it easier to follow the relevant guidelines and practices than to oppose them.
In their best-selling book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,11 Professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein define a “nudge” as a small feature of the environment that attracts attention and alters behavior. Two examples they describe are the fly painted near the drain in urinals in a men’s room at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport that reportedly reduced “spillage” by 80 percent, and the effect of having employees “opt-out” rather than “opt-in” to a retirement plan. Since not deciding takes considerably less energy than making decisions, these seemingly small changes can have large effects.
Nudges can be rewards or incentives for doing the “right thing,” disincentives or inconvenience arising through not doing the right thing, defaults that make decisions easy or unnecessary, or competitions with others, even bets that maintain behaviors through the pain of losing an existing investment.
So, how can leaders make it easier for people to have a robust and constructive debate—the kind that can lead to real breakthroughs— rather than passing mediocre ideas along? What kind of nudge would it take for project leaders and managers to include and engage their teams first in generating better ideas, and then to give those ideas a thorough vetting by running them through a process that toughens and refines them?
Cultural Factors
Organizational cultures, like national or ethnic ones, consist of norms, values, taboos, rituals, and mythology, often among many other elements. Norms govern how people behave; values articulate what they believe in or strive for; taboos warn them about what is forbidden; rituals celebrate and reinforce what the organization finds important and valuable; and the mythology translates all these elements into stories that help people know what is expected and rewarded and how to be successful. All these factors can support a constructive debating process . . . or can seriously undermine it.
Norms: How We Behave
Explicit norms—that is, ones that are stated, discussed, included in orientations, or posted in actual or virtual meeting rooms—provide guidance as to behavior. Norms such as the following can, if made explicit and then enforced, create a generative climate:
• Defer evaluation of ideas until later in the process.
• Don’t stop at the first good idea; generate many ideas.
• Build on the ideas of others.
Values: What We Believe In
Values form the basis of our most important decisions. They describe what we aspire to and are thus usually the foundation of both mission and vision. Here are some values that help create the conditions for vibrant and healthy debate:
• We celebrate our company’s diversity of background and opinion.
• We encourage speaking truth to power.
• We support intelligent risk-taking.
Taboos: What Is Forbidden
Taboos can set off the organizational immune reaction. When articulated by leaders, taboos shape behavior even more strongly than norms. Unfortunately, many taboos are not explicit—and some may even reinforce caution and conflict avoidance when they are activated. Here are a few “positive” meeting taboos that can help in the idea-development process:
• Don’t stop at the first decent idea.
• Don’t step on ideas too early, but . . .
• Don’t withhold your critique until it’s too late.
Rewards and public recognition are common rituals in organizations. In any culture, what is rewarded is generally repeated, so it’s wise to reward and recognize what we want more of. Ideally, rituals should take place in addition to any celebrations of more-traditional success in the marketplace, since the focus here is on the early part of the process, before you know about results. Rituals that may help promote better ideas include:
• Giving an award to the team that came up with the most unusual or innovative prototype in a contest about new products or services
• Celebrating the failure we learned the most from this year
• Recognizing (with a lunch or small gift) the individual or team that contributed the highest number of different ideas to improve organizational processes
Mythology: Stories that Define the Culture
Even though norms and taboos may be implicit—that is, not stated directly—they can often be clearly communicated through stories. Many times, the way new employees learn how to fit in is through the stories others tell them about what has worked and what has not. For example, a story about a lab worker who used company equipment during off-hours to develop an innovation that became a valuable product suggests that asking for permission is not always required.
For each of these cultural factors, examples could be cited that could have a dampening or destructive impact on ideation and decision-making. An implicit norm that you don’t criticize your manager; a value of requiring complete consensus on all decisions; a taboo against open conflict; rituals that only recognize success after a product is actually in the market; or stories about people who took a risk, failed, and were never heard from again—these are all predictors of fear, analysis paralysis, and stale ideas.
Processes, Practices, and Structures
The way things happen, the route that information travels, and the arrangements for getting work done all have a strong impact on ideation, development, and decision-making.
Two processes that could “nudge” (there’s that word again) an organizational system or team toward better ideation and decision-making practices are based on research by psychologists.
Paul C. Nutt, in his 2002 book, Why Decisions Fail,12 discusses his research on 78 major decisions by senior managers. He found that in only 15 percent of the cases was there a stage at which the managers sought alternative options. In a later study, he found that only 29 percent of managers consider more than one option; he also found a strong correlation between the number of alternatives considered and a decision’s ultimate success. If managers or team leaders require themselves or their team members to ask for a greater number or variety of ideas before moving toward a decision, they will increase their chances of success.
Gary Klein, Ph.D., developed the practice of a “pre-mortem,” in which project teams look into the future and imagine that their project has failed miserably. They then discuss what happened to make that result occur. This is a form of a behavioral skill (one we discussed in chapter 7) called “Anticipate Consequences.” This behavior can lead to a deeper discussion on how to prevent these consequences or which alternative solution might be more successful.
These practices and similar ones that require conscious consideration of the downside of potential solutions, such as formal or informal scenario planning, can become standard meeting procedures. They can be included in boilerplate templates for planning meetings—saving leaders or facilitators the trouble of creating a plan from scratch or going into an important meeting with no plan at all. In other words, these are defaults that, if practiced repeatedly, can reshape meeting processes to make constructive debate more likely.
Additional helpful practices in meetings include:
• Assigning a “devil’s advocate” to make and summarize arguments against a proposal. Because it is an assigned role, built into the meeting plan, the personal risk of critiquing is diminished.
• Having a standard practice of taking the last five minutes of a meeting to reflect on the process, using questions such as:
º What worked well in the way we generated [evaluated, or made decisions about] ideas?
º What did we miss or avoid dealing with?
º How satisfied are you with our process today? [Ask for a show of hands, with five fingers for “very satisfied” down to one finger for “very dissatisfied.”] What should we do differently next time?
• Stopping the process in the middle of a discussion, before making a decision, to ask participants how comfortable they feel right then with their own level of participation. Use a similar show of hands (five fingers down to one). Then ask what to change to make sure everyone has an opportunity to weigh in.
Many of the interventions discussed in the materials in the appendix can also be useful as part of a standard practice. In addition to interventions, you’ll find tools that can make meetings more efficient, creative, collaborative, and interesting.
Not all constructive debates, of course, will take place in a formal meeting. In a 1:1 or small and informal meeting, it’s a good practice to establish the agenda, norms, and processes by agreement before diving into the content. Step out of the content from time to time to listen and summarize and to ask if other people have some reflections or comments to offer. Check for agreement before moving to a decision. Put all agreements and commitments in writing, and later disseminate them, to make sure you understand them in the same way.
Rewards and Recognition
As we’ve probably all noticed from our own experience, what gets rewarded gets repeated. This is a neutral process—we develop both good and bad habits through experiencing rewards (sound diet choices leading to better health vs. addiction to drugs or alcohol because of the immediate hit of pleasure, for example). Short-term rewards are hard to resist. You may have seen the videos of children in some variant of the Marshmallow Test, struggling with the researcher’s directive that they can have one marshmallow immediately, but two if they can postpone eating it for several minutes. The conclusions of this study about self-control leading to success later in life were recently cast into doubt as the researchers had failed to consider other important factors such as socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, the popularity of the videos suggests that we can identify with the emotional response to rewards. The shorter-term reward of immediate approval by a group or a leader can drive behavior, especially if no longer-term and more important reward is available, such as a positive performance review based on behaviors the organization wants to encourage.
Thoughtful design of rewards that support building better ideas rather than encouraging conflict avoidance or strict consensus (to give only two examples) can create “nudges” in the strategic direction the organization has chosen. An expectation, for instance, that managers include people from diverse backgrounds in all their project teams can become part of performance and reward discussions.
Leader Behavior
The role of a leader, whether formal or informal, is to set a standard to be emulated and a direction to be followed. Even when leaders in a hierarchical organization try to take a step back or suggest that they’re “just going to be a member of the group,” most people junior to them will not take them at their word. The leaders need to take conscious, repeated actions to minimize their impact in any meeting where they want ideas to flow without the filter of “political correctness.”
As discussed earlier, meetings can be designed in ways that keep the leader from taking up too much room in the conversation. In addition, whether in a large meeting or a 1:1 conversation, leaders can support constructive debate by:
• Being clear at the beginning about anything that is off-limits or “taboo,” so that others can feel free to range widely in their thinking without imagined restrictions
• Modeling constructive debate behaviors, especially the Engaging ones
• Providing positive feedback to team members about their use of the constructive debate behaviors, thereby reinforcing them
• Avoiding both positive and negative evaluation of the ideas themselves until later in the process (otherwise there will be a tendency to support the ideas the leader likes rather than exploring more widely—or to suppress ideas that seem less attractive to those who have more power)
• Withholding their opinion for some time during a decision-making process so they don’t give clues as to “the right answer”
• When criticized, responding with curiosity rather than defensiveness
Organizations can move toward building better ideas by establishing cultural and process elements that encourage healthy competition as well as broad participation. They can set new standards of acceptable behavior and can reward a good process even before the results are in. They can design the organization to maximize participation and engagement by a diverse population. They can create small nudges in the right direction—norms, rituals, team and decision structures, meeting plans, expectations, rewards, and other ways that make it easier to be courageous, to be collaborative, and ultimately to achieve breakthrough solutions.