Developed by David Owens at Vanderbilt University and customized for the cultural sector with National Arts Strategies, this course is designed to help arts and culture leaders create an environment where new ideas are constantly created, shared, evaluated and the best ones are successfully put to work. One of the toughest challenges for any leader is getting traction for new ideas. Winning support can be a struggle. As a result, powerful new ideas often get stuck. This is especially true in the cultural sector. People involved in arts and culture often have little time and even less money for experimentation and risks. This course will help those in the performing arts, museums, zoos, libraries and other cultural organizations build environments where new management and program ideas flourish. Leading Innovation in Arts & Culture will teach you how to make an "innovation strategy" a fundamental component of your organization's overall strategy. In this seminar you will learn to: - Analyze constraints on innovation in your organization, foresee obstacles and opportunities, and develop a shared vision - Develop a process to manage the demands of multiple stakeholders, shifting priorities and the uncertainty inherent in new initiatives - Create a culture for innovation and risk-taking that generates new perspectives and challenges existing practice - Create a strong customer focus within your organization that anticipates customer needs National Arts Strategies worked with David Owens to customize this course for those working in the cultural sector. They based their work on David Owens’ Leading Strategic Innovation in Organizations course. This highly interactive 8-week course will engage you in a series of class discussions and exercises.
L8-Part 7 Stop Creative People
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From the course by Vanderbilt University
Leading Innovation in Arts and Culture
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From the lesson
Leading an Innovation Strategy
Our final week takes on the problem of innovating as if it really mattered. We start with the story of Apollo 13, a life-or-death situation that required intense creative problem-solving, and consider the leadership behaviors that made successful innovation possible. Next, since our focus so far has been on improving our own ability to innovate, we discuss how to use the innovation constraint model to drive adoption by those people who are the targets of our change. We then revisit the question of process, and look at the role of the leader during each phase of a team's innovation journey. Moving to the organization-level of analysis we explore innovation portfolios and their ability to help us manage risk. Finally, by way of conclusion in the course, we talk about the nature of YOUR constraints and the ways that you can continue to identify them and find ways to work around them.
Meet the Instructors
David A. Owens, PhD, PEProfessor
Practice of Management and Innovation
Jim RosenbergIndependent Consultant and Senior Advisor at NAS
[MUSIC].
I want to talk about some of the myths of managing innovation.
I know that we've had some. And I've had some of these myths myself
for a long time before I began to understand some ways of getting past
that, and that's how innovation actually works.
So, let me just share a few of these with you.
there's a myth that creativity only comes from creative type.
You have to go find that person with the weird haircut or with the, you know,
funny shoes or something like that, and that's where innovation comes from.
Hopefully, you've learned from the time we've spent together, that creativity
comes from a process. Comes from a desire to create, it comes
from under-, bringing information in, from different ways of thinking about
information, and from expressing those ideas.
All of us can do it. You could not live very long on this
earth if you were unable to solve creative problems all the time.
And so, creativity does not come from creative types, creativity comes from
having a process and encouraging and demanding in creating obligation for
people to be creative and innovate for you.
Another myth is that money motivates creativity.
You know, people want to be creative. And I think we do, we talked about the,
at the individual level, about Sigmund Freud's idea of the id, you know, the
inner drive. He said creativity is, is, in-, innate,
it's inner. It's, it's when people have nothing to
do, they're going to create. So we don't need to put money towards
motivating creativity. What we need to do is share the wealth,
when people are creative and they get a good outcome, we need to share that.
And also we need to give them the things that will let them be creative.
So, sometimes, instead of giving people dollar bills, give them a space where
they can go be creative. Instead of giving them, you know, only
dollars per idea, maybe we should give them more vacation time, or give them
more access to more different kinds of resources to gather new information for
it. And so, it's not about the money, really
it's about the creativity here. There is an idea, that many people hold
that fear forces breakthroughs and by making people scared to death, it's
going to make them much more creative and they are going to make them work much
harder at the breakthroughs. In fact, we saw that the kind of fear
that if people's brains, if they are not able to be open, if they are not able to
take in new information. In fact, they sort of shut down.
Remember the door study where the people are carrying the door past the person
because they are so engaged in their project.
If I'm scared of, for my job, I'm going to be engaged with approach/g.
I'm not going to be open to new things. And, if I have fear, if you put me in
state of fear, I'm also going to become very risk averse.
And so, I'm not going to be thinking about things that might actually change
things around us, change us in some way. And so, fear does not force
breakthroughs. What fear forces is more fear.
Time pressure, that we sort of, if we put people under time pressure, they'll make
it happen really fast. And so, we have these ways of, you know,
just arbitrarily putting people under time pressure.
People get it, they understand what you are doing and it doesn't help.
And so, again, here we have this outside pressure to be creative and[INAUDIBLE] it
just makes it very impossible, it makes it very difficult to do the thing called
being creative, to go thru the process of generating ideas, assessing those ideas
and, and choosing and doing the best idea that we come with.
And that takes time and we have to leave time for that.
Leave time for learning, leave time for exploration, leave time for refining and,
and implementation. Sometimes people think that competition
is a thing that beats collaboration, but if you put teams in competition.
Let me take this team, this team and put them, work 'em on the same problem.
That that somehow makes the people more creative, and that, that is a better
thing? I don't agree with that.
I think that's problematic because when we put people in, in competition with
each other we're[INAUDIBLE] creating sort of an adverse situation.
Maybe the competition's outside you organization, maybe those are the people
you need to be competing with and not bring the competition inside.
If people aren't being innovative and aren't being creative, it's probably not
because they're not competitive. It's probably because there're some other
constraints in place that are not allowing them to do the things that they
would naturally do. And they, maybe the obligations are
making their way down to where people understand what their obligations are
about innovation in your organization. Another myth is that innovation should be
starved, whole no resources, so that innovation should be gorged given too
many resources. It really isn't.
It really is about understanding what are they trying to do and what are the
resources they need to be able to do that.
And they can, reasonable decisions about that.
There's not simply to start every pro-, project or gorge every project.
It really is saying, what are they trying to do and how can I help them do that
better? And do more of that.
There's a theory in some organizations that innovation is R&D's job.
You know, there's innovation that need to be done, go get those guys over there.
Isn't that their job? My job is production, or my job is sales,
or my job is, you know, cleaning the floors.
Well, if you make innovation everyone's job, you're much more likely to get
somewhere better with that. Because everyone in the organization is
innovating, everyone has the tools for innovation.
And so R&D has as much support driving innovation as every other part of the
organization does. Because we know innovation is not just
this technical thing. Innovation can be in process.
Innovation can be in product. Innovation can be in, in thinking.
And to be able to do that, we need to touch every aspect of the organization
and not just R&D. And so, the fact that the people think
that innovation is R&D's job means that there's something wrong inside culturally
or in terms of the way we talk about innovation in our organization.
I say, explode the idea of what innovation is and make everyone
responsible for it, not just those few people who work in R&D.
There's an idea that a streamlined organization is a creative organization.
Yeah, while streamlined organizations are good at being efficient, I don't think
they're necessarily good at being creative.
And you can streamline a creative organization, but if you start out with
trying to create a creative organization and streamlining that, that's very
different than starting with a streamlined organization and trying to
make that thing creative. And so again, if you're focused on
productivity and efficiency and things like that, you're not going to have the
kind of access to create. You're not going to be able to make
yourself as creative as you might otherwise.
And so, seeking this kind of efficiency is problematic if efficiency means less
time for learning, less time for exploration, less time for exploring
other alternatives, other possibilities that are out there.
Finally, there's this idea that you can't routinely innovate, that sometimes you
have to just sort of sit down or take a shower or go great.
Do some, go in some altered state in order to have the idea that needs to be
had? That's not true.
You can be routinely innovative. We've seen number of examples of
organizations as we've gone through of people that we've gone through of groups
that we've gone through that are able to routinely innovate.
And now, we have some of the secrets why. It's, you know a newspaper.
The newspaper has been new every day and they have a system for and there is a
process for it. If you do that process, you'll come up
with something new all the time. You can't routinely innovate.
And so, this myth does not have to dominate your thinking.
It doesn't have to dominate the operational view in your organization.
So, here are the myths and, hopefully, now we know why they don't matter.
So, the last thing I want to talk about is stopping creative people.
Sometimes creative people must be stopped.
If people asks me about the title of the book creative people must be stopped, and
do I really believe that. And I tell them a little bit it's tongue
and cheek but also it's sort of true, that there are things we need to stop in
creative people. You know, creative people have to be
stopped because they sabotage their own creativity.
People get stuck in one way of thinking and one way of seeing the world, and then
they're stuck in that, and then they can't get anywhere new.
You have to stop them from that. You have to stop them when they are
afraid to stick up for their ideas in groups, and when they're working with
other people, and they have a group that goes again, you know, an idea that goes
against the group's mindset they're afraid to.
You have to stop them from doing that, right?
And how do we stop them? We've, we discussed that at the group
level, how it is that we can create a, make the constraints go away that operate
that level. Individual must be stopped.
they wander down paths and they go down these places that the organization will
never value. And even if the organization should
value, they don't think that they have to, they can have the responsibility to
tell the organization why. They think that if I make this widget,
somehow the world should, is obligated to understand why it's a great widget.
And so, they end up down these paths that can't end well.
It just cannot end well. So, we have to stop people from that
frustration that they're going to get by going down those paths.
You have to stop people from only using, you know, traditional characterizations
of the markets and, and the way that we create value, and our value chain, and
who we compete with. The people want to do that, and they want
that to stand still, right? Almost by definition the, the industry
is, never stand still. It's always moving.
And we can't see the future and there's no obligation that other organizations
have of being obedient. And especially, people in our market, the
customers. They're certainly not obedient, right?
They want things faster, better, cheaper, and they will switch if they can.
And so, what we have to do is we have to stop people from thinking about
industries and thinking about their organizations and thinking about
competition and thinking about value creation in the same ways all the time.
We need to stop them from that and get them to think about it in different ways.
We also have to stop people when they start judging the desirability of the
world of changes, of innovations in terms of their own values.
And they only look to themselves to say whether something is meaningful or not.
Oh I, customers would never like that, or they would never like this, or customers
should like that. That's problematic.
And that's something we have to stop. Creative people have to be stopped if
that's what they're doing, if they're judging.
Desirability of things is only based on, their own self image and their own
values. An finally, creative people must be
stopped, when they become so sure, that they know, that they really don't know.
Right? And so, we get this unconscious,
incompetence, because people are so sure that they know that they don't bother to
test, they don't bother to try, they don't bother to look, at different
problems. Had problems in different ways and
understand that they are potentially fallible.
So, these are many reasons why creative people must be stopped.
And I think it's, these are good reasons and fair reasons to intervene and to
actually go about stopping people. So, with that I want to say thanks for
joining us. It's been great.
hopefully you all have enjoyed the drawings and and enjoyed the class.
There have been a bunch of people who have helping here.
This is a few of the the prime movers, but there also have been a number of
other people helping as well. So, thanks for joining us.
tune in for more courses from Vanderbilt and we'll see you next time.
[MUSIC]
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