Look at More

A Proven Approach to Innovation, Growth, and Change

Andy Stefanovich

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470949771
• eBook ISBN: 9781118019610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Why does real innovation elude so many companies, including those with the best technology, the cheapest resources, and even chief innovation officers? The problem is that they lack inspiration. Inspiration—as defined and outlined in this book—is a discipline (not to be confused with the real but short-lived burst of energy that sometimes occurs after quarterly earnings reports or the arrival of a charismatic new leader). It is a systematic approach that, when applied consistently, brings long-term, sustainable results.

Look At More teaches you how to harness inspiration by thinking differently—and to encourage others to do the same. Designed to be an individual and organizational hands-on guide, Look At More focuses on the front end of the Inspiration–Creativity–Innovation continuum. Using Stefanovich's proven LAMSTAIH approach (Look At More Stuff, Think About It Harder), leaders and employees can develop the practical skills, leadership behavior, and cultural mindset to consistently create ideas and drive innovation.

Built on the principles of the five M's for unleashing creativity within an organization, Look At More explores:

• MOOD: The attitudes, feelings, and emotions that create the context for inspiration and creativity
• MINDSET: The intellectual foundation and baseline capacity each of us has for getting inspired and thinking differently
• MECHANISMS: The tools and processes of creativity at work
• MEASUREMENT: The qualitative and quantitative performance and the guidance for giving critical feedback
• MOMENTUM: The active championing of celebrating inspiration and creativity to create a self-reinforcing cycle for growing innovation

Together the five M's can act as a diagnostic tool and a guide for inspiring individuals, empowering teams, and transforming organizations to become true models of innovation.

For more information, please visit www.prophet.com/lookatmore

Chapter 1

Mood

Mood is the attitudes, feelings, and emotions that create the context for innovation and creativity.

Mood is one of those you-know-it-when-you-see-it kinds of things. You've probably had the experience of walking into a café, taking a quick look around, and walking right back out. Just didn't feel right. Or you drop off your child at day care, and there's something about all those kids running around that makes you want to sit on the floor and start playing with Legos. That's mood in action. You may not be able to articulate exactly what it is, but you definitely know how it makes you feel. What's a lot less intuitive, though, is the impact mood can have on your creativity. Just think of the last brainstorming session or uninspired team meeting you attended.

You got there at 8:30 sharp, and it was just the two of you—you and the only other person who got there on time. No windows. One of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling was flickering so faintly that you could barely notice it, but within fifteen minutes, it gave you a pounding headache. One tile in the ceiling had been inexplicably missing for months, and another one had a new brown stain blossoming from its center. The big heavy table was covered in fingerprints, scratches, and faded stains, and all of the chairs were uncomfortable, despite their fancy adjustable features. You knew that one chair was dangerous—lean back in that thing and you'd end up on the floor—but you could never remember which one it was because they all looked the same. The air was stale and still smelled like pepperoni and onions from the prior day's lunch meeting. The trash can was overflowing with lipstick-covered Styrofoam coffee cups and an old box of donuts. The whiteboard was one of those “smart” devices with features that no one remembered how to use. Years ago someone accidentally used a permanent marker on it, and it still said “AGENDA” in bold blue letters in the upper left corner. You tried to communicate to the person sitting across from you, but there was something about the acoustics in the room that smothered words as they came out of your mouth. It was like talking through a pillow. So you sat in silence, waiting for the allotted period of unchecked creativity to begin.

Ah, yes. The conference room. The place where corporate America comes to create. And, sadly, a place we've all been. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be this way. There are ways to change the mood in your organization from an energy suck to something that actually stimulates creativity. And that's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do in this chapter.

Mood is the first of our five M's for a reason: the success or failure of your attempts to inspire your organization and change the way it thinks and operates is often determined long before you begin applying any specific tools or approaches. If you get the mood wrong, you may not even get a chance to try the other drivers of inspiration and innovation, because mood is the foundation for everything else.

There are three very important ways to shift the mood and inspire people within your organization:

• Create purposeful disruptions
• Ask provocative questions and make bold statements
• Make physical changes

Let's take a look at these three mood-changers in detail.

Create Purposeful Disruptions

Deliberately knocking a group's physical and mental dynamics off course, what I call a purposeful disruption, is a great mood-altering tool that every leader should use. Keep in mind that there's a very clear difference between an engineered experience that's going to take people out of their current context (like going to a farm to talk about leadership) and a truly spontaneous purposeful disruption. It takes intuition and a healthy tolerance for risk to fully disrupt a moment or interrupt a ritual and shift the mood. But hey, you're a leader: that's your job. Try it out a few times and you'll see the benefits in the renewed energy and passion of your team.

I was saved by a purposeful disruption on the day I got married to Jill.

The St. Francis Borgia Church in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, was packed. I was up at the altar, sweating and trying not to fog up my glasses with the tears of joy I was trying to hold back. I just wanted to get the whole thing going. The violin player had started up, and I could see a glimpse of Jill, looking beautiful at the other end of the church.

Just as Jill was about to make her first step toward me, my Uncle Mitch stood up and addressed the entire group. My heart stopped. Uncle Mitch is a big guy who's pretty much a clone of the Archie Bunker character from the classic television sit-com All in the Family. He had on a short, fat tie, and he spoke with a chewed up (and, fortunately, unlit) cigar hanging precariously out of the corner of his mouth.

“Wait a minute! Just hold on here,” he exclaimed to the confounded guests. “Aren't we here to get to know each other? Andy would want us to mix it up!”

Mitch hadn't consulted me about this, and, frankly, I really didn't care where people were sitting. I just wanted to get married. From my viewpoint at the front of the church, I could see the danger in Uncle Mitch's call to action. Two women on opposite sides of the aisle were wearing the same dress, and a lot of people were squirming in their seats, unsettled by this off-the-wall request to get up and mingle. Would they actually get along? Would they think my family was good enough? Did they already think we were all as nuts as Uncle Mitch?

There was confusion at first, then nervous laughter. But within just a few moments, Uncle Mitch had everyone up shaking hands with the people around them. After about ten minutes of this mini cocktail party, people gradually found new seats and silently waited for the ceremony to start again. Not only did this purposeful disruption change the guests' mood and their experience of the wedding, but it made the reception an overwhelming success. The families had a jump-start on getting to know each other, and the payoff was exceptional.

Disrupting a ritual can have a powerful effect, but sometimes the best way to influence mood is to create completely new rituals. I learned this lesson from one of my former teammates, a guy named Chip Leon. Chip was always the first person in the office. One day, he decided to try something completely different from his regular morning routine. So he waited in the parking lot until the first of his coworkers drove in. As soon as she stepped out of her car, Chip gave her a standing ovation. The woman was a little taken aback, but after a few seconds she started smiling. On the spot, she and Chip decided to greet the third person to arrive in the same way. Then three of them applauded the fourth, and so on. I'm not going to tell you that these A.M. Cheers (as we call them now) led to any specific inspirational breakthroughs. But I do know that they changed the mood in the office for the rest of the day—all because of one person's spur-of-the moment decision to stir up his morning routine. In fact, A.M. Cheers have been such a success at boosting mood that we now use them as part of our corporate training for new hires. We ask one of the group to leave the room, count to ten, and step back in—to a loud burst of applause.

My team functions as a lab, testing and learning in any capacity that we can. One of our most surprising learning experiences took place in a client session with a Nike executive team. The team members were working toward creating a unified vision and strategy, and they needed a breakthrough to bring them all into alignment. That particular year, budgets were under heavy scrutiny, and each executive had a list of his or her own priorities. The leader of this group knew that collapsing some of the strategies was the most efficient—and effective—way to achieve the organization's broader goals. But to do that, the group members would have to connect as they never had before, so that they could see each other's priorities in a new and fresh way.

We knew that it would take a radical head snap to grab this group's attention. They were successful individually and as a group, so why should they worry about further collaboration? To answer that question, we created an EUK Event (Experience, Understanding, Knowledge—we talk more about these events in Chapter Three, Mechanisms) that would take the group into the field. We met the Nike team at the Ritz-Carlton in Portland over scones and tea, which the group interpreted to mean that they were headed into yet another executive meeting with all the usual dynamics. Then, to their surprise, we told them to join us on the train to Seattle. Once we arrived at the city, we asked everyone in our party to look at more stuff and think about it harder, all in service of seeing themselves as a different kind of working group.

The daylong journey began at the public bus stop. We walked the members of our group up to the corner and handed one of them a full bouquet of Gerbera daisies, with instructions to give the flowers to the first person to step off the incoming bus. The request definitely grabbed the group's attention. When the first rider alighted from the bus, the Nike team member handed her the flowers. As the woman smiled with delight, one of us asked her a simple question: What had she done—that morning, the prior week, or in her lifetime—to deserve this unexpected gift? The woman answered our question with conviction: she was a teacher who had gone through deep budget cuts and yet managed to keep the most critical resources available to her students; she tutored an underprivileged child when she knew the parents could not; for twenty-five years, she had been giving hope to children who might not have gotten it otherwise. With that, she walked off, flowers in hand and head held high.

After taking a minute to process the exchange, we chatted, right there on the corner, about the experience. The Nike executives shared their beliefs about doing the right thing, about how much of what they do goes unnoticed, how they are always trying to do it in the context of the bigger picture, and how they could benefit from more collaboration to get through the driving agendas they all owned. The simple act of recognition for recognition's sake—one question and a handful of flowers—led us to discover how much we all were accomplishing as individuals, but how much more potential there was in the power of collaboration.

On that corner, the members of the executive team developed their new approach to work: more connection to each other, more appreciation of the others' agendas and efforts, and more willingness to ask about and listen to another person's story—things that hadn't been happening at the rate and frequency that they should have been. The team embarked on a new conversation that netted a new outcome.

Later, as we canvassed the tourist area of Seattle, we noticed vendors, shopkeepers, and street musicians with single-stem Gerbera daisies. When we stopped at one busy corner to ask a guitar player where he got his flower, he said, “A woman asked me why I deserved a flower. I told her and she gave it to me… it's a cool day.” The ripple effect of this kind of purposeful disruption never ceases to amaze me. Begin with an inspirational act of beauty and watch it cascade through the streets of the city—or your organization.

The words you use, the ways you present yourself—even small details matter, because they all work together to ultimately define the context for creativity and the mood of your organization. Let's look at some examples of how words and language can transform expectations and change the mood in any organization.

Focus on Who People Are, Not on What They Do

In my view, titles and org charts should be set aside while creating ideas. When I founded Play two decades ago, I wanted to create a different kind of organization, one where the mood for innovation was strong and positive. Over lunch one day, one of my team members at the time, Patty Devlin, suggested that instead of the title of CEO, I call myself the person “In Charge of What's Next.” This title sent a clear sign to everyone within the organization and to my clients that my role was not managing and executing—I was there to think ahead and find new opportunities for growth. Today, everyone at Prophet chooses his or her own title. Of course, alternative titles don't change the daily activities we need to do to keep the business running, but they do personalize our approach and start new kinds of conversations.

What message does your current title convey? What title would you choose if you had an option? What title would capture the essence of who you are and the value you deliver to your organization? Come up with a title that expresses that idea—not what you do, but who you are—and then be that every second of every day.

Ask Provocative Questions

A well-placed, provocative question can completely shift the mood of an individual or team by inviting people to think aloud with you. These questions are especially useful in changing the dynamic of a working session. Ideally, they should be abstract or open ended, and the answers shouldn't be easy.

I brought the power of one provocative question to life one day while working on innovation with a global financial institution. I had been working with the company's thirty-member executive team to articulate and outline their five-year innovation strategy. Products, culture, technology, acquisitions, product portfolio, customer segmentation, and organization design were all part of the conversation—as they should have been. But the breadth of the topic had paralyzed the team. As we worked through the conversation, the difficulties became more complex and wiry, as happens so often with an executive team whose members (1) each have an opinion and (2) have years of context informing their point of view.

To move the group forward, I had to unleash the team members' intuition and allow them to “do” rather than “talk.” I unleashed them with one question: “So what are you going to do?” With that question lingering in the air, I told them I would return in an hour, and they would report back on the priorities that would set the innovation agenda on its way with full wind in the sails. Upon my return, there was a new energy in the room as the teams huddled around work plans and mind maps. Cutting through the clutter and asking a group of seasoned professionals to “do”—simply to do, not talk—turned their innovation strategy efforts around and unlocked their potential. Never underestimate the power of a simple, provocative question to create a more dynamic, inspirational mood.

Here are some of my favorite provocative questions:

• What's next?
• What don't we know?
• What are we going to do?
• When did you last create something?
• What's relevant?
• What questions should we be asking?
• What's the most important thing?
• What would make you a little more uncomfortable?
• What would be your first move as CEO?
• What is the world telling you?
• How could you put yourself out of business?
• What should we start, stop, and continue?
• How much time have you thought about your team today?
• How much time do you set aside for yourself?
• When is the last time you really looked outside your business, your industry, or your world?
• What's the Bigger Big?
• What could go wrong?
• What could go very right?
• Why shou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Mood
• Chapter 2: Mindset
• Chapter 3: Mechanisms
• Chapter 4: Measurement
• Chapter 5: Momentum
• Chapter 6: Full Circle: The Sixth M
• Appendix: The Scientific Stuff
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index