The challenge for leaders to respond to today’s ever changing, disruptive operating environment requires not only resilience and compassion but creativity and imagination. High on the list of objectives for leadership development is the promotion of an innovation mindset, the ability to think differently, to collaborate in new ways, to experiment when the roadmap and answers are unclear or evasive.
There are a range of interventions and approaches to building these capabilities available when you are thinking about how to help your teams to be more innovative, collaborative and creative. One of the challenges is to move beyond the theoretical and to help leaders genuinely think and work in new and different ways. The more senior we become the more expert we tend to be in our particular field, and the more we rely on the approaches which have served us well in the past. Innovation and the innovator’s mindset is about leaving the security of some of that behind; as the old adage goes ‘If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.’ So what can we do to help leaders move into a different mode, and to create the conditions necessary for new ways of thinking and working to flourish?
One unusual, impactful approach is to deploy the power of music and jazz. Working with jazz musicians offers leaders the opportunity to develop their improvisation skills, to really feel what it’s like to experiment, to test and learn in order to create together. Imagine being given control of a group of jazz musicians, and asked to conduct the group, starting and stopping different instruments to build a composition in the moment. There are obvious nerves, ‘I don’t know how to do this’, ‘I can’t play an instrument or read music’, ‘I don’t like jazz and I don’t know anything about it’, ‘Will it sound good?’. The fears quickly melt away when the music starts, and the band respond. There is no time to over think.
Alex Steele at Improwise has been running innovation experiential learning groups marrying his passion for jazz with his expertise in innovation for over a decade. Alex realised the skills he needs as a jazz musician mirror the experimentation and collaboration that fuels innovation in teams. He says, ‘The participants gain a unique view into the ways jazz musicians approach many similar challenges to those faced by individuals, teams and organisations in the audience. When participants interact with the musicians and control what they do, they get a fascinating insight into design, creativity, communication, emotional intelligence, change management, leadership and innovation.’ Time is taken to help participants reflect on how they might deploy similar skills and techniques in their ways of working, the ways they engage with each other, their clients, customers and stakeholders.
The process requires active listening, stepping into the unknown, throwing yourself into a situation where you are not an expert. These jazz improvisation sessions quickly create the kind of real time collaboration that generates new solutions and ideas, and the dynamics necessary for collective creativity. Importantly this happens in a visceral, experiential way, we are not talking theory here, this approach raises heart-rates, tests the nerves and prototypes what it’s really like to innovate, improvise and experiment to create something unique. Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s summed this up “One thing I like about jazz kid, it I that I don’t know what is going to happen next. Do you?”
For teams to innovate a set of conditions are necessary. One of the most important is psychological safety- you can’t innovate without a safe space to experiment and make mistakes. Expertise is useful but also dangerous, to be innovative you have to acknowledge other ways of looking at challenges and issues, and open your mind to alternatives. According to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos organisations which cannot experiment cannot innovate. Experiments make people nervous, by definition an experiment has an unknown outcome, it is unpredictable. Innovation is unpredictable too.
So how might we better support leaders who are increasingly being expected to deliver innovative and dynamic solutions to increasingly wicked and complex problems? Many organisations focus on process-oriented approaches, process innovation is temptingly reassuring, if we understand what we need to do and when, we can control for the outcomes, monitor our progress, and create some clarity and certainty out of the unknown. This is important, but it is only part of the answer. A good innovation process is necessary, it provides a guide and a structure, but the mindset we use for innovation matters just as much. It is very difficult to switch your mode of thinking away from task orientation, and reliance on subject matter expertise and prior experience. Innovation demands we do just that.
If you find yourself in conversations about the need for a change in mindset to encourage an innovation culture, think about how you are helping leaders to really feel the difference required. To change the way you work, you need to change the way you think. To change the way you think, you need to switch modes not just intellectually, but emotionally, viscerally. Rachel Sceats, Head of Experiential Learning at Hult EF Executive Education, Ashridge campus has been pioneering learning experiences which reach the parts other interventions cannot reach, “Research shows that learning happens when people are physically and emotionally as well as cognitively engaged. We use heart rate variance monitors in some of our simulations to track these pivotal moments for participants, this data means the feedback we can offer takes us to a much deeper, more impactful level.”
Think about the last time you stepped into the unknown, tried something new, opened your mind to alternative options, how did you feel ? How was that feeling different to business as usual? What are you doing to help your leaders feel what it means be more innovative, collaborative and creative together at a time when the challenges they face demand ever more imaginative, novel and experimental solutions?
