How to fuel ideas

Welcome to the age of the expert.   As innovation thrives, us worker bees are becoming increasingly educated and specialised in what we know.  Making something happen that’s exciting and innovating requires bringing together a team of people from diverse backgrounds who don’t necessarily always agree with each other.  And that’s a good thing for the catalytic leader to recognise and harness.

Command and control

Many of us grew up and served part of our careers through the command and control model.  Indeed it is still prevalent in lots of organisations.  Serve is a good word because command and control consisted of a star chamber of senior people, sometimes even just one senior person, who set the direction of the organisation, agreed the projects and the tasks needed to be achieved, delegated those and set up rigorous controls to ensure they were executed and accountability was in place and enforced.

Command and control has its place in certain circumstances – when there is little room or time for debate and creativity, when rules and conformity is important, here command and control ensures people quickly and decisively know what is expected and get on and execute.  

The age of the expert

In the military, usually the most experienced folk are in the position of command and control.  In healthcare settings, usually the most experienced healthcare professionals are issuing the directions.  But in other organisations the expertise is not concentrated or focussed at the top.  In fact expertise can exist almost regardless of seniority, rank or tenure with the company.

Enter the age of the expert and if your organisation looks a bit like this then how can the most senior folk now issue commands and control an organisation that is actually smarter and more knowledgeable than they are?

And here lies the flaw in command and control within creative or innovative settings.  The first flaw is that the star chamber takes it on themselves to know what’s best for the organisation, in extreme this leads to group think, disengagement from people who cannot understand why they were hired for their expertise only to see that expertise ignored or filtered.  The star chamber model, with its procession of approving and disapproving of proposals can also lead to group think, stifling innovation. 

It’s attributed as part of the reasons why kodak, blockbuster and other famous names are no longer with us.   It’s not because there were no smart people in any of those organisations, it’s just the smart ideas never penetrated the group think.  It’s also attributed to some of the western world’s greatest regulatory failures where a cultural tone was set to “bring me good news” leading to less palatable if truthful messages being suppressed.

Oxygen for debate removed purposely in the rigorous pursuit of goals.

The bus

Most organisations want to know their people are marching in broadly the same direction but sometimes shortcuts are taken to earn support – “get on the bus”, “my way or the highway” I’m sure you’ve heard worse phrases designed to issue an ultimatum to people to agree with the chosen direction of travel or choose another pathway outside.

The challenge here is that often these phrases were used as a way to stifle dissent, disagreement and with that debate and innovation.  It’s unlikely such leaders purposely went out of their way to ensure their people lost all creativity but clumsy handling sent a message that the time for input was over and it’s now time for delivery.  These are moments when this makes sense but when people hear the what and they don’t understand the why then at best they start marching solely because they have been told to, not because they understand where it will lead.   In fairness some leaders go for a half-way house on this one and will give a kind of why that your mother used to try and convince you that foods you didn’t like when you were young were things you must eat because initially “they’re good for you” and eventually “because I told you so”.

Leaders turning their relationship with staff into a parent-child relationship shouldn’t really have been surprised to find either minor rebellions on their hands or actually and worse, somewhat sullen disenchanted workers.  Workers who are trying to pursue the what without the why are often a leading cause of regulatory failure – the anxiety of not being able to hit the target leads to the wrong kind of inventive and creative methods of ensuring the objective gets met, even if that causes downstream harm to the organisation.

The bottleneck

And of course the command and control leader creates a bottleneck in the organisation.   In my coaching role I’ve had the privilege of working with people from different kinds of organisations and frequently the command and control leader crops up as a troublesome figure to tackle.  The common thread across different organisations is how people feel either fearful of this leader or redundant as a decision maker themselves.   If you start to hear within your organisation “there’s not much point in developing this one further until we hear what Elvis thinks of it because you know he always has his own ideas we might as well just wait until the oracle speaks”.   Then you have a command and control leader in your presence.

Harnessing the smarts in the room

For the catalytic leader there is thankfully a much better way.

It firstly though has to start with a bit of self-analysis and humility, without this, things don’t really stack up.  Catalytic leaders are significantly less concerned about their own smartness as they are with the collective smartness of the organisation.   They believe in the organisation’s ability to solve problems, they believe in their people’s ability to innovate and create new things.  They understand their role is to unlock these talents, prime them to action and then unlike the command and control leader, to get out of the way.

The catalytic leader is the master of debate except unlike the command and control leader, they are not at the centre of this debate, they are the debate maker.   Their role is to ask incisive questions that are designed to make people think.  Their role is to ask contrasting questions to ensure an issue is looked at in the round.  Their role is to bring alternative viewpoints, experience and personality into the debate so an issue benefits from multiple perspectives.

Shared Inquiry

Education has adopted the shared inquiry / enquiry model as a method of drawing out student understanding but a catalytic leader can also use it to good effect.  This isn’t a vague, woolly, educational debate without purpose as we’ll see through an example

The shared inquiry model has three stages:  IDEA, EVIDENCE and RESPONSE

You can try this out immediately with your team – the rule for yourself though is only to ask questions, refraining from adding your own opinion for risk that everyone will simply fall in line.   Here goes some example questions

Eliciting ideas

Tell me about your idea?

How did you come up with this?

What other ways did you look at this?

What do you think is the main reason?

How does this link to the problem in hand?

Are there any other ways we should or could be looking at this?

If you had more time to look at this, what would you be doing next?

It’s OK to challenge and check – here are some shared inquiry ways to do this

When you say x what do you mean?

What research has helped you come to this conclusion?

Is there anything you’ve found that concerns you?

I wondered if it might be possible that ……?

What are we missing?

See the impact of these carefully chosen words are intended to keep the speaker and those in the room engaged in this exploration, going deeper or wider as necessary.

Looking for the evidence

Catalytic leaders need to be encouraging those around them to search for evidence that forms ideas whilst being open to accepting the limitations of data.

What did you notice?

Where has this happened or not happened in the world already?

What examples are out there that can help us understand how this turns out?

What assumptions are we making here?

Where else does this happen?

What support might we need?

How have you researched this?

If there was more time, what additional research would you want to help improve our confidence / insight?

The trick here is not to accept data just as a given but look for wider evidence associated with the data.  As a side note it’s a good idea for catalytic leaders to have some competence in data research methods or at least the courage to question the assumptions and framing of research.

Ideas

The catalytic leader also has to be skilled at bringing in and incorporating other ideas and responses from around the table and particularly skilled at looking the voices that are not contributing, the quieter and thoughtful voices.

Are there are other ways we can look at this?

How does this concept work with – other ideas on the table?

How will this help us reach our goal?

What have you heard that’s resonated with you most?

Who else do we feel would be good to contribute to this?

Can you summarise the key steps we need to take?

Have we exhausted our ways of looking at this one?

These are just a few to try out and bring into your repertoire.  The catalytic leader may be a debate maker but there are occasions when they will have an opinion they want to introduce.   Here they have to be super careful not to invoke the command and control response so a few suggestions are:

My thoughts on this went in another direction

I wonder if another angle we could look at this could be

I’d like to go back to what xyz said earlier

Summing up

Shortcuts in this process tend to backfire – it is very tempting for the budding catalytic leader to hear the first idea they agree with and try and wrap up the debate with a “I think we’re all agreed we’re going with Frank’s suggestion”.   This ends up being somewhat worse than command and control leadership – it’s stifling debate and making Frank the target for the enmity of everyone else.

The catalytic leader using shared inquiry stands firm as debate maker – encouraging the team around them to bring all their smartness to the room without fear and favour and in doing so they get more ideas on the table and are able to make intelligent decisions that the whole team buy into because they understand the why and the where an idea came from.   It doesn’t mean everyone exists in a state of cozy agreement, that debate can be fierce, opposing opinions are deliberately sought and respect given to all the contributions so that next time around the team continue to bring all the smart to the room.

Have fun practicing 😊