Sparking creativity in teams: An executive’s guide
Senior managers can apply
practical insights from neuroscience to make themselves—and their teams—more
creative.
Although
creativity is often considered a
trait of the privileged few, any individual or team can become more
creative—better able to generate the breakthroughs that stimulate growth and
performance. In fact, our experience with hundreds of corporate teams, ranging
from experienced C-level executives to entry-level customer service reps,
suggests that companies can use relatively simple techniques to boost the
creative output of employees at any level.
The key is to focus on perception,
which leading neuroscientists, such as Emory University’s Gregory Berns, find
is intrinsically linked to creativity in the human brain. To perceive things
differently, Berns maintains, we must bombard our brains with things it has
never encountered. This kind of novelty is vital because the brain has evolved
for efficiency and routinely takes perceptual shortcuts to save energy;
perceiving information in the usual way requires little of it. Only by forcing
our brains to recategorize information and move beyond our habitual thinking
patterns can we begin to imagine truly novel alternatives.
In this article, we’ll explore four
practical ways for executives to apply this thinking to shake up ingrained
perceptions and enhance creativity—both personally and with their direct
reports and broader work teams. While we don’t claim to have invented the individual
techniques, we have seen their collective power to help companies generate new
ways of tackling perennial problems—a useful capability for any business on the
prowl for potential game-changing growth opportunities.
Immerse yourself
Would-be innovators need to break
free of preexisting views. Unfortunately, the human mind is surprisingly adroit
at supporting its deep-seated ways of viewing the world while sifting out
evidence to the contrary. Indeed, academic research suggests that even when
presented with overwhelming facts, many people (including well-educated ones)
simply won’t abandon their deeply held opinions.
The antidote is personal
experience: seeing and experiencing something first hand can shake people up in
ways that abstract discussions around conference room tables can’t. It’s
therefore extremely valuable to start creativity-building exercises or idea
generation efforts outside the office, by engineering personal
experiences that directly confront the participants’ implicit or explicit assumptions.
Consider the experience of a North
American specialty retailer that sought to reinvent its store format while
improving the experience of its customers. To jump-start creativity in its
people, the company sent out several groups of three to four employees to
experience retail concepts very different from its own. Some went to Sephora, a
beauty product retailer that features more than 200 brands and a sales model
that encourages associates to offer honest product advice, without a particular
allegiance to any of them. Others went to the Blues Jean Bar, an intimate
boutique retailer that aspires to turn the impersonal experience of digging
through piles of jeans into a cozy occasion reminiscent of a night at a
neighborhood pub. Still others visited a gourmet chocolate shop.
These experiences were
transformative for the employees, who watched, shopped, chatted with sales
associates, took pictures, and later shared observations with teammates in a
more formal idea generation session. By visiting the other retailers and seeing
firsthand how they operated, the retailer’s employees were able to relax their
strongly held views about their own company’s operations. This transformation,
in turn, led them to identify new retail concepts they hadn’t thought of
before, including organizing a key product by color (instead of by
manufacturer) and changing the design of stores to center the shopping
experience around advice from expert stylists.
Likewise, a team of senior
executives from a global retail bank visited branches of two competitors and a
local Apple retail store to kick off an innovation effort. After recording
first impressions and paying particular attention to how consumers were
behaving, the bankers soon found themselves challenging long-held views about
their own business. “As a consumer, I saw bank branches, including our own,
differently,” said one of the executives. “Many of us in the industry are
trying to put lipstick on a pig—making old banking look new and innovative with
decorations but not really changing what’s underneath it all, the things that
matter most to consumers.”
We’ve seen that by orchestrating
personal encounters such as these, companies predispose their employees to
greater creativity. For executives who want to start bolstering their own
creative-thinking abilities—or those of a group—we suggest activities such as:
·
Go through the process
of purchasing your own product or service—as a real consumer would—and record
the experience. Include photos if you can.
·
Visit the stores or operations
of other companies (including competitors) as a customer would and compare them
with the same experiences at your own company.
·
Conduct online research
and gather information about one of your products or services (or those of a
competitor) as any ordinary customer would. Try reaching out to your company
with a specific product- or service-related question.
·
Observe and talk to
real consumers in the places where they purchase and use your products to see
what offerings accompany yours, what alternatives consumers consider, and how
long they take to decide.
Overcome orthodoxies
Exploring deep-rooted company (or
even industry) orthodoxies is another way to jolt your brain out of the
familiar in an idea generation session, a team meeting, or simply a contemplative
moment alone at your desk. All organizations have conventional wisdom about
“the way we do things,” unchallenged assumptions about what customers want, or
supposedly essential elements of strategy that are rarely if ever questioned.
By identifying and then
systematically challenging such core beliefs, companies can not only improve
their ability to embrace new ideas but also get a jump on the competition. The
rewards for success are big: Best Buy’s $3 million acquisition of Geek Squad in
2002, for example, went against the conventional wisdom that consumers wouldn’t
pay extra to have products installed in their homes. Today, Geek Squad
generates more than $1 billion in annual revenues.
A global credit card retailer
looking for new-product ideas during the 2008 economic downturn turned to an
orthodoxy-breaking exercise to stir up its thinking. Company leaders knew that
consumer attitudes and behavior had changed—“credit” was now a dirty word—and
that they needed to try something different. To see which deeply held beliefs
might be holding the company back, a team of senior executives looked for
orthodoxies in the traditional segmentation used across financial services:
mass-market, mass-affluent, and affluent customers. Several long-held
assumptions quickly emerged. The team came to realize, for example, that the
company had always behaved as if only its affluent customers cared deeply about
travel-related card programs, that only mass-market customers ever lived
paycheck to paycheck (and that these customers didn’t have enough money to be
interested in financial-planning products), and that the more wealthy the
customers were, the more likely they would be to understand complex financial
offerings.
The process of challenging these
beliefs helped the credit card retailer’s executives identify intriguing
opportunities to explore further. These included simplifying products, creating
new reward programs, and working out novel attitudinal and behavioral
segmentations to support new-product development (more about these later).
Executives looking to liberate
their creative instincts by exploring company orthodoxies can begin by asking
questions about customers, industry norms, and even business models—and then
systematically challenging the answers. For example:
·
What business are we
in?
·
What level of customer
service do people expect?
·
What would
customers never be willing to pay for?
·
What channel strategy
is essential to us?
Use analogies
In testing and observing 3,000
executives over a six-year period, professors Clayton Christensen, Jeffrey
Dyer, and Hal Gregersen, in a Harvard Business Review article,3 noted five
important “discovery” skills for innovators: associating, questioning,
observing, experimenting, and networking. The most powerful overall driver of
innovation was associating—making connections across “seemingly unrelated
questions, problems, or ideas.”
Our own experience confirms the
power of associations. We’ve found a straightforward, accessible way to begin
harnessing it: using analogies. As we’ve seen, by forcing comparisons between
one company and a second, seemingly unrelated one, teams make considerable
creative progress, particularly in situations requiring greenfield ideas. We’re
not suggesting that you emulate other organizations—a recipe for
disappointment. Rather, this approach is about using other companies to stir
your imagination.
We recently used this technique in
a brainstorming session involving the chief strategy officers (CSOs) of several
North American companies, including a sporting-goods retailer. The rules were
simple: we provided each executive, in turn, with a straightforward analogy the
whole group would use to brainstorm new business model possibilities. When it
was the turn of this retailer’s CSO, we asked the group to consider how Apple
would design the company’s retail formats. The resulting conversation sparked
some intriguing ideas, including one the retailer is considering for its
stores: creating technology-assisted spaces, within its retail outlets, where
customers can use Nintendo Wii–like technology to “try out” products.
Of course, most companies will use
this tactic internally—say, in idea generation sessions or problem-solving
meetings. Executives at the credit card retailer, for example, created
analogies between their company and other leading brands to make further
headway in the areas the team wanted to explore. By comparing the organization
to Starwood Hotels, the executives imagined a new program that rewarded
customers for paying early or on time (good behavior) instead of merely offering
them bonus points for spending more (bad behavior). Similarly, by comparing the
company’s back-office systems to those of Amazon.com and Google, the credit
card retailer learned to think differently about how to manage its data and
information in ways that would benefit consumers as they made product-related
decisions andwould also give the company valuable proprietary data
about their behavior. Together, these insights led to several ideas that the
company implemented within two months while also giving it a portfolio of
longer-term, higher-stakes ideas to develop.
Analogies such as those the credit
card retailer used are quite straightforward—just draft a list of questions
such as the ones below and use them as a starting point for discussion.
·
How would Google manage
our data?
·
How might Disney engage
with our consumers?
·
How could Southwest
Airlines cut our costs?
·
How would Zara redesign
our supply chain?
·
How would Starwood
Hotels design our customer loyalty program?
Create constraints
Another simple tactic you can use
to encourage creativity is to impose artificial constraints on your business
model. This move injects some much-needed “stark necessity” into an otherwise
low-risk exercise.
Imposing constraints to spark
innovation may seem counterintuitive—isn’t the idea to explore “white spaces”
and “blue oceans”? Yet without some old-fashioned forcing mechanisms, many
would-be creative thinkers spin their wheels aimlessly or never leave their
intellectual comfort zones.
The examples below highlight
constraints we’ve used successfully in idea generation sessions. Most managers
can easily imagine other, more tailored ones for their own circumstances. Start
by asking participants to imagine a world where they must function with severe
limits—for instance, these:
·
You can interact with
your customers only online.
·
You can serve only one
consumer segment.
·
You have to move from
B2C to B2B or vice versa.
·
The price of your
product is cut in half.
·
Your largest channel
disappears overnight.
·
You must charge a
fivefold price premium for your product.
·
You have to offer your
value proposition with a partner company.
The credit card retailer tried this
approach, tailoring its constraints to include “We can’t talk to customers on
the phone,” “We can’t make money on interchange fees,” and “We can’t raise
interest rates.” In addition to helping company managers sharpen their thinking
about possible new products and services, the exercise had an unexpected
benefit—it better prepared them for subsequent regulatory legislation that, among
other provisions, constrained the ability of industry players to raise interest
rates on existing card members.
Creativity is not a trait reserved
for the lucky few. By immersing your people in unexpected environments,
confronting ingrained orthodoxies, using analogies, and challenging your
organization to overcome difficult constraints, you can dramatically boost
their creative output—and your own.
By Marla M. Capozzi, Renée Dye, and Amy Howe
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/sparking-creativity-in-teams-an-executives-guide
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