Thinking Outside of the Cubicle: Unleashing Creative Genius at Work through Team-Based Creativity

cubicle farm

Thinking Outside of the Cubicle: Unleashing Creative Genius at Work

Cultivating workplace creativity is no easy task. It is most stifled by a rigid organizational culture that discourages unconventional ideas or limits freedom of expression. But even if a business is totally on board to foster an environment that supports creative thinking, various factors can make it challenging to get to that state. These roadblocks might run from the pressures of meeting deadlines, achieving targets, and focusing on immediate outcomes to time constraints and very real fears of failure. Moreover, lack of adequate resources, limited opportunities for collaboration and brainstorming, and a lack of support from leaders can further hinder creative thinking. 

So how do you get from wanting to encourage workplace creativity across teams to living those values? Promoting workplace creativity requires a conducive environment that values experimentation, encourages diverse perspectives, and provides the necessary resources and support. Your first step is to make making change the priority. And that’s where we come in

Team-Based Creativity

Team-Based Creativity is a five-session, hybrid training series that puts workplace creativity in the spotlight. The course covers topics such as building and fostering creative environments; building team trust; creating big future states; understanding cognitive diversity; developing disruptive ideas that lead to huge breakthroughs in innovation; and maintaining teams that operate at the highest levels of efficiency, collaboration, and creativity.

During the customized, collaborative series, participants will:

  • Understand the characteristics of high performance innovation teams

  • Learn how to recruit and develop the right talent for your innovation team

  • Develop a clear innovation strategy and identify areas for growth

  • Create an environment that fosters creativity and experimentation

  • Develop effective communication and conflict resolution skills

  • Learn best practices for managing innovation projects, including agile methodologies and design thinking

As with all of our training series, Team-Based Creativity is designed to equip you and your teams with the knowledge and skills necessary to foster a culture of innovation and help drive further growth within your organization. And, we do it all while having serious fun. An enjoyable, fun, and creative training environment creates a safe space where participants are encouraged to disregard any fears of making mistakes, in the name of collaboration and innovation. Engaging with our teams through thought-provoking, results-based, and fun training activities is what we’re all about. And, we’re here to provide that to you and your colleagues too.

All Aboard

We delivered dozens of Team-Based Creativity training sessions in 2023 and are offering a steep, one-time BOGO discount in the month of February for new clients ready to help ignite the creative process that drives innovation (and revenue) within their organization. Schedule a discovery call today to unlock the deal!

 

Intentional Innovation® Powered by Teaming Worldwide

Intentional Innovation® is a commercially-proven innovation operating system designed to simplify and implement higher-performing, longer-lasting solutions that drive market disruption, new revenue, and deeper customer engagement.

Ready to learn more about Intentional Innovation® and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. Visit www.teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

Steering around Organizational Roadblocks to Innovation: Are Your Leadership Mandates Clear?

Steering around Organizational Roadblocks to Innovation: Are Your Leadership Mandates Clear?

When starting innovation, it is often best to begin by gaining an understanding of what roadblocks exist in your organization today. We have two ways to classify roadblocks: (1) some roadblocks are mandates. These are things you can’t change. And, (2) others are barriers. These are things you can change.

Mandates and Barriers

Mandates take the form of leadership directives, whether they are spoken or unspoken. An example is the statement, “Our charge is to drive productivity to the bottom line.” Although it might not be 100% clear, this statement declares that this organization’s focus is on incremental innovations. It does not care to disrupt the world, and we can determine that the appetite for innovation is very limited.

Barriers, on the other hand, are resolvable issues. An example is this statement: “It’s hard to wrap our arms around innovation. We just don’t know where to start.” This is something that can be resolved with new answers, better answers, or proof based on the unique situation leading to the issue. As the bubble graphic here shows, there are nine major categories of barriers for innovation: some easier to manipulate, and others are much harder to transform. The good news for barriers is that they can be assessed, analyzed, and mitigated. 

chart

Clarity and Communication

 The best resolution for mandates is clarity and communication. You need to get clarity on what leaders mean in their statements, and provide them with examples and be sure everyone is on the same page. Then, communicate that mandate widely and clearly.

The goal of a strong innovation process is to equip you with new answers and proof points to help you resolve barriers and achieve sustainable and substantial growth.

Going deeper, in order to understand leadership mandates, you must have clarity on what your leadership’s commitment to innovation is. With this understanding, you will know how far you can go with your innovation strategy. And this hierarchy helps you understand the different mandate possibilities and their impact on innovation.

Attributes chart

Leadership Commitments, Legacies, and Impacts

Most leaders have a low commitment to innovation and are primarily interested in harvesting and protecting the products and services the organization provides today. This means you are pretty much allowed to innovate at the margin level (e.g., operations) but not much further. The legacy and impact of these types of leaders on the world is pretty minimal.

As we go up the pyramid in this illustration below, the leadership commitment to innovation increases, as does the leader’s potential to leave a legacy and a lasting impact. However, there are fewer leaders open to these increasing levels of commitment. Let’s take a closer look at the key takeaways from this graphic:

  • Leaders who are focused on improvements allow innovation at the product and service level. As such, these leaders are most open to innovation that makes better versions of what already exists.
  • The leaders who are committed to transformation allow innovation at the category level. These leaders are open to changing their industry and the way things are done. And these leaders are open to big ideas.
  • At the top of the pyramid are leaders who are committed to disruption. These leaders want to change the world and the ways things are done, no matter the industry. Additionally, we know that these leaders are very open to big ideas and do not have much tolerance for small ideas.
  • Leaders with the highest levels of commitment to innovation will, of course, leave behind the largest legacy and impact since they are open to not only disrupt the industry, but also the world. 
Pyramid

Conclusion

Keep in mind that each of these approaches is legitimate. Not every leader is equipped for disruptive change. But, by understanding where your leadership falls on the innovation spectrum, you will have a clearer idea of what kind of innovation strategy you’ll have license to pursue moving forward.

All Aboard

Ready to learn more about steering around organizational roadblocks and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. 

Intentional Innovation® Powered by Teaming Worldwide

Intentional Innovation® is a commercially-proven innovation operating system designed to simplify and implement higher-performing, longer-lasting solutions that drive market disruption, new revenue, and deeper customer engagement.

Ready to learn more about Intentional Innovation® and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. Visit www.teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

Stakeholder Engagement: We Need More in 2024

An illustration of connected people communicating

Stakeholder Engagement: We Need More in 2024

In 2024, the need for engaged supporters is real. As business leaders, we must work harder than ever for a healthy, engaged stakeholder community. In particular, this rings true when it comes to the design and development of new products and services. For example, the massive investment in high speed rail in the UK (HS2) was recently shelved citing economic woes. It also suffered from a critical lack of public support for the high speed rail solution. Even in less spectacular cases, many businesses face stakeholders who have more reach through social media today than ever before. It is scary to think that one angry customer could sink a new product launch before it even reaches the market. 

 

However, this is not a tale of powerlessness. Rather, it is the opposite. It is a quest for new and better tools to help us manage and engage our customers, consumers, users, partners, and internal teams. As you know, we live in a networked world of partnerships, data sharing, integrated technologies, and shared innovation. Great stakeholder management is not a destination, but a journey that simply continues. And, there are no single answers that help us solve for unhappy or for happy stakeholders. We must seek to balance priorities and communicate our rationale clearly.  

 

The purpose of healthy stakeholder engagement in an innovation program is to build mutually beneficial, long-term relationships with those who are affected by, or who can affect, the big ideas. And, the more effectively our stakeholders engage, the more able and likely they are to address issues important to customers. Ultimately, this leads us to realizing higher levels of trust and acceptance.

Leadership Competencies for Healthy Stakeholder Engagement

There are three key competencies that we look for in leaders engaging stakeholders:

First, we look for a discovery mindset. This involves the ability for our leaders to create, recognize, elaborate, and articulate the problems that need to be solved and the opportunities that can be explored.

Second, we must have an incubation capability. This is also known as the ability for our business leaders to evolve the opportunity into hypotheses and experiments that can be reliably tested for desirability, feasibility, and viability. 

And lastly, we look for an acceleration orientation, or the ability to scale. Here, we look to leaders who will seek to ramp up the new solution to stand on its own, so it can successfully compete and deliver on its promises.

Consider the graphic below, which demonstrates which leadership focus will be required in order for you to effectively communicate with and encourage your stakeholders.

Five Tenets of Healthy Stakeholder Engagements

So, now that you know what leaders need when engaging stakeholders, how do you empower stakeholders to take action? All stakeholders, regardless of their power and influence over the initiative, should be encouraged to act in their appropriate role. Furthermore, good stakeholder-ship takes practice, and a seasoned innovation leader must help to foster the right level of engagement. We call this activating.

Activating will be successful, meaningful, and impactful only when it comes as a result of healthy stakeholder engagement. And how do you do that? I’m glad you asked! Here are five key tenets of healthy stakeholder engagement you can keep at the forefront:

  • It is strategic. We keep our engagement outcomes-based, answering the “why?.”  Questions of impact, risk, and long-term objectives should inform engagement priorities and be informed by stakeholder perspectives.


  • It is dialogue-based. Additionally, stakeholder engagement should create opportunities for a two-way discussion and for stakeholders to input into decisions that affect their lives.


  • It is proactive. We maintain the key tenet that anticipatory and regular communication is critical, allowing space for stakeholders to express any concerns and for the team to pivot accordingly.


  • It is clear and direct. In addition, we ensure that engagement is underpinned by openness and honesty about any potential adverse impacts and include explanations of who may be affected, when, and how.


  • And, it is inclusive. Lastly, we engage with all affected stakeholders, including vulnerable groups, by using tailored engagement approaches.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, a new year brings a new chance to reset and regroup. As you seek to push forward on new resolutions and new products, ensure you closely examine the general health and wellbeing of your business’ internal and external stakeholders. They are arguably your most critical corporate assets. By fostering transparent communication and active involvement in decision-making, addressing stakeholder needs and concerns, and adopting a long-term perspective, you can build and maintain robust relationships with stakeholders that are healthy and thriving. And that will help keep your business healthy and thriving too. 

A Call to Action

Want to learn more about healthy stakeholder engagement and how Teaming Worldwide can help your company take the guesswork out of innovation? Visit teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com for more info.

Intentional Innovation® Powered by Teaming Worldwide

Intentional Innovation® is a commercially-proven innovation operating system designed to simplify and implement higher-performing, longer-lasting solutions that drive market disruption, new revenue, and deeper customer engagement.

Ready to learn more about Intentional Innovation® and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. Visit www.teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

Future of New with Jonathan Hefter!

The Future of New Podcast with host Tim Jaques and featuring Jonathan Hefter

Future of New Interview with Jonathan Hefter

On our most recent Future of New podcast, Teaming Worldwide’s Tim Jaques interviews Circl.es‘ own Jonathan Hefter. Jonathan is one of the great thought leaders today on teams, collaboration, leadership, and making effective tradeoffs. He is an OG at Circl.es, a new kind of meeting platform, where he is the Head of Experience Design and Facilitation. Circles comes from the age-old tradition of storytelling and gathering as a community. And the Circl.es System™ enables the same kind of human connection, virtually. Jonathan and his company are at the convergence of authentic human interaction and technology. And it’s an exciting area to explore.

During the podcast, Tim and Jonathan discuss the intersection of change, innovation, and human performance.

Click below to listen to the full interview and discussion between Jonathan and Teaming Worldwide’s own Tim Jaques. Enjoy!   

A Call to Action

Want to learn more about how Teaming Worldwide can help your company take the guesswork out of innovation? Click here to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com for more info.

Intentional Innovation® Powered by Teaming Worldwide

Intentional Innovation® is a commercially-proven innovation operating system designed to simplify and implement higher-performing, longer-lasting solutions that drive market disruption, new revenue, and deeper customer engagement.

Ready to learn more about Intentional Innovation® and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. Visit www.teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

An Innovation Leader’s Quest for Credibility

An Innovation Leader's Quest for Credibility

Notes from the Field

In a recent one-day workshop with a group of healthcare executives, the frustration arose that innovation leaders (i.e., those whose portfolio covers innovative investments) must fight for the credibility of the innovation program in ways that their counterparts do not need to. These innovation leaders felt their existence was constantly being called into question, even today, when innovation leadership is needed more than ever in healthcare.  

This exchange got me thinking about how important credibility is to a leader whose charge is to innovate. The act of creating the next generation of products and services involves making promises that are inherently risky. So when we are making a series of risky bets in new technologies and solutions, our stakeholders sometimes conflate these individual risks with the overall innovation program. 

Moreover, an organizational leader must possess a high degree of credibility already in order to operate effectively. Yet, the leader’s individual credibility is not always extended to the innovation function. So there is a disparity – a tremor in the force that must be continuously addressed for innovation to excel. We must evolve our stakeholders capacity for taking risks and making big bets.

An innovation leader would do well to have methods and tools for reinforcing the essential promise of innovation. 

Innovation comes in many different forms, however the leadership function at the heart tends to have golden threads across all innovation programs. As we go about innovating new and inventive ways to grow the business, four particular leadership practices may be useful: 

 

  • Set the Vision. In the messy work of a typical innovation program, we see pivots and fast failures, and early partnerships come and go, and strange new business models. We need a compelling, articulate vision of the future that overrides the individual portfolios. 
  • Engage Others. The leader should be meeting with teams, learning and hearing many perspectives. Engagement is a multi-sided game, so the leader needs great EQ to do this effectively.  Leadership begins and ends with people – and therefore engagement is the first task. 
  • Be A Sense Maker. Innovation leaders are storytellers and sense makers. How does AI fit into the future of our organization? How will we work with robots in the future? These questions should be storylines that evolve over time in order to form innovation narratives to help other leaders and teams make sense of the wide open future.   
  • Manage Creativity. We need deeply creative teams that can blow up the assumptions of today’s business and reformulate new models for tomorrow. But how do we do this without causing panic? Begin by building firewalls around the creative process – make it safe for stakeholders to engage in a full throated creative agenda. But also ensure that that process has a conclusion and the results are filtered through analytical tools like risk management.
A leader’s stock-in-trade is credibility.

Without it, she has no ability to build trust, influence others, or create momentum.  Leading an innovation program is a potential cred-killer, so the leader must take care to position herself accordingly.  

Want to talk more about leadership and innovation?

Join us over in our LinkedIn Community: Intentional Innovation where we explore a wide range of topics around modern innovation practices and work together to define The Future of New.

You may also enjoy this related article: A Quick Reflection on Grit.