Author: Lina M. Echeverría
PROLOGUE – LEADERSHIP FOR FAST-PACED INNOVATION
An impassioned culture of innovation thrives when guided by leaders who can resonate with team members, leaders capable of managing with passion and creating energized organizations while staying true to themselves and making their own work meaningful. Innovation thrives under a leader who internalizes and lives by the belief that to excel you must start with a group; to excel you must create a culture; and to excel you must manage one by one—one person at a time, one situation at a time, one project at a time, one group at a time—by staying in the present, undistracted.
PASSION 5 – CREATE A CULTURE
TO EXCEL IN BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATION it is not enough to manage a group of talented individuals. It starts with survival of the culture, and to survive a leader must create a culture defined by beliefs, attitudes, energy, interaction style, and practices—and rituals. But to excel, the leader must ensure that the culture be one of creative engagement and liberating values. If it is clearly defined and rests on lived values, the group culture will flood the larger organization and, in so doing, create the network that is vital for innovation to take place. The effort needed is not defining a complex, multicomponent framework. Unlike top-to-bottom corporate efforts aimed at changing culture, which may take years to yield fruit, the creation of a culture within the intimacy of a single group allows effects to be quickly noticeable, and the dimensions that need to be addressed are basic ones.
At the core of a successful culture of innovation is the respect for the individual and the individual’s freedom. The culture will develop as the leader provides the space for the emergence of the attitudes and practices that typify the group and provides the support for their survival. Well-established primitive cultures are the reflection of skills passed down from one gen eration to the next through oral traditions and rituals of celebration. In the same fashion, the value that a modern-day group with sophisticated innovation as its goal places on the same three pillars—time, sharing of knowledge through the oral tradition, and celebrations—leaves a defining imprint on the culture it creates.
The value placed on time defines the nature of a group. At the core of the creative process is a culture that creates negative space by eschewing frenetic habits and providing autonomy over time, thus enabling the flow of creative intuition. Sharing of knowledge through formal and informal exchanges allows identification and transmission of behaviors and accomplishments that are honored and deserving of emulation, and thus recognized and celebrated.
ESTABLISHING THE ORAL TRADITION
Whether in primitive cultures that rely on it or in sophisticated innovation settings, the oral tradition—that practice of sharing knowledge and cultural practices, wisdom and expectations, information and acceptable behavior, the know-how and the philosophy that permits the passing of the culture from one generation to the next—relies on two important elements: the physical setting for the sharing to take place and the nature of the gettogethers themselves.
CREATE SETTINGS THAT NURTURE KNOWLEDGE SHARING
The ability to collaborate and get along with others is paramount in enabling people to quickly share knowledge, either formally within a team or informally beyond the team. To foster informal knowledge transfer, teams need an environment that stimulates the senses and the emotions, one that fosters free association of ideas. An impassioned leader uses every lever, including workspaces and furnishings, to support the team culture. One effective way of promoting cross-pollination of ideas, actively coaching incoming talent, and keeping team members up to date is to establish “creativity rooms”—nicely decorated and furnished rooms that look more like living rooms, with comfortable leather couches and toys that encourage tinkering—where teams can drop in and use informally as needed. They are true “living” rooms, for it is here that the culture is lived. It is here that, along with knowledge and understanding, the sense of freedom that practitioners crave, once experienced, is shared and passed on as a cultural element, as discussed in the context of allowing space for wings to spread.
Only one rule should apply to a creativity room: it cannot be reserved for meetings, or it will become just one more conference room. It is to be used as the group sees fit: for oneon-one discussions, which might be joined by anybody else interested in the subject; to read an article, have lunch, or simply decompress; for coffee breaks and celebrations, and to brainstorm around a tough problem. It belongs to the group in which—it cannot be forgotten—you as a leader also participate. So it is important that you partake in the life that teems in the creativity room.
EPILOGUE – LET LIFE CONTINUE
As with my healing experience, I got the picture, very much as I had been aware through the passionate experience of leading teams, that what succeeds is not one thing, but a circle of things all working in harmony. As I immersed myself in rich discussions with the leadership practitioners and consultants and authors and journalists and editors and graduate students that were now my guiding team on the elements of creating cultures where innovation thrives, my eagerness and anticipation to jump back into action was tangible. Years after my time with the glass research group, my learning about the Society Committed to Relaxation, spurred by Tim Cobb, loner fundamental physicist turned unmasked ballroom dancer and gregarious mentor, cemented the notion that one can indeed create a culture that prevails, passed down through generations by oral tradition and rituals of celebration, not through top-to-bottom corporate efforts, but within the intimacy of a single group, one person at a time. I understood that what I needed to do, as I had done before, was bring the vital elements—the passions—together to work as a unit, prodding here, cajoling there, so they all resonate as one:
• To jump into the ring of fire and embrace the conflict that inevitably arises as the different experiences and viewpoints of creatives emerge as different ideas, often op posing and driven, at times violently, by the energy that fuels them.
• To bring passionate, brilliant, and creative people together who show a vibrancy in their personal lives, and whose interests, skills, and collaborations will create the persona of the group.
• To define values that resonate with you as a leader and that are both conducive to the expansion of the creative spirit and to the spirit of excellence and rigor that is paramount in taking visions and dreams to physical reality.
• To demand excellence and enrich lives by coaxing individuals and teams to let their intuition and drive guide them while instilling a spirit of high performance and focusing on commitment to make it happen.
• To create a culture of creative engagement within the intimacy of a single group, one defined by beliefs, attitudes, energy, interaction style, and practices.
• To define a clear structure, one that will inform the interactions, the roles and the responsibilities of every single person and, in so doing, will eliminate barriers and frustrations and provide every one with a raison d’être.
• To develop the self-awareness and acceptance that allows you as a leader to stay centered, to be impassioned and detached, and in so doing to be motivational and inspirational on one hand, and to guide the raft through whitewater on the other.
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