E094: Creativity & Innovation (Failure & Psychological Safety)

This is the world of work podcast with James and James. Hi, this is James.

hello. This is James, and this is Jane, and here we are again with another episode of The World of Work podcast. We've got some exciting chat coming up to Jay Jane, what are we speaking about?

Well, today we are talking about innovation, and specifically we're talking about the role of failure, which is one of my favorite subjects. And we're talking to Ronnie Rita Pullman from the University of Nebraska, who's an expert in this stuff. Yeah,

it's exciting. We've got a great conversation lined up. She brings a wealth of really interesting knowledge around the space of creativity and innovation, and I think we'll have a great chat. Hello. So here we are in the main body of this podcast, and this is the first of three episodes we're doing in the summer of 2012 where we're focusing on innovation, and today we're going to be looking at innovation, and we're going to be exploring the role of failure and psychological safety in relation to innovation. We're lucky to have an excellent guest of us today actually going to be a guest for all three of these episodes. We've got Ronnie writer paulman, and before we get into the conversation, would you be able to introduce yourself and say a little bit about yourself and your background to

the audience? Absolutely. So I am a professor of Organizational Psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I'm also the director of our graduate program. We have a master's and a PhD, and I've been studying creativity and innovation for the last 30 years.

That's excellent and I'm sure you're going to bring a wealth of knowledge to this with that background before we get into some of the details, can we just start with a really simple question, so what is it that innovation really means to you? What is innovation?

That's a great question, and there's actually a debate in the literature on the similarities and differences between creativity and innovation, the semi consensus, it's not a full consensus, is that creativity refers to the early stages where people think about the problem and come up with ideas, whereas innovation relates to the narrowing down of the ideas, choosing one or two and implementing those ideas in the organization, because I'm interested in the entire gamut. I just talk about creativity and innovation as one thing.

Yeah, that's cool. And I'd never really thought of them being linked together so much, and it's something we might explore a little bit later. But I normally think of creativity being, you know, in the artistic space and in those other domains, as opposed to work related space. But clearly, it feels to you as if it's all drawn together in one process.

Absolutely. So anytime you come up with a new idea for solving a problem, whether it's at work, whether it's raising your children and coming up, you know, how am I going to entertain them today when we're locked in, you know, dealing with friends, cooking a new dish, all of those are, can be creative activities,

yeah, and it's really liberating to think about it that way. It's quite positive to think about that creativity in that space. I think when, we're drilling into this conversation today, we're really looking at the role, I guess, of failure and how we deal with failure ourselves and our teams in relation to that creativity and innovation process. So when we think about failure in the workplace, what kind of things constitute failure, and what is failure at work? Do you

think so? It's a tough question for me, because for me, for me, I don't see a whole lot of failure, right? I see learning opportunities. The problem is that many organizational leaders, if things don't work out the way they expected, it is a failure. The issue, and why this is important with creativity is because anytime we have a new product or a new process, we haven't tried it before, we don't know if it works, therefore the chance of it not being successful and therefore labeled a failure are fairly high if we view it as a failure. People don't like to fail, so I'm not going to try something new, because it may not be successful. My boss will label it a failure and it will taint me.

Yeah, yeah. And I guess that's that's a difficult part of an organizational culture, isn't it? Is to to understand that relationship. Between failure and the individual and efforts to do new things. In your experience working with organizations, does anybody ever get the right answer for the first time around? Does anyone do new things and just have it work out normally, instantly,

sometimes, sometimes it happens. It's rare. A lot of the work that we do is is iterative in nature, where we try something that doesn't work, we make a fix, we try it again. We see what pieces don't work, we try it again. And that's a very typical approach. You see it in things like rapid prototyping, or when we talk about agile, that's that's exactly what they're dealing with, is this notion that it's not going to be right the first time around. Occasionally, people are lucky, teens are lucky, and they get it right. But most of the time, it either doesn't work or, you know, if we're lucky, we learn from the experience. We fix things. We get better the next time. On a slightly side conversation

about this, as you've been speaking, I've just been thinking a little bit about how we plan and allocate our time in organizations when, when you're working with organizations are exploring the way that they're practically going about their day to day processes. Do you think they build in time sufficiently for what you're describing as learning opportunities or about iterative process or or overcoming when things don't work the first time? Or do you think we make incorrect assumptions about how long processes take and how close we get to correct solutions?

I don't know if we make assumptions, incorrect assumptions. The way organizations operate right now is that they do not allow for time. One of the things we do know from the research is that developing creative ideas takes time, not just because we have to engage in this trial and error, but also because we have to come up with new ideas that is more effortful, that's more time consuming than doing what we've done before. We need to think about problems from a new perspective. We need to try to combine new things together. Those are effortful activities, and organizations, for the most part, don't build in time for those activities. You know, it's not uncommon for me to work with an organization, they come to me and they say, We want to improve creativity and innovation. But then when I start to talk about providing employees with more time to think. No, we have fires that need to put out. They have things they need to do. If you're too busy doing the day to day routine activities, you're not going to be able to have that time to think or reframe. And if everything is urgent, there's no margin for error. There's no time to try something not succeed and try again.

Yeah, and I guess or correct me if I'm wrong, it feels to me like you can't probably schedule in a 30 minute window to have space for that type of creative thinking. Does it take time to get into to those sort of spaces to think creatively? Or how does it how do you see that work?

You see that working? So we know that when people start thinking deeply, it does take time to get into it, and disruptions are difficult and make it harder to get back into the thought process. So that is an issue. And actually, relatedly, I just saw a paper that suggested that parents working from home right now with the pandemic, the average time between kids interrupting them as less than five minutes.

Wow, wow. That's hardly anything. It must be hard to focus on anything without that direction. You can only do shallow tasks, I guess, slight side question again, so where people have tried to create something and not achieve the initial objective, or goal of open set. Do you ever see examples of where those efforts result in something else and organizations kind of pivot to use a popular modern phrase, or move into new areas? I mean, is there tangential success through these sort of development processes?

Absolutely probably the best example is post it notes, so 3m that developed the post it notes is known for their support of creativity and innovation, and they one of the things they do, speaking of time, is provide their professionals with. Is the task of spending about 20% of their week on unrelated tasks where they develop new ideas so they provide them with time to think creatively. And one of their chemists wanted to develop a really strong glue, and that resulted in the post its which is the exact opposite of a strong glue. I was gonna say, yeah. But what happened was that this glue was developed, and initially it was viewed as not successful, but over a period of time, people found uses for it, and as a result, it became one of the most successful products of this company.

So I think there's I'm really interested in this, because one of the conversations I had recently around creativity and failure and particularly innovation was where I was talking to a couple of organizations that have effectively tried to separate the jobs out for who's responsible for coming up with the better ways to do things, or how they would refer to it, development versus the delivery team. And there's there's using your post it example, there the way they think is delivery team. Are there to get the job done, not to innovate, and then there's a separate development team. But the way you're talking about something like the post it, that would never work, because the people that would execute the ideas are the people that are going to spot the opportunities for maybe creating something different, or looking at what's happening in real time and going, hang on, this isn't working here, but it might help us somewhere else. So do you have a view on organizations that try and sort of allocate innovation to specific job roles and whether that's possible?

Well, I'm a great believer in interdisciplinary teams, right? So I could also see, you know, R and D folks sitting there not knowing what production teams and the factory are dealing with coming up with fantastic ideas of doing something that are not really possible to translate in a meaningful way to production. If we don't have people from production sitting in the room discussing it, they wouldn't know. So I think there's importance for expertise and putting together a team of experts from different perspectives, whether it's, you know, the marketing person, the production person and the R and D person, they all have to be in the room together, yeah.

And it's interesting looking at it that different, that different way round of both having the what would be traditionally termed innovative jobs with production and production with those innovative jobs. Because actually, what you say is actually true, and a lot of our listeners will recognize this where they work in delivery, they're presented with ideas, options, projects to develop, and they're like, Well, you can't do that for X, Y and Z reason. We know that. That's our evidence. So it sounds to me like failure is really important, almost essential, in order to innovate and actually execute the outputs of those innovations well, but but consistently, we hear that it's really tough, and consistently, when we talk to people, they find it really difficult. Why do you think it is so difficult to to fail and move forward and learn from it, beyond just seeing it's a failure. Well,

I think there are a number of reasons, right? So psychologically, as a species, we do not like to not do well, right? We shy away from things that we're not successful at we've been taught and learned that this is not appropriate, right? We all want to be successful. We all want to do well. We get praise when we do well, and we get negative feedback when we fail. So we have this built in mechanism that makes us shy away from failure, and that's part of the reason why companies that have been successful in terms of their innovation have moved away from that label of failure, because it has those negative connotations they try to look at these as learning opportunities, and they very intentionally focus on, what can we learn? How can we improve? What can we do better next time and there? And they move away from labeling these as failures, on the one hand, and also from having the negative consequences associated with it. And

there's, there's quite a move, certainly in the sort of IT sector, the technology, software service sector, of trying to bring products that aren't finished to market quite often, to test them out. So. So that they've effectively committed less resources to finding out if their innovation is working or if their ideas are working. Do you think? Do you think that is playing a part in helping them? Because if you what the what we what we've seen, where failure has been like, really damaging to organizations is where they've committed huge amounts of resources, people and money to projects they think are going to work at the first go, and then when they don't, that team is seen to have failed the entire organization. So do you think there's a there's a balance that needs to be struck about how people sort of invest in their ideas and their innovation before they sort of trial them?

That's part of it, right? Or just understanding from the organization that we're committing resources with the understanding that some of these projects are not going to be successful, and some of them will, and we can't tell ahead of time. We just don't know, right? If we knew ahead of time, it wouldn't be creative, because we would have all the knowledge, yeah, and

the way, I mean, it's really interesting, you talk about it as investment, and like, you know, you think about that is absolutely accepted. When we think about financial investments, right? We absolutely accept that people who manage our money, or if we're doing it ourselves, will use all the information they've got to make good choices, and some of those choices will pay off, and some won't. And some won't. And yet, somehow, when you go into organizations and they've put all this time and effort into things, they are, they seem almost broken when it it doesn't work that first and I first time, and I'm saying it doesn't work that first time, because all too often I work with organizations and they give up after the first go, because they're like, well, it failed. It totally failed, rather than coming back and iterating and trying differently, is that, do you see is that getting people getting better at that? Are they getting better at innovating and tweaking and rather than doing these big, giant change project programs?

I think to some extent they are. I think there's a big push and a better, much better understanding of the process today than there was before. On the other hand, there's also a push to be more lean, more efficient, less resource intensive. And you know, if you look at the workforce currently, we don't have, you know, the workforce is very lean. We have just enough people to get the job done, and sometimes not even that. And if that's the case, again, everybody's running around dealing with the here and now. There's no time to think about the future and to develop new products and new ideas. Yeah.

And that that raises, I guess, an interesting question, which is, you know, some of those things that you're talking about allude to an organizational certain type of organizational culture. So what, what role do you think the organizational culture and the leadership play in creating an environment that is conducive to innovation?

Oh, the leadership, the role of leadership in organizational cultures is huge. Frankly, there is this concept of create culture for creativity or culture for innovation that received a lot of attention in the literature. Leadership is a big part of it, because they shape the culture. And part of that culture is the acceptance of the risk that comes with innovation, of not blaming people when in teams, when products or ideas are not successful, of learning from failure or from lack of success and improving for the next time. So those are big markers of a creativity culture. And how

do we how do we create those cultures that are, I guess, kind and sort of respectful and aren't so judgmental about failure without losing some of the drive to get better at things?

Can you balance both of those at the same time?

Well, if you look at creative individuals, they balance both right. Creative individuals strive for success and want to be successful and innovate, while at the same time realizing that failure or lack of success is part of the process. It's a normal part of the process. You know, think about, even if you think about the art, how many drafts do authors go through before that book is sent to the publisher? If we look at works of great painters, we could see that they've had multiple, you know, pencil and charcoal drawings of what they wanted to paint before they actually paint it. That's normal. That's part of the process. It doesn't mean that you do not want to be successful. You still have the drive. It's because you. Want to be successful, that you take the time. So one of the things that leaders need to understand, and going back to your question about, How do we create a culture like that? I think leadership has a lot to do with that. You know when, when a product fails or a team is not successful in what they're achieving. Does the leader blame the team? Do they look for scapegoats? Do people get fired or are are we talking? Are we sitting there and talking and doing basically what we call a debrief, where we're going, Okay, what went well, what didn't go well, and what can we learn from it that will make it better the next time, whether it's this particular product or even if we're giving up this product, can we learn something from this that will help us with the next product, with the next idea,

and in teams like that, when, when you can get to that stage where you're focused on on, I guess, for future and learning and continuing, to develop. What kind of role does, I guess, power within leadership have? Does that work in teams where you've got maybe, very hierarchical cultures and strong leadership, or does it need to be more egalitarian? Does that sort of power, distance and then power dynamic influence the ability of a team to innovate?

You know, that's a good question. I'm not sure we have a ton of research that compares the two. I think if you have a lot of power, distance, the role of the leader becomes more pronounced. So everybody is going to follow what the tone of the leader? If it's more egalitarian, then obviously other people will have an influence as well. What we're finding from creative teams, typically is that they have multiple experts, and when you have experts, they become the de facto leader in their area of expertise. So if, for example, I've been doing work with medical professionals. Well, when it comes to the teamwork piece, I'm the expert. So if something is not successful or we need to learn from it, I'm the leader. When we talk about teams, I know nothing about medicine, so I sit and listen, so we share the leadership function, and you're more likely to see that in successful creative teams.

That's interesting. And do you find that the teams that are successful that they have human connections? Does it take time to create these teams? Do people need to know each other? Do they need to have some of that softer, more human relationship? Or is it, is it able to create this in a more transactional, very work focused environment, or do you need a bit of both? Yeah,

the research is pretty clear on this. You know, one of the big factors in taking and learning from failure is the ability to honestly discuss any of the issues that come up. And in order to do that, you need to feel comfortable with your teammates. You need to know that if, if you didn't do something correctly, people were not going to going to blame you, that that they will be respectful. And we call that process psychological safety. People need to be need to feel safe in that environment. So absolutely, those connections, those human connections, are critically important.

So I've got a question for you. I mean, we're here as a group of interested people discussing what you know organizations can do to get better at creativity and innovation and overcoming failure and things like that. Do you think this is a type of conversation that teams have amongst themselves? Do you think people are in organizations aware that this is an area to explore and think about and and talk about it and explore themselves? Or do you think people sort of march through life without really stepping back and reflecting on this as a, as a, as an avenue of thought and exploration. You know,

I think we have a little bit of both. I think some people are aware, and some organizations and teams are more aware than others, and in some places they're not. Again, these are not easy, always easy conversations to have. And so I think in some cases, even if people are aware and want to have the conversation, they feel uncomfortable doing it. If you have, let's say dominant, strong teammates that are not accepting, they're not going to have those conversations

and and that those dynamics that exist within teams. Do you think if people, where people have started to understand the importance of this, do you think that, in itself, can help teams change how they react to each other and how they are. Understand, sometimes, you know, the very knowledge that this might help develop their capabilities and their their ability to deliver in itself helps. Does that, does that knowledge of this concept really help them sort of improve, or is it more that the research just notes that where it exists, then it helps teams move forward.

No, we definitely know that the knowledge helps improve. There is evidence that training, team training works, and we can help teams become better and have those conversations, have those discussions in a more meaningful way, and as always, the first step is understanding that you're not where you need to be. So

that's a really positive point, I think, for a lot of our listeners who work in smaller organizations or, like, running their own teams, which is that, you know, you can get better at this stuff with some training and some knowledge and some support, and that it's not, you know, they're not stuck where they are given their team if their team doesn't have it at the moment, which is really pretty great, because a lot of the stuff that we talk about, there isn't great evidence that learning and Developing necessarily changes it. But as individuals, on our own, people listening right now, what can they do? Do you think to get better at failing? If you like,

first of all, you have to try, right? There's no failure if you don't try so and it requires courage. And I think, to me, the first thing is to try to assess where you're at relative to the team, and what are your reactions when things don't go well, right? These are things you can control. Do you blame people? Do you get mad? Or do you take the approach of, what can we learn from this? And if you can try to control your own reactions, emotional reactions, to to those situations, that can shift the team environment. And now, if you put together a team of people that are all paying attention to this, you've created a team where you have psychological safety.

Yeah, sorry. The reason I'm smart, I'm you probably, you definitely can't see me, but I've got a smile on my face. And the reason I've got a smile on the face is because I was just, I was just reflecting to myself, both on my own career and some of the clients that I work with, and about how often we end up talking about having to park your ego and having to get over it really quickly, because that helps everybody, and I think with failure in particular, if you can somehow find a way to disassociate the failure with your own opinion of yourself and your ability to to be effective at work, I think it's a really powerful thing, But it's quite hard to do. I don't know, James, what do you think? Yeah, I very much agree. And actually, I

was smiling to myself when you were speaking about that, because so many of the conversations that we have about different domains of work and our I guess social interactions with others often at some point, mentioned the benefits of self awareness and and developing that awareness that you have some influence over how you think, how you feel, how you choose to interact, and if you get to a stage where people can start to step back and to appreciate that and watch watch themselves, sort of in this social environment, it makes it easier for them to to shape those experiences that they have and the experiences with other stuff when, when you work on this type of improvement to creativity and innovation, do you? Do you focus on with your clients, things like self awareness? How does that work within your your work,

in some cases, absolutely, I think, both in terms of creativity and in terms of Team processes, self awareness is really critical. As you started the conversation, you said, Oh, I didn't think about creativity as something you could do in business. That is a common conversation, that a place where I have to start is the realization that everybody can be creative, and you can be creative in domains that we typically don't associate with creativity. I can't train you to be more creative if you believe you cannot be creative at all, or that creativity has no place in business. So that's part of that self awareness process that needs to happen, that the realization that this is possible, and the same thing happens within the team environment.

So I've got, I've got one more question, and then we're kind of running out of time on this episode. If we were to think about, say, leaders in small to medium organizations, or people leading, you know, medium sized teams, but we're looking. To to sort of create the environments that support thinking about failure as learning opportunities and then create that safety. Have you got any, any thoughts on what they could do, to just create those, those environments, any simple things they could do? Yeah,

I think modeling the appropriate behavior is really important. That is, again, you need to be the first in line to treat the failure as a learning opportunity. And if you see other people on the team treating it differently, or when there are occasions where people belittle ideas and so forth, you're you need to intervene as the leader, even if the idea is silly, it may lead to a good idea. So you know, one of the first rules of brainstorming is that you know, you just spew out ideas, because you never know, and at that point, your job as the leader is to make sure that everybody on the team understands that it's okay to have silly ideas. We don't have to use them, but if you start to self censor and not present those idea we may miss a great idea that's hidden among them. So it's modeling and providing the direction to the team on how it's appropriate to behave. Well, that

sounds like a really good piece of advice. And I think we're going to end this episode there, because we've got a few more to get through on innovation, and I think we've covered some really great content. So just before we finish up, just to make sure that we've covered it, here, is there anything people can do to find out a bit more about you and this topic, and some of the work that you've done

on it, absolutely feel free to connect with me. Email is probably the best bet. I have a longer email address. I'm not sure what the best way to provide it to people.

If we can, we'll share it. We can share some stuff at some point. Yeah, that'd be good, right? Okay, well, that's excellent. And thank you very much. It was an excellent conversation. Thank you. I enjoyed it. So that

was our conversation with Ronnie. I think we covered some really good stuff there, and she brings such a wealth of knowledge to this sort of idea of innovation and role of failure or sort of learning from our mistakes in that Jane, did you have any specific takeaways that you wanted to reflect on or call out? Yeah, I

think, I think the thing for me that really sort of stopped me in my tracks and thought, oh, I recognize that was when she talked about leader role modeling and the importance of leaders in demonstrating and embracing failure and seeing it positively. And I just think about all the times that I've worked with teams, and the managers or leaders of those teams, or even the organizations have absolutely wanted to foster and embrace innovation, but when they've invested time and energy into something and it's gone wrong, they haven't been able to hide their disappointment and their frustration, and that instantly creates an environment of failure is wrong and bad, and it should be sort of shrunk back, and we should, like, push it under a carpet, rather than sort of embrace it and indulge in it and revel in it, such that we can find the learning. Yeah,

there was a phrase that I used to hear, which was that failure is an orphan, but success as a million parents. I don't know if you've heard that, but it just kind of sums up the way that a lot of us approach this, and then sort of, to me, sums up some of the challenges around it. And I think that's that's really difficult. Um, one of the things that stood up for me in this conversation was just a little snapshot to do with the time it takes to really do things and make things better. And it feels like we don't always appreciate or understand or make time for a non linear path to an outcome that we're aiming for. So so how we can shape our expectations around our sort of direction process and where we're heading to seems important. And you know one of, one of examples that she raised when you know failures create secondary success through the post it note example, I thought was really interesting. And how do you how do you lead and structure so that you give people space for that time and that creativity and maintain that fluidity to to respond to changing things? I just think there's some really interesting stuff in there. Yeah,

absolutely, really interesting episode. Looking forward to to the next one as well, because for those of you who aren't aware, we've actually recorded a couple more episodes with our same guest until