The psychology of innovation: how to unleash creativity in your team

Does your work environment encourage innovation? If not, why not?

Is it a lack of resources? Is it political:?do you need more influence to have your voice heard? Perhaps it’s a strategy gap, where no one entertains ideas beyond the short-term. Tomorrow we’ll do the same thing we did today, and so it goes.

It’s easy to become an agent for these mindsets when we think we’re powerless to effect change, or our company culture constrains our willingness to contribute. The reality is that our working environment has a direct impact on how creative we can be, and thus on how innovative the company will be.

Let’s take a look at some psychological barriers to getting creative in the workplace, and consider ways to overcome them.

A soft landing for jumping into the unknown

The workplace demands resilience, however — unless you’re in life-or-death careers — this is centred on, of course, resilience towards hefty workloads and delivering to deadlines. Often, though, and, as I’ll focus on here, it’s the interpersonal stressors that really test us.

Being hyper vigilant to the very many different personalities and sensibilities of your wider team, and navigating cues from individuals within it, can be taxing, as well as being sensitive to how you’re viewed by leadership and / or your direct reports. But if needing a thick skin is the norm then to establish a positive and shame-free environment, in which creativity can flourish, demands a slight, though no less significant, tweak to the usual psychology of the workplace.

(Most) businesses will have processes in place to enact pastoral care — reviews, training, team bonding, Secret Santa — but outputs mean little without the good intention behind them. Cangemi and Miller (2007) explain,

‘Certain behaviors must precede any attempts to create a fulfilling, stimulating, and freedom to think, creative work environment. Formulation and fulfillment of a psychological contract, especially on the part of the organization's leaders – but also including employees – seems to be an effective process for the development of an open, healthy climate which is encouraging and conducive to the development of creativity.’

At Wilson Fletcher we have a saying: the future can’t be found in a spreadsheet, but it needs to look good in one. Similarly, a happy workplace can’t be made through team building exercises, but happy team members, who feel secure ‘putting themselves out there’ will be open-minded and optimistic about the good that can come from them.

Sure, it’s not rocket science

This lesson won’t be necessary for everyone, but determining whether your work environment is set up for, let’s call it ‘creative safety’, isn’t ever a wasted exercise.

Start by asking yourself whether everyone is happy to contribute if they want to, and won’t be penalised if they don’t; is there a tangible sense of trust within the team; and do people work and talk as a unified whole? ‘We’ have had some ideas, as opposed to ‘I’. Whatever our seniority, do we feel we could fearlessly say something a bit out there? And could we hear something out there, in turn, without judgement?

At Wilson Fletcher we’re fairly unencumbered by social conventions. Not to the extent that anything goes, but we do have the assurance that even if our contribution isn’t itself the solution, we’ll be listened to with open minds and might just spark the next brilliant thought, or be sparked into having it ourselves. It sounds chaotic (and sometimes creativity needs to be harnessed to stay on track), but it provides a fertile soil for ideas.

Imagine if the fear wasn’t that you might say something foolish, but that you might not say something foolish enough. Because brave ideas often seem foolish at first (see Facebook, see Airbnb, see NFTs. See also Shakespeare*).

No time to think

The argument that a lack of resources hampers innovation is a particularly tricky one to debunk. There are, after all, only so many hours in the day. If the culture encourages burnout, then it’s up to the individual to square this with their career hopes, finances and wellbeing.

If, however, it’s less a question of mental and physical burnout, and more a case of spiritual malaise, then it’s more essential than ever that creativity and innovation be fostered. Torpor makes the day feel like you’re pushing a rock uphill, even if outputs aren’t as high as they can be when enjoyment, purpose or true fulfilment is a driving force — or, in other words, when you’re on a roll. Bye bye rock.

Inputs < outputs

At Wilson Fletcher, we work a four-day week. I tell you this because first of all, it’s an operational model we want to encourage the adoption of elsewhere, and because we find that working for only ‘four awesome days’ doesn't affect the amount of work we produce, or reduce its quality. It’s the opposite. We’re more creative and engaged in the short work week than we were before. Trying to innovate to a purpose when you’re tired isn’t a watertight strategy for success. It’s certainly not sustainable.

The credibly open and supportive community at WF enables the model to work, and we’re confident we won’t go back. It’s important we help refresh the minds we need to have energised on Monday mornings and it’s equally important that those minds want to actually be at work;?the equanimity the model allows, and agency over one’s life, not to mention the mutual respect, means outputs are as good and creative as ever, if not better.

You’re not the problem

In an environment that goes that extra mile to foster teamwork, if you’re stuck on a project; feeling unproductive; and/or needing to refresh your thinking, it isn’t internalised as a personal shortcoming (‘the always-on, over-achieving ‘A people’ would never let this happen’). Instead it’s understood to be a problem happening to the individual, the solution to which can be crowdsourced.

We all know that you won’t truly benefit from the help of your peers without actively seeking it out, but how often do we actually do this, in the day-to-day? Their varied inputs (and we’d hope they are varied —?homogenised workforces begone) can pull you out of the work weeds and, when this kind of collaboration becomes a natural cadence to the workplace, it adds up to a more enlivened work environment. Not only will you be closer to solving a particular problem; have ideas for fresh approaches; or have got help reframing a tricky project and with a clear plan of action, but you’ll also be adding to a constructive culture.

Basically, it’s telling when companies ask for a can-do attitude in spite of a role’s baked-in challenges. The right working environment can create can-do attitudes because of the challenges.

You’re the solution

So you’ve asked, but your colleague can’t help. In this case, you’ve uncovered a shared issue that needs more thought: could you be the one to progress the conversation? At WF, we do smart lunches — elegantly rechristened as ‘smunches’ — where we’ll discuss a topic, either as a presentation from a member of the team, a workshop, or open-forum solution-finding. Our latest one was a discussion on how we structure our internal company Wiki, and the contributions were generally positive and always helpful, also engaging the team in the day-to-day experience of their workplace. It’s important that they are self-initiated and not obligatory, structured meetings. They happen in the interests of sharing, and are symptomatic of a workplace fostering creative safety.

What’s more…

Plussing. It’s something that we’ve talked about before in our Futurestate Design series (in this free downloadable workshop guidance, specifically).

Originally a technique attributed to Walt Disney and made famous by Pixar, plussing is an ideation process that always builds on and improves ideas over picking holes in them. It helps engender the positive environment that empowers creativity.

Plussing a critique is to frame it in the language of opportunity or suggestion. Going from ‘We can’t do that, it’d make our anxious customers uncomfortable,’ to ‘How would we make customers feel more comfortable here? Could we…’

It can be a really useful tool to give those scared of change — often the most negative in the room — the option to be a bit more fearless, part of creating positive change they can be comfortable with, maybe even responsible for.

These change impeders may even go on to become leaders of change, in the right environment and with the right support and guidance.

Plussing isn’t a decision-making process: it brings the ideas to the fore that the facilitator can choose to adopt, or not. Wise facilitators will see the use, and won’t be defensive about it.

If you want to give it a try, and you should, initially it can help to have a person whose purpose is to invigilate: it can be hard to get into the knack of plussing at first. This person asks (plussing as they do so), ‘and how would we reframe that as a positive ‘plus’?’ (Rather than negatively stating ‘that’s not a plus.’) (I know I'm not plussing here... See? It's hard.)

‘The more we purposefully let our mind wander and the richer our environment, the more insights we unearth’

Or so says Chris Bailey, in his book Hyperfocus. It’s not about paying your team to daydream. (The crucial word here is ‘purposefully’.)

By providing a rich and supportive environment for people, we can stretch operational models, concepts and ideas — even coming up with new ones… so long as we uphold the promise of our company’s purpose.

* ‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.’ (Shakespeare, As You Like It)