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2016-02-25 11:03:41
Adam Grant
From the March 2016 Issue
If there s one place on earth where originality goes to die, I d managed to
find it. I was charged with unleashing innovation and change in the ultimate
bastion of bureaucracy. It was a place where people accepted defaults without
question, followed rules without explanation, and clung to traditions and
technologies long after they d become obsolete: the U.S. Navy.
But in a matter of months, the navy was exploding with originality and not
because of anything I d done. It launched a major innovation task force and
helped to form a Department of Defense outpost in Silicon Valley to get up to
speed on cutting-edge technology. Surprisingly, these changes didn t come from
the top of the navy s command-and-control structure. They were initiated at the
bottom, by a group of junior officers in their twenties and thirties.
When I started digging for more details, multiple insiders pointed to a young
aviator named Ben Kohlmann. Officers called him a troublemaker, rabble-rouser,
disrupter, heretic, and radical. And in direct violation of the military ethos,
these were terms of endearment.
Kohlmann lit the match by creating the navy s first rapid-innovation cell a
network of original thinkers who would collaborate to question long-held
assumptions and generate new ideas. To start assembling the group, he searched
for black sheep: people with a history of nonconformity. One recruit had been
fired from a nuclear submarine for disobeying a commander s order. Another had
flat-out refused to go to basic training. Others had yelled at senior flag
officers and flouted chains of command by writing public blog posts to express
their iconoclastic views. They were lone wolves, Kohlmann says. Most of them
had a track record of insubordination.
Kohlmann realized, however, that to fuel and sustain innovation throughout the
navy, he needed more than a few lone wolves. So while working as an instructor
and director of flight operations, he set about building a culture of
nonconformity. He talked to senior leaders about expanding his network and got
their buy-in. He recruited sailors who had never shown a desire to challenge
the status quo and exposed them to new ways of thinking. They visited centers
of innovation excellence outside the military, from Google to the Rocky
Mountain Institute. They devoured a monthly syllabus of readings on innovation
and debated ideas during regular happy hours and robust online discussions.
Soon they pioneered the use of 3-D printers on ships and a robotic fish for
stealth underwater missions and other rapid-innovation cells began springing up
around the military. Culture is king, Kohlmann says. When people discovered
their voice, they became unstoppable.
Empowering the rank and file to innovate is where most leaders fall short.
Instead, they try to recruit brash entrepreneurial types to bring fresh ideas
and energy into their organizations and then leave it at that. It s a
wrongheaded approach, because it assumes that the best innovators are rare
creatures with special gifts. Research shows that entrepreneurs who succeed
over the long haul are actually more risk-averse than their peers. The hotshots
burn bright for a while but tend to fizzle out. So relying on a few exceptional
folks who fit a romanticized creative profile is a short-term move that
underestimates everyone else. Most people are in fact quite capable of novel
thinking and problem solving, if only their organizations would stop pounding
them into conformity.
When everyone thinks in similar ways and sticks to dominant norms, businesses
are doomed to stagnate. To fight that inertia and drive innovation and change
effectively, leaders need sustained original thinking in their organizations.
They get it by building a culture of nonconformity, as Kohlmann did in the
navy. I ve been studying this for the better part of a decade, and it turns out
to be less difficult than I expected.
For starters, leaders must give employees opportunities and incentives to
generate and keep generating new ideas, so that people across functions and
roles get better at pushing past the obvious. However, it s also critical to
have the right people vetting those ideas. That part of the process should be
much less democratic and more meritocratic, because some votes are simply more
meaningful than others. And finally, to continue generating and selecting smart
ideas over time, organizations need to strike a balance between cultural
cohesion and creative dissent.
Letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom
People often believe that to do better work, they should do fewer things. Yet
the evidence flies in the face of that assumption: Being prolific actually
increases originality, because sheer volume improves your chances of finding
novel solutions. In recent experiments by Northwestern University psychologists
Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren, the initial ideas people generated were the
most conventional. Once they had thought of those, they were free to start
dreaming up more-unusual possibilities. Their first 20 ideas were significantly
less original than their next 15.
R1603H_VEDROS_A.jpg Matt Carr/Getty Images; Photo illustration: Stephen Webster
Across fields, volume begets quality. This is true for all kinds of creators
and thinkers from composers and painters to scientists and inventors. Even the
most eminent innovators do their most original work when they re also cranking
out scores of less brilliant ideas. Consider Thomas Edison. In a five-year
period, he came up with the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon
transmitter used in telephones while also filing more than 100 patents for
inventions that didn t catch the world on fire, including a talking doll that
ended up scaring children (and adults).
Of course, in organizations, the challenge lies in knowing when you ve drummed
up enough possibilities. How many ideas should you generate before deciding
which ones to pursue? When I pose this question to executives, most say you re
really humming with around 20 ideas. But that answer is off the mark by an
order of magnitude. There s evidence that quality often doesn t max out until
more than 200 ideas are on the table.
Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes that the Pixar movie Cars was chosen
from about 500 pitches, and at Skyline, the toy design studio that generates
ideas for Fisher-Price and Mattel, employees submitted 4,000 new toy concepts
in one year. That set was winnowed down to 230 to be drawn or prototyped, and
just 12 were finally developed. The more darts you throw, the better your odds
of hitting a bull s-eye.
Though it makes perfect sense, many managers fail to embrace this principle,
fearing that time spent conjuring lots of ideas will prevent employees from
being focused and efficient. The good news is that there are ways to help
employees generate quantity and variety without sacrificing day-to-day
productivity or causing burnout.
Think like the enemy.
Research suggests that organizations often get stuck in a rut because they re
playing defense, trying to stave off the competition. To encourage people to
think differently and generate more ideas, put them on offense.
That s what Lisa Bodell of futurethink did when Merck CEO Ken Frazier hired her
to help shake up the status quo. Bodell divided Merck s executives into groups
and asked them to come up with ways to put the company out of business. Instead
of being cautious and sticking close to established competencies, the
executives started considering bold new directions in strategy and product
development that competitors could conceivably take. Energy in the room soared
as they explored the possibilities. The offensive mindset, Carnegie Mellon
professor Anita Woolley observes, focuses attention on pursuing opportunities
whereas defenders are more focused on maintaining their market share. That
mental shift allowed the Merck executives to imagine competitive threats that
didn t yet exist. The result was a fresh set of opportunities for innovation.
Solicit ideas from individuals, not groups.
According to decades of research, you get more and better ideas if people are
working alone in separate rooms than if they re brainstorming in a group. When
people generate ideas together, many of the best ones never get shared. Some
members dominate the conversation, others hold back to avoid looking foolish,
and the whole group tends to conform to the majority s taste.
Evidence shows that these problems can be managed through brainwriting. All
that s required is asking individuals to think up ideas on their own before the
group evaluates them, to get all the possibilities on the table. For instance,
at the eyewear retailer Warby Parker, named the world s most innovative company
by Fast Company in 2015, employees spend a few minutes a week writing down
innovation ideas for colleagues to read and comment on. The company also
maintains a Google doc where employees can submit requests for new technology
to be built, which yields about 400 new ideas in a typical quarter. One major
innovation was a revamped retail point of sale, which grew out of an app that
allowed customers to bookmark their favorite frames in the store and receive an
e-mail about them later.
Since employees often withhold their most unusual suggestions in group
settings, another strategy for seeking ideas is to schedule rapid one-on-one
idea meetings. When Anita Krohn Traaseth became managing director of
Hewlett-Packard Norway, she launched a speed-date the boss initiative. She
invited every employee to meet with her for five minutes and answer these
questions: Who are you and what do you do at HP? Where do you think we should
change, and what should we keep focusing on? And what do you want to contribute
beyond fulfilling your job responsibilities? She made it clear that she
expected people to bring big ideas, and they didn t want to waste their five
minutes with a senior leader it was their chance to show that they could
innovate. More than 170 speed dates later, so many good ideas had been
generated that other HP leaders implemented the process in Austria and
Switzerland.
Bring back the suggestion box.
It s a practice that dates back to the early 1700s, when a Japanese shogun put
a box at the entrance to his castle. He rewarded good ideas but punished
criticisms with decapitation. Today suggestion boxes are often ridiculed. I
smell a creative idea being formed somewhere in the building, the boss thinks
in one Dilbert cartoon. I must find it and crush it. He sets up a suggestion
box, and Dilbert is intrigued until a colleague warns him: It s a trap!!
But the evidence points to a different conclusion: Suggestion boxes can be
quite useful, precisely because they provide a large number of ideas. In one
study, psychologist Michael Frese and his colleagues visited a Dutch steel
company (now part of Tata Steel) that had been using a suggestion program for
70 years. The company had 11,000 employees and collected between 7,000 and
12,000 suggestions a year. A typical employee would make six or seven
suggestions annually and see three or four adopted. One prolific innovator
submitted 75 ideas and had 30 adopted. In many companies, those ideas would
have been missed altogether. For the Dutch steelmaker, however, the suggestion
box regularly led to improvements saving more than $750,000 in one year alone.
The major benefit of suggestion boxes is that they multiply and diversify the
ideas on the horizon, opening up new avenues for innovation. The biggest hurdle
is that they create a larger haystack of ideas, making it more difficult to
find the needle. You need a system for culling contributions and rewarding and
pursuing the best ones so that people don t feel their suggestions are falling
on deaf ears.
Developing a Nose for Good Ideas
Generating lots of alternatives is important, but so is listening to the right
opinions and solutions. How can leaders avoid pursuing bad ideas and rejecting
good ones?
Lean on proven evaluators.
Although many leaders use a democratic process to select ideas, not every vote
is equally valuable. Bowing to the majority s will is not the best policy; a
select minority might have a better sense of which ideas have the greatest
potential. To figure out whose votes should be amplified, pay attention to
employees track records in evaluation.
At the hedge fund Bridgewater, employees opinions are weighted by a
believability score, which reflects the quality of their past decisions in that
domain. In the U.S. intelligence community, analysts demonstrate their
credibility by forecasting major political and economic events. In studies by
psychologist Philip Tetlock, forecasters are rated on accuracy (did they make
the right bets?) and calibration (did they get the probabilities right?). Once
the best of these prognosticators are identified, their judgments can be given
greater influence than those of their peers.
So, in a company, who s likely to have the strongest track record? Not managers
it s too easy for them to stick to existing prototypes. And not the innovators
themselves. Intoxicated by their own eureka moments, they tend to be
overconfident about their odds of success. They may try to compensate for that
by researching customer preferences, but they ll still be susceptible to
confirmation bias (looking for information that supports their view and
rejecting the rest). Even creative geniuses have trouble predicting with any
accuracy when they ve come up with a winner.
A Syllabus for Innovators
When aviator Ben Kohlmann set out to build a culture of nonconformity in the
U.S. Navy, he found inspiration in many sources. Here s a sampling of the items
he recommends to people who want to think more creatively, along with his
comments on how they ve influenced his own development.
R1603H_SYLLABUSFORINNOVATORS_A
Speeches
Lead Like the Great Conductors
TED talk by Itay Talgam
Much can be learned from professions we have no understanding of. People are
people and recognizing the commonalities is useful.
How Great Leaders Inspire Action
TED talk by Simon Sinek
Sinek cracks the code of influence: Deep-seated desire is what inspires
followers and builds movements.
R1603H_SYLLABUSFORINNOVATORS_B
Fiction
Ender s Game
by Orson Scott Card
This novel illustrates how tactical and strategic teams can be adaptable and
how genius can emerge at a young age. It s especially apropos reading in the
military, where we promote on seniority and not merit.
Dune
by Frank Herbert
A compelling story about insurgency and taking on established powers, Dune
explores the ambiguous nature of messianic saviors.
R1603H_SYLLABUSFORINNOVATORS_C
Nonfiction
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
by Kathryn Schulz
We re wrong a lot, and yet we almost never admit it. Schulz helped me
critically evaluate my own biases and better understand how people view and
portray themselves.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
by Ben Horowitz
Horowitz doesn t merely talk about how to lead; he s actually lived it. And who
doesn t love a guy who starts his chapters with rap lyrics?
The (Mis)behavior of Markets
by Benoit Mandelbrot
Mandelbrot is the father of fractal theory, and his insight into how that plays
into the stock market transformed my understanding of luck s role in managerial
successes and failures.
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
by Robert Coram
When I read this in college, I realized that those who don t toe the party line
often have the most impact.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
by Carol Dweck
Dweck argues that intelligence is not fixed. My world opened up once I
discovered that we can grow into what we want to be.
Letters to a Young Contrarian
by Christopher Hitchens
I m a person of faith, but I appreciate the way Hitchens incisively questions
everything, even faith. I ve used his methods many a time to develop contrarian
positions and win debates.
R1603H_SYLLABUSFORINNOVATORS_D
TV Shows
Sherlock (BBC series)
Each episode is pure fun but yields lots of learning at the same time.
Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images; Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images
Research suggests that fellow innovators are the best evaluators of original
ideas. They re impartial, because they re not judging their own ideas, and they
re more willing than managers to give radical possibilities a chance. For
example, Stanford professor Justin Berg found that circus performers who
evaluated videos of their peers new acts were about twice as accurate as
managers in predicting popularity with audiences.
Make it a contest.
Idea competitions can help leaders separate the wheat from the chaff, whether
they re sifting through suggestion-box entries or hosting a live innovation
event. At Dow Chemical, for example, employees participate in an annual
innovation tournament focused on reducing waste and saving energy. The
tournament calls for ideas that require an initial investment of no more than
$200,000, and those costs must be recoverable within a year. Peers review the
submissions, with monetary rewards going to the winners. Innovation researchers
Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich report that over more than a decade, the
resulting 575 projects have produced an average return of 204% and saved the
company $110 million a year.
When an innovation tournament is well designed, you get a large pool of initial
ideas, but they re clustered around key themes instead of spanning a range of
topics. People spend a lot of time preparing their entries, which can boost
quality, but the work happens in a discrete window of time, so the contest is
not a recurring distraction.
Thorough evaluation helps to filter out the bad ideas. The feedback process
typically involves having a group of subject matter experts and fellow
innovators review the submissions, rate their novelty and usefulness, and
provide suggestions for improvement.
With the right judges in place, an innovation contest not only leverages the
wisdom of the crowd but also makes the crowd wiser. Contributors and evaluators
get to learn from other people s successes and failures. Over time, the culture
can evolve into one where employees feel confident in their ability to
contribute ideas and develop better taste about what constitutes quality.
Because successful innovators earn recognition and rewards, everyone has an
incentive to participate.
So start by calling for ideas to solve a problem or seize an opportunity, and
then introduce a rigorous process for assessment and feedback. The most
promising submissions will make it to the next round, and the eventual winners
should get the staff and resources necessary to implement their ideas.
Cultivating Both Cohesion and Dissent
Building a culture of nonconformity begins with learning how to generate and
vet ideas, but it doesn t end there. To maintain originality over time, leaders
need to keep fighting the pressures against it.
We used to blame conformity on strong cultures, believing they were so cultish
and chummy that members couldn t consider diverse views and make wise
decisions. But that s not true. Studies of decision making in top management
teams show that cohesive groups aren t more likely than others to seek
consensus, dismiss divergent opinions, and fall victim to groupthink. In fact,
members of strong cultures often make better decisions, because they
communicate well with one another and are secure enough in their roles to feel
comfortable challenging one another.
Here s the evidence on how successful high-tech founders in Silicon Valley
built their start-ups: They hired primarily for commitment to the mission,
looking for people who would help carry out their vision and live by their
values. Founders who looked mainly for technical skill or star potential didn t
fare nearly as well. In mature industries, too, research shows that when
companies place a strong emphasis on culture, their performance remains more
stable.
Yet there s a dark side to strong, cohesive cultures: They can become
homogeneous if left unchecked. As leaders continue to attract, select, and
retain similar people, they sacrifice diversity in thoughts and values.
Employees face intense pressure to fit in or get out. This sameness can be
advantageous in predictable environments, but it s a problem in volatile
industries and dynamic markets. In those settings, strong cultures can be too
insular to respond appropriately to shifting conditions. Leaders have a hard
time recognizing the need for change, considering different views, and learning
and adapting.
Consider BlackBerry: After disrupting the smartphone market, senior leaders
clung to the belief that users were primarily interested in efficient, secure
e-mail. They dismissed the iPhone as a music player and a consumer toy, hired
like-minded insiders who had engineering backgrounds but lacked marketing
expertise, and ultimately failed to create a high-quality web browser and an
app-friendly operating system. The result? A major downsizing, a billion-dollar
write-off, and a colossal collapse of market share.
So to balance out a strong culture, you also need a steady supply of critical
opinions. Even when they re wrong, they re useful they disrupt knee-jerk
consensus, stimulate original thought, and help organizations find novel
solutions to problems. In the navy s rapid-innovation cell, the norm is loyal
opposition, says Joshua Marcuse, one of Ben Kohlmann s collaborators in the
Pentagon. Agitating against the status quo is how we contribute to the
mission.
In short, make dissent one of your organization s core values. Create an
environment where people can openly share critical opinions and are respected
for doing so. In the early days of Apple, employees were passionately committed
to making the Mac a user-friendly household product. But each year, the Mac
team also gave an award to somebody who had challenged Steve Jobs. Every one of
those award winners was promoted.
Cohesion and dissent sound contradictory, but a combination of the two is what
brings novel ideas to the table and keeps a strong culture from becoming a
cult. Here are some ways to hold these principles in productive tension:
Prioritize organizational values.
Give people a framework for choosing between conflicting opinions and allowing
the best ideas to win out. When companies fail to prioritize values,
performance suffers. My colleague Andrew Carton led a study showing that across
hospitals, heart attack readmission rates were lower and returns on assets were
higher when leaders articulated a compelling vision but only if they spelled
out no more than four organizational values. The more values they emphasized
beyond that, the greater the odds that people interpreted them differently or
didn t focus on the same ones.
R1603H_VEDROS_B.jpg istockphoto; Photo illustration: Stephen Webster
Values need to be rank-ordered so that when employees face choices between
competing courses of action, they know what comes first. At the software
company Salesforce.com, trust is explicitly defined as the number one value,
above growth and innovation. That communicates a clear message to employees:
When working on new software, never compromise data privacy. At the online shoe
and clothing retailer Zappos.com, CEO Tony Hsieh prioritizes employee happiness
over customer happiness. The airline WestJet identifies safety as its most
important value. And at GiveForward, a company that helps people raise money
for causes, compassion tops the list. Although media coverage is critical to
the company s success, cofounder Ethan Austin notes, We will not push a story
in the media unless we are certain that the customer whose story we are sharing
will benefit more than we do.
Once you ve prioritized the values, keep scrutinizing them. Encourage new hires
to challenge the company way when they disagree with it. They re the ones
with the freshest perspective; they haven t yet gone native. If they
familiarize themselves with the culture before speaking up, they ll have
already started marching to the same drummer. At Bridgewater, when new
employees are trained, they re asked about the company s principles: Do you
disagree?
Solicit problems, not just solutions.
When working with executives, organizational psychologist David Hofmann likes
to ask them to fill in the blanks in this sentence: Don t bring me ____; bring
me ____. Without fail, they shout out, Don t bring me problems; bring me
solutions!
Although leaders love it when employees come up with solutions, there s an
unintended consequence: Inquiry gets dampened. If you re always expected to
have an answer ready, you ll arrive at meetings with your diagnosis complete,
missing out on the chance to learn from a range of perspectives. This may be
especially common in the United States: In a recent study comparing American
and German decision groups, the Germans made twice as many statements about
problems and 30% fewer statements about solutions. Americans are driven to
find solutions quickly, the researchers observe, often without a complete and
thorough analysis of the problem.
When individual members of a group have different information, as is usually
the case in organizations, it s smarter to get all the problems out there
before pursuing solutions. At the digital music company Spotify, instead of
working on projects, people organize around long-term business problems. If
they were easy to solve, chief technology officer Oskar St l notes, we would
have solved them already. When we create a new team, people typically stay
together on a business problem for at least a year. If it becomes successful,
the team and mission will exist for a long time. Angie s List cofounder Angie
Hicks holds weekly office hours to hear concerns from employees. And when Anita
Krohn Traaseth became the CEO of the Norwegian government s innovation efforts,
she again used speed dates to give employees a voice. To make sure she had
full visibility into problems, she asked people to name their three biggest
bottlenecks and what they would like to safeguard or change. Only after
gathering problems across a tour of 14 offices did she begin implementing
solutions.
Don t appoint devil s advocates go find them.
Research by UC Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth shows that assigning
someone to play devil s advocate doesn t overcome confirmation bias. Though
people may pay lip service to considering the counterargument, they ll stick to
their own views in the end.
To make a difference, the devil s advocate has to actually hold a dissenting
view, not just voice it for argument s sake, and the group has to believe that
the dissent is authentic. Under those circumstances, groups look at more
information against the majority view than for it, and they re less confident
in their original preferences. It s rare that role-played disagreement is
forcefully argued or taken seriously; actual disagreement is what stimulates
thought.
R1603H_VEDROS_C.jpg Inti St. Clair/Getty Images; Photo illustration: Stephen
Webster
Groups with authentic dissenters generate more and better solutions to
problems. Abraham Lincoln famously asked his political rivals to join his
cabinet, knowing they would genuinely hold contrarian views. At a recent
Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett invited a trader who was
shorting the stock to share his criticisms. Of course, this strategy works only
if the dissenter s input is clearly valued and respected.
Model receptivity to critical feedback.
Many managers end up promoting conformity because their egos are fragile.
Research reveals that insecurity prevents managers from seeking ideas and leads
them to respond defensively to suggestions. Employees quickly pick up on this
and withhold ideas to avoid trouble. One way to overcome this barrier is to
encourage people to challenge you out in the open.
Years ago at the software company Index Group, CEO Tom Gerrity gathered his
full staff of about 100 people and had a consultant give him negative feedback
in front of everyone. When employees saw their CEO listen to critical opinions,
they were less worried about speaking up. And managers became more receptive to
tough comments themselves.
You can also get people to challenge you by broadcasting your weaknesses. When
you re the leader, it is really hard to get good and honest feedback, no matter
how many times you ask for it, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says. One trick I
ve discovered is that I try to speak really openly about the things I m bad
at, because that gives people permission to agree with me, which is a lot
easier than pointing it out in the first place. For example, Sandberg tells
her colleagues that she has a habit of talking too much in meetings. If I
never mentioned it, would anyone walk up to me and say, Hey, Sheryl, I think
you talked too much today ? I doubt it.
For a culture of originality to flourish, employees must feel free to
contribute their wildest ideas. But they are often afraid to speak up, even if
they ve never seen anything bad happen to those who do.
To fight that fear in the navy, Ben Kohlmann rejected the military s
traditional emphasis on hierarchy. Everyone communicated on a first-name basis,
ignoring rank. If you have an idea, pitch it to the crowd and run with it, he
told members of his rapid-innovation cell. And he introduced them to people who
had successfully championed creativity and change in the navy, to show them it
was possible.
Other ways to nip fear in the bud include applauding employees for speaking up,
even when their suggestions don t get adopted, and sharing your own harebrained
ideas. Without some degree of tolerance in the organization for bad ideas,
conformity will begin to rear its ugly head. Ultimately, listening to a wider
range of insights than you normally hear is the key to promoting great original
thinking.
If at first you don t succeed, you ll know you re aiming high enough.
A version of this article appeared in the March 2016 issue (pp.86 94) of
Harvard Business Review.
Adam Grant is a professor of management and psychology at the University of
Pennsylvania s Wharton School and the author of Originals: How Non-Conformists
Move the World (Viking, 2016).