The talk was well-received, with a lively discussion about the What, Why and especially the How of making change happen in organizations. I was particularly impressed by the willingness of the people in the room to share their stories, experiences and insights with each other. Many of the attendees took away practical actions and next steps from the conversation to try out in the coming days, which is always a gratifying outcome.
Equally gratifying was the chance to enjoy a fabulous tapas dinner with Alvin, Simon and Andrew Work, Executive Director of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong - which I learned is the largest Canadian business association outside Canada. I'm already looking forward to my next visit!
I've spent the latter half of last week in Hong Kong learning more about the nine personality styles, which I've previously referred to within the NeuroPower framework (as developed by author and strategist Peter Burow) as Core Belief Types or NeuroLimbic Types; "core belief" because these styles act as the filter through which each individual views the world and him- or herself, and "neurolimbic" because these reactions tend to be immediate, knee-jerk, and located in the limbic or emotionally reactive centres of the brain (which you'll recognize as the place where our fight-flight-freeze response originates, which I've also referred to as the "mental gearbox" of forward-reverse-neutral).
When you speak to people in the language they understand, you get results
I'm always impressed when I can go out and immediately make practical application of new learning, and that was what I was able to do this week with what I learned in the workshop.
The situation: I'd been trying to have a successful conversation with a friend for some weeks now and she had proven unresponsive to my overtures.
Applying this knowledge, I noticed that I was speaking to her from MY perspective rather than hers - so in a sense I was speaking my language rather than speaking in her language. Once I was able to write something that made sense to her in her own terms I received an immediate reply and satisfactory resolution of an ongoing concern of mine.
This seems quite a commonsense thing - if you try speaking Hindi to a bunch of Germans, chances are we won't get very far. Sometimes our solution, like that of some monolingual tourists travelling abroad, is to SPEAK EVEN MORE LOUDLY AND SLOWLY in the hopes that these "foreigners" will understand.
Well just as no one is a foreigner in their own country, likewise each person's personality style makes perfect sense from their point of view. So I suppose I've learned a little more about the nine languages that people use to make sense of themselves and the world around them, as well as a bit of proficiency speaking the other eight that aren't my "first language".
What was particularly impressive to me is that around 75% of the participants in the workshop were from Hong Kong and another 15% or so were from countries across southeast Asia, yet the core belief types held true across all cultures. Since these types stem from the limbic brain centre of all humans, this makes sense at a scientific level, but my sceptical side was gratified to see that this is a system with such broad-based applicability - not just among the millions living in Hong Kong and the billion-plus in China, but all over the world...
4) Being in control – having a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness
5) Blending egos – working collaboratively not competitively
6) Equal participation, informed by comparable skill levels
7) Familiarity with performance styles of other group members
8) Communication that’s spontaneous and ongoing (i.e. café/lunchroom talks)
9) Use “Yes, and…” thinking to accept offers and extend and build on them
10) The potential for failure and the value of rehearsals
And in answer to the question, “what is the best balance of planning and improvisation?” Sawyer devotes a chapter to “Organizing for Improvisation,” where he offers another top-ten list of the secrets of collaborative organizations:
1) Keep many irons in the fire – innovative companies experiment with lots of low-cost projects on the go, responding to what emerges
2) Create a Department of Surprise – look for ways to repurpose apparently failed experiments by finding them a home elsewhere in the organization
3) Build space for creative conversation – more on this below
4) Allow time for ideas to emerge – deadlines amp up stress and kill creativity; you can’t rush creativity because it needs incubation time
5) Manage the risks of improvisation – define the right amount of time taken away from other projects, the sheer number of ideas generated and balance with the need for structure and planning
6) Improvise at the edge of chaos – not too rigid to prevent creative emergence, not too loose as to results in complete chaos
7) Manage knowledge for innovation – capture the innovations that emerge improvisationally and make sure other parts of the organization can benefit from the creative sparks
8) Build dense networks – keep groups small enough to effectively interact, ca. 150-200 people (the size of the earliest human societies, and still the ideal size of group to effectively manage changes, including those required in creative processes)
9) Ditch the org chart – break down the silos and get people working across business units to cross-pollinate ideas and discover latent creative forces
10) Measure the right things – instead of spend on R&D or number of patents registered, measure the health of your social networks in the organization to find out just how well people are interacting and how well information is diffused.
I would flesh out a couple of these points in particular as follows. On point #3 (building space for creative conversation), it’s absolutely crucial if you expect people to be creative that you give them an environment that says to the brain: “it’s OK to be creative here”. As an example, Google got this right in their Zurich office design. As the waggish final slide suggests, creativity rarely emerges from cubicle farms.
One other idea that I think is worth highlighting from the list is a combination of points 2, 7, 8, 9 and 10 – the concept that innovative solutions created in one part of an organization can have unexpected and novel applications in other areas to solve problems that would otherwise go unsolved. To put it in a wider context: When I interviewed the Dutch cross-cultural business thinker Fons Trompenaars he pointed out that a surprisingly large number of innovations come from other countries and only appear new because no one ever thought to view things quite that way before. One of the best examples I've seen lately of this kind of innovation came from author Dan Pink, who's understood the lesson well with his latest book, Johnny Bunko published in the manga format popularized in Japan, a first in the English-speaking world and a product perfectly pitched for a the meaning-hungry Gen-Y market:
The talk was well-received, with a lively discussion about the What, Why and especially the How of making change happen in organizations. I was particularly impressed by the willingness of the people in the room to share their stories, experiences and insights with each other. Many of the attendees took away practical actions and next steps from the conversation to try out in the coming days, which is always a gratifying outcome.
, here are the 10 factors that Sawyer suggests enable 