ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING AND CREATIVITY & INNOVATION
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Synergies Between Organizational Learning and Creativity & Innov...
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ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING AND CREATIVITY & INNOVATION
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Synergies Between Organizational Learning and Creativity & Innovation George P. Huber In today's fast changing business environment, where knowing more and knowing it faster than the competition is often the difference between surviving and not surviving, organizational learning is more and more being recognized as a crucial organizational function. Never mind that the term is over-used, over-hyped and made to mean whatever the writer really wants to talk about. See through the snow and recognize that organizational learning is an organizational function that is here to stay and that will grow in importance. Unending changes in technology and in markets and the removal of logistical and regulatory buffers from competition will make it so. As a consequence of these facts, organizational learning has become a subject of study by management researchers and a subject of considerable interest to corporate leaders ± so much so that many large US business organizations are creating positions with the titles like Chief Learning Officer and Chief Knowledge Officer. Certainly organizational learning is a phrase in high fashion. But in what specific ways, if any, does it lead to creativity and innovation? Or, consider the reverse directionality ± in what ways do creativity and innovation lead to organizational learning? In this article, I offer some partial answers to these questions, with the intention of giving readers an additional way to frame the processes of creativity and innovation in their organizations.
Organizational learning: what does it mean?
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sychologists studying animal learning, cultural anthropologists and political scientists studying higher-level living systems, and computer scientists studying neural networks or self-learning systems would accept the following:1 An entity learns if, through its processing of information, the range or likelihood of its potential actions is changed.
After substituting the more relevant ``organizations'' for the more general ``entities,'' managers would more likely endorse this assertion: An organisation learns when, through its processing of information, it increases the probability that its future actions will lead to its improved performance. The definitions implied in these statements apply to many entities, from computercontrolled chemical factories to nations (both France and the U.S. ``learned'' that they didn't want to fight a war in Indo-China). By # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Organizational learning here to stay
substituting ``organizations'' for ``entities,'' we have in these two statements two different meanings for organizational learning. Although the implied definitions are not the same, the issue is not one of correctness but rather one of usefulness for a particular purpose. The first definition tends to be more useful for understanding learning. The second tends to be more useful when attempting to improve performance. Here, given the roles and responsibilities of most readers, we will use the second definition. Some people argue that organizations do not learn ± that only the people in organizations learn. Essays could be written on either side of this argument. Whether organizations learn, or whether the learning-related processes that occur within organizations are merely metaphors for the learning and learning-related actions of their members, is a question whose importance is much more imaginable than it is frequent ± seldom does the position taken seem to have practical impact on either the discussion or the improvement of organizational learning. For ease of discourse, here I take the position that organizations do learn, as do other living
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systems, such as nations, work teams, and people. As a short transition to the next section, dealing with creativity and innovation, let us agree to use these words broadly. Let us include as contexts for creativity and innovation not only R&D and manufacturing but also marketing, human resources, management practices, and other organizational processes and functions. Creativity and innovation are needed everywhere.
Effect of organizational learning on creativity and innovation
Importance of information-rich environments
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Research shows that the amount and variety of information to which an individual is exposed is an important determinant of the individual's creativity.2 Similarly, other studies demonstrate that one of the major factors influencing the level of innovation in organizations is the amount of information to which the organization exposes itself and its members.3 There is no doubt that informationrich environments contribute to creativity and innovation. This fact is of tremendous importance to anyone who seeks to increase creativity and innovation in an organization. Given that information-rich environments contribute to creativity and innovation, we can conclude that organizations particularly characterized by creativity and innovation are generally those especially adept at maintaining internal environments where information acquisition, distribution, and collective interpretation are commonly occurring processes. Our earlier definition of organizational learning tells us that organizations where these processes are commonplace and effective are good candidates for the title of ``learning organizations,'' organizations where learning is actively managed for the purpose of improving organizational performance.4 Let us turn for the moment to the matter of how organizational learning can be actively managed. For some purposes it is useful to think of organizational learning as occurring in different modes. The management literature calls attention to three. Organizations learn through sensing as when they observe relevant events (e.g., changes in technology, morale, or competitor actions) in their external or internal environments. They also learn experientially, as when through their ongoing experiences they find ways to manufacture products more rapidly and at lower cost. Finally, organizations learn vicariously from those who already know, as when they rent or hire outside experts with specialized knowledge.
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Now we turn to examining these modes in more depth. In particular, we wish to highlight a few ideas about how each can be made more effective and how each can lead to creativity and innovation.
Sensing Sensing includes both passive and active scanning. What is sensed, or noticed, generally gets categorized ± perhaps after further investigation and discussion ± as either a threat or an opportunity. Sensing occurs in regard to both the external and internal environments. Our focus here will be the organization's external environment, as events there are more diverse and less familiar, and consequently more likely to lead to creativity and especially innovation. Sometimes the initial ``signal'' from the environment, e.g., a report of the discovery of a new method for doing something related to a firm's business, does not allow the event to be immediately classified as a threat or opportunity. For this reason, or because more must be learned about the magnitude and nature of many threats and opportunities, organizations often send out ``probes'' to investigate further. Probes can range from middle managers inviting themselves to observe ``best practices'' in another industry to the reverse engineering of competitors' products. As with all important functions, the question of how sensing can be made more effective arises. We must include in our answer the context of sensing in today's world. Advances in scientific knowledge and improvements in technologies are creating organizational environments characterized by more (and more varied) competitors, customers, constituencies, and entities of all sorts. Due to these scientific and technological advances, more entities in the environment are generating threats and opportunities at an increasing rate, so that the overall consequence ± more entities multiplied by more events generated per entity ± is one of organizational environments filled much more densely with attention-demanding changes. To cope with this torrent, to sense environmental changes swiftly, accurately, and efficiently, management must increasingly consciously design and actively manage environmental sensing systems. Because increases in scientific and technical knowledge result in greater specialization of competitors, technologies, and other environmental sectors, and thus a greater variety of potentially dangerous environmental components and events, more so than ever before management must make sensing the formal
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responsibility of specialized personnel. Because delayed or incomplete information acquisition or inaccurate interpretation of information about environmental changes is more damaging in the future than in yesterday's slower and less complex environments, sensing structures that ensure specialization and accountability are needed. Even though this organizational design feature of specialized accountability is necessary, it is not sufficient to ensure adequate coverage. Not only are individual threats and opportunities in today's fast-changing and erratic environments often unpredictable, the sources themselves of such events are also unpredictable. Reliance solely on preassigned scanning responsibilities would result in many events going unnoticed (until it was too late) because no one had been assigned to monitor the ``new'' event-generating source. One way that management can reduce such adverse occurrences is to create ``eclectic accountability,'' i.e., ensure that all organizational members who serve in boundaryspanning roles ± even inauspiciously as when engineers read technical journals ± view themselves as potential environmental sensors for the organization and see themselves as responsible for fulfilling this role. An example of what middle and upperlevel managers might do would be to develop what might be called an ``Everyone a Sensor'' culture.5 An engineer who at a trade show learns something useful to a project team other than her own, and who communicates that something to that team because ``it's the way we do things here,'' would be reflecting an Everyone a Sensor culture. Such cultures can be created and maintained through actions and credible pronouncements by top managers and other influential organizational members. For example, immediately upon returning from a long business trip, do upper level managers invariably and promptly give briefings to those who report to them? Do managers frequently ask their technical subordinates about new technical developments that are surfacing in the technical literature? Such symbolic acts set examples and send messages about what is important. Once in place, organizational cultures can be reinforced by recognitions and awards for exemplary actions congruent with the Everyone a Sensor culture. A second example of what managers can use to encourage their members to be alert for information unrelated to their job responsibilities, and to communicate it to relevant parties in the organization, is to implement ``Everyone a Sensor'' practices. For example, many firms allow and even encourage their
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members to attend trade shows or meetings of professional societies. The firm's goal is for the employees to learn on behalf of the organization. But how many organizations have as a standard operating practice a requirement that recent travelers report what they have learned to others who could benefit? When post-travel information dissemination occurs on a regular basis, not only does the breadth of organizational learning significantly increase, but the need to report motivates the traveler-sensor to consciously seek useful information to report. Examples of information-sharing forums and media include informal but scheduled meetings, formal presentations (if the event warrants), and person-specific e-mail memos to needto-know recipients. It is important to recognize that these examples and discussions do not imply that this eclectic accountability organizational design feature is limited to the use of travelers as sensors. A culture and set of practices that encourage organizational members to act as sensors can be made to fit a huge variety of personnel, from globe-traveling CEO's to Internet browsers to purchasing agents. Eclectic accountability complements the earlier idea of specialized accountability. Both are mechanisms for motivating people to adopt the sensor role. The success of these motivating mechanisms and the effectiveness of every organization's sensing system will depend management's learning, and acting on, answers to three questions. Do the organization's sensors know what information might be useful? Do they know which organizational members or units need the information? Are there user-friendly devices and facilities for communicating the information? Affirmative answers to these questions require the installation of procedural and physical infrastructure. Effective sensing is critical to the adaptation processes that enable organizations to survive and thrive. The outcome of sensing is often a call for creative ideas about how to respond to the threat or opportunity. How can we possibly adopt ABC Ltd's ``best practice'' in our company, different as our company is from ABC Ltd? How can we possibly adopt this beautiful feature of ACME Ltd's new product without a costly reconfiguration of our product? Sensing very often generates a need for creativity or innovation.
Potential environmental sensors
Experiential learning Organizations learn from their own first-hand experience. They sometimes learn through their experiments ± both designed and
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natural. More commonly, they learn by interpreting unique events that they experience, often inadvertently. In this latter case, especially, organizations can be much more effective learners than are individuals ± if they see to it that the interpretations benefit from the variety of perspectives brought by multiple participants. Because of the expertise brought to bear in research and development and test marketing, designed experiments in these areas are usually fruitful learning experiences for the organization. However, except for these areas and possibly process control, designed experiments are seldom authorized. One reason is because powerful players having personal agendas may be concerned that the research results might not favor their agendas. (I once heard a university president ± one wellschooled in social science research ± say, in his capacity as a president, ``I never authorize a survey unless I know what the results will be.'') Another reason designed experiments are seldom authorized is that the need to project an image of decisiveness (substantiated by research as an admired characteristic in leaders) sometimes causes managers not to admit to the uncertainty that would justify an experiment. Natural experiments are situations in which performance variation exists naturally among a set of entities, e.g., organization subunits, and where it is possible to measure one or more of the possible antecedents or determinants of the performance. An example from my own consulting experience involved the performance variation across some 50 governmental units, all with the same task but having a variety of organizational designs. The question we successfully answered was ``Which features of these alternative organizational designs are associated with (and probably causal to) high performance?'' Managerial resistance to natural experiments is usually less than for designed experiments. A major exception is when a manager suspects that some aspect or feature of the units or other entities, one that he or she is responsible for, may turn out to be a negative influence on performance. Organizational learning from experiments does not generally result in new needs for creativity or innovation because the ``solution'' is usually to adopt whichever of the performance determinants is found to be most efficacious. If advertising program A generates more sales than does advertising program B, adopt A. Learning by interpreting the organization's unique experiences is potentially a richly rewarding approach to organizational learn-
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ing. It can lead not only to identifying useful organizational actions, but also to a more complex, valid, and agreed-upon mental model for those participating in the interpretation task. What can we learn from the Bhopal disaster? Why, exactly did we lose in court? These are the kinds of questions where formal efforts to manage the interpretative process can have major learning benefits. Several sources contain insights and ideas that can be drawn upon in formally managing the interpretation process.6 Space does not permit reviewing the contents of these sources, but two related ideas seem worth noting before proceeding to the subsequent discussion of learning by importing. One of these ideas is that a casual, informal approach to interpreting organizational experiences very often leads, unfortunately, to ``superstitious learning.'' Superstitious learning occurs when correlation is incorrectly interpreted as causation. An example would be when a particular advertising program preceded an increase in sales. The logic of the causality is strong, and generally amplified by the manager who authored or authorized the program, but was it the real cause? Maybe other factors, e.g., the economy, the competition, or a change in consumer tastes were the real causes. Superstitious learning is especially common when there is a positive correlation between a managerial action and a subsequent favorable event. (Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Chief Executive Officers often take credit for favorable events even when alternative explanations abound.) In contrast, when the interpretation task is managed by an objective party and when a varied group of individuals participates, overly simplistic interpretations (such as are many instances of superstitious learning) become the exception rather than the rule. The second idea that needs mentioning concerns the relationship between learning through interpretation on the one hand and creativity and innovation on the other. While it seems likely that people with an analytic predisposition would be especially useful when interpreting ambiguous situations or events, it is also true that people with an inclination to see new relationships among situations and events, or an inclination to draw upon analogies and metaphors, may be equally useful. So, having some especially creative people involved when attempting to learn by interpreting, even when these people are not familiar with the context, seems like a practice worth testing. A second benefit is likely to occur when creative people are involved. Many unique events require solutions to problems or
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opportunities not previously encountered by the organizations. Almost by definition, such situations are prone to require ``creative'' solutions and innovations. In the best of instances, these creative solutions and innovations can later be exploited and leveraged beyond the circumstance that led to their origin.
Vicarious learning It seems always to have been the case, and seems even more so in today's fast-changing world, that organizations cannot produce through their own experience nearly the information and knowledge they need. So they learn from others who already know. One mechanism is by drawing into themselves people who have and will impart the required information. Examples are rented consultants and purchased new-hires having expertise different from current employees. Related mechanisms simply move to the next higher level of analysis. That is, knowledge-needing organizations create knowledge-exchange alliances with other organizations or acquire organizations that already possess the needed knowledge. All four of these informationinjection mechanisms, by providing new information, knowledge, and ± especially ± stimulation to the organization's incumbent members, can cause these incumbents to become more creative and innovative. Whether or not more creativity and innovation are forthcoming, as a result of drawing in knowledge or information from what were outside sources, depends largely on the organization's culture and on how management has framed the importation to the incumbents. If the incumbents have an ``it's no good if it's not invented here'' attitude, or if they see the importation as threatening to their status or employment, they are likely to use their creativity to undermine the imported information, ideas, or personnel. If, on the other hand, the organization's culture is embracing of much that is new and different and if management's words and record indicate that incumbents' status and employment are in no danger, then the importation is likely to lead to more incumbent creativity and innovation. Another way that organizations import information and knowledge occurs when their members engage in anticipatory jobrelated learning. Common examples include reading technical journals, obtaining an MBA or other academic degree while working, and attending employer-produced training programs. Although the fast-changing external environments of organizations are causing all
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learning modes to be engaged in more frequently, perhaps none is more attended to than anticipatory job-related learning. Many incumbents interpret such learning as a means of maintaining employment security, even (or sometimes) job security. Many employers view facilitating learning as a means of maintaining and increasing the organization's intellectual capital and as a means for attracting new employees who demand such learning opportunities. The loss of intellectual capital associated with downsizing or with poor human resource practices is now being recognized as a major management problem. One of the consequences is the increased attention being given to ``organizational memory,'' and especially to broadened interpretations of this outcome of organizational learning.7 Considering again the important idea introduced earlier, that creativity and innovation occur with greater frequency in an information-rich environment, it is easy to see that careful attention to increasing jobrelated learning could be a critical managerial mechanism for enhancing organizational creativity and innovation.
Anticipatory job-related learning
Thoughts on the relationships between creativity and innovation and organizational learning As it is exhibited in individuals, creativity is often achieved from a combination of conscious and subconscious information processing. In groups it is necessarily more a consequence of conscious information processing and sharing. Either way, creativity fits our earlier definitions of learning ± with their emphasis on information processing for generating a wider range of options ± very nicely. Given these widely accepted definitions, it is clear that creating is a form of learning. This is a definitional relationship between creating and learning ± the former is included in the latter. Earlier we discussed a causal relationship ± learning makes available the information and knowledge that facilitates creativity. Creative ideas generated in an organization are often the origin of the organization's innovations. If we define innovations broadly, then imported ideas and processes are also often the sources of innovations. As made clear by the work of Van de Ven and his colleagues,8 whichever of these sources is their origin, innovations are modified and customized by the organization. These alteration processes follow from the organization's experiences as it tries to apply or implement
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the innovation. Thus, innovations frequently lead to organizational learning by experiencing. Further, as is also shown by Van de Ven and his associates, the experience associated with innovating leads not only to learning about the innovation, but also to learning about the organization's capabilities for handling innovation.9 Finally, creativity and innovation often lead to opportunities that the organization cannot exploit without additional knowledge. The requirement or desire for rapid exploitation generally requires that this knowledge be acquired vicariously. So, for both experiential and vicarious learning, the relationships between organizational learning and creativity and innovation are bidirectional and synergistic.
Summary This article called attention to important relationships between organizational learning, on the one hand, and creativity and innovation in organizations on the other. It began with a brief review of what organizational learning is, and then turned to examining three modes of organizational learning ± sensing, experiential learning, and vicarious organizational learning. For each of these three modes, the article reviewed how learning through that mode can prompt or facilitate creativity or innovation. It was noted here that creativity and innovation often make sensing worthwhile. That is, creativity and innovation often enable an organization to capitalize on a sensed opportunity to a greater extent than if more mundane or familiar exploitation approaches were employed. It was further noted that creativity and innovation often lead to unusually productive learning in the cases of experiential and vicarious learning. In the case of these modes, then, through their facilitation of creativity and innovation on the one hand and their heightened usefulness stemming from creativity and innovation on the other, the creativity and innovation processes and the learning processes complement one another, sometimes to a remarkable degree. The potential synergy between the two sets of processes should not be ignored when investments in either are considered. Altogether, the ideas contained in the article create a framing for the creativity and innovation processes that ties these processes more closely to more important organizational processes, i.e., other learning processes. As a result, the ideas enhance our understanding of creativity and innovation and of the range and nature of their roles in organizations.
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Notes 1. I have elsewhere discussed this definitional issue in depth. See Huber, G. P. (1991) Organizational learning: the contributing processes and the literatures. Organization Science, 2 (1), pp. 88±115. 2. A point well documented by Amabile, T. M. (1996) Creativity in Context, Westview, Oxford and by Sternberg, R. J. and Lubart, T. I. (1995) Defying the Crowd, Free, New York. 3. See Amabile (1996) and Sternberg and Lubart (1995). 4. The best known reference on learning organizations is Senge, P. M. (1990) The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday/Currency, New York. An excellent anthology of works by scholars in the field is Cohen, M. D. and Sproull, L. S. (1996) Organizational Learning, Sage, London. A more eclectic and international anthology with pieces written by business people and by scholars focused on business issues is Moingeon, B. and Edmondson, A. (1996) Organizational Learning and Competitive Advantage, Sage, London. 5. An earlier development of this concept is included in Huber, G. P. (1996) ``Organizational Learning: a Guide for Executives in Technology-critical Organizations'', International Journal of Technology Management, vol. 11, no. 7/8, pp. 821±832. 6. Three quite different sources are Janis, I. L. (1989) Crucial Decisions, Free, New York, Weick, K. E. (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations, Sage, London and Wilensky, H. L. (1967) Organizational Intelligence, Basic, London. 7. For perspectives on organizational memory, see Stein, E. W., and Zwass, V. (1995) Actualizing organizational memory with information systems. Information Systems Research, 6 (2), 85±117, and also Huber, G. P., Davenport, T. H., and King, D. R. (1998) Perspectives on organizational memory. In Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual International Conference on Systems Sciences, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA (forthcoming). 8. See Van de Ven, A. H., Angle, H. L., and Poole, M. S. (1989) Research on the Management of Innovation, Harper & Row, London and also Van de Ven, A. H. (1993) Managing the process of organizational innovation. In Huber, G. P. and Glick, W. H. (eds.) Organizational Change and Redesign: Ideas and Insights for Improving Performance. Oxford University Press, New York. pp. 269±294. 9. Cheng, Y., and Van de Ven, A. H. (1996) Learning the innovation journey: order out of chaos, Organization Science, 7, pp. 593±614.
George P. Huber is Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Regents Professor in Business Administration at the Graduate School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA.
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Fortune Favours Only the Prepared Mind: Why Sources of Inspiration are Essential for Continuing Creativity Claudia Eckert and Martin Stacey Intellectual health like physical health depends on a balance between feeding and exercise. But the demands of work often make a healthy balance very hard to maintain. In a detailed study of the knitwear industry and in comparisons with other design fields, we have observed that designers use external sources of ideas for a variety of different purposes throughout the design process. We have also observed that designers' creative potential is often limited by the failure of managers to understand design, and especially their designers' need to search for sources of new ideas. Managing design processes to maximize creative output requires both an understanding of the role of sources of ideas in the creative process, and proactive management to support and encourage the renewal of intellectual resources. In this paper we suggest some practical steps for supporting continuing creativity.
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bservations of a variety of creative activities show that they depend on the recognition of similarities and connections, and involve the modification and combination of existing ideas into novel forms to meet new requirements: designs, musical compositions, scientific hypotheses and theories, solutions to problems. Product designers take shapes and motifs from nature or from other artefacts, for example inventing the jug kettle by adapting the shape of a water jug, or employing the idea of a pistol grip for power drills and cameras (see Roy 1992). Engineers solve problems by recognising analogies and relationships with problems to which they have solutions, and adapting those solutions (see Cross 1989), for instance basing the design of a machine to produce chocolate coated ice-cream on injection moulding in plastics (the Magnum, made by Unilever). Scientists generate hypotheses and experimental designs by recognizing analogies between the structure and behaviour of different systems, as well as by reasoning about how general theories can be applied to specific situations (see Giere 1988, for a cognitive perspective on science); for example, understanding why animals sometimes behave altruistically using the theory of games originally applied to economics (see Maynard Smith 1976, 1978, for an introduction). # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
To generate good ideas of their own, creative thinkers depend on their prior knowledge and their ability to recognize its relevance when they need it, not just on their ability to combine and adapt ideas and distinguish good ideas from bad ones. Hence Pasteur's famous remark that ``in the field of observation, fortune favours only the prepared mind'' (quoted in Valery-Radot 1903). A designer's fortune is the arrival of design briefs and commissions, which usually have to be met quickly with no time for long searches for ideas, and often in competition with others. Sometimes, especially in crafts like furniture design or tattooing (Glinski 1997), designs are evolved in initial conversations with customers. A large part of expertise is recognition of recurring patterns and re-use of solution chunks (see Chi, Glaser & Farr 1988, for studies of expertise in different fields). SchoÈn (1983; SchoÈn & Wiggins 1992) observe that architects perceptually appreciate the characteristics of design elements and combinations; and that a large part of conceptual design in architecture is identifying and constructing appropriate design elements, and exploring combinations. The same is true of knitwear designers (Eckert 1997b). Successful creative thinkers possess wide knowledge ± a large stock of design elements ± as well as a wide
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range of ways to recognize similarities and connections, and ways to combine and adapt ideas. But the more designers use standard methods the more they are locked into them; they need to renew their stock of design elements, renew their awareness of the cultural and technical context, to continue to be creative. The search for new ideas takes different forms in different industries, and is perceived and managed differently; but the need for renewal is the same, so comparisons are instructive. In the clothing industries the use of external sources of ideas is well understood by designers, but nevertheless its importance is grossly underestimated by managers. It is well recognized that scientists and engineers need to work at keeping up with research findings and conceptual innovations in order to produce good ideas of their own. But commercial pressures and corporate culture often dictate that designers (and other professional thinkers including scientists) always devote their entire energy to current projects ± the output side of the equation. Although some organisations are aware of the need to provide for the intellectual development of their creative minds, too many treat designers as though they were a disposable short term resource. In the absence of supportive management continuing success depends on a very high degree of self-motivation.
Knitwear: an inspiration-driven industry How do designers use outside sources of inspiration? The MIND Project (Mechanisms of Inspiration in Novel Design) at the Open University is studying the role of external sources of ideas in the design process. We are focusing on knitwear, a large commercially important design-driven industry that has been neglected by academic design studies. Our observations (Eckert 1997b) are based primarily on an ethnographic study of the knitwear design process involving structured interviews of designers and knitting machine technicians in over 25 knitwear companies in Britain and Germany, carried out by the first author, supplemented by interviews with engineers, architects, town planners, product designers and fashion designers. The knitwear companies span the full range from market leaders selling their own brands of expensive clothes to suppliers for cheap high street chains. Knitwear design combines characteristics of fashion design and engineering. It is a
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variety of aesthetic design: sales depend on the appearance of the product. But there is a complex and subtle interaction between the appearance of a garment and the technical properties that determine the feasibility and cost of producing knitted fabric. In consequence the design process involves a problematic interaction between the knitwear designers who do the aesthetic design, and the knitting machine technicians who do a lot of detailed design in the course of programming industrial knitting machines to produce feasible affordable garments. The designers produce large numbers of designs, of which many are technically infeasible, and only a few are selected for further development by technicians. Communication difficulties are aggravated by the pressure on designers and technicians to minimise the time between design research and production. Both have to work under intense time pressure, as the time from getting a brief to a hard delivery deadline is often short and the time required to produce a sample garment can be unpredictable (Eckert 1997b; Eckert & Demaid 1997 discuss how to alleviate the problem by reengineering the design process). Thus knitwear design shares many characteristics of engineering design processes, as well as of other aesthetic design processes. The appearance of a garment needs to fit within the envelope of current fashion, defined by the shared features of contemporary garments as well as by themes and moods. Design research ± studying the shape of this envelope ± is a vital part of every designer's job. So in the fashion industry, even more than in other craft-based aesthetic design domains, the vital importance of sources of inspiration is well recognized by designers themselves. This makes the use of sources of design ideas relatively easy to track, though our comparisons with other creative fields indicate that similar processes of recognition, selection, abstraction and adaptation of relevant ideas are universal.
Sources of inspiration in knitwear design Anything visual can be a source of inspiration for a garment, and knitwear designers combine ideas from different sources as it suits them (see Eckert 1997a for a fuller discussion). They are often concerned with projecting the cultural connotations of their sources, but seldom with fidelity or conceptual consistency. The major types of idea sources are:
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. garments: designers attend catwalk shows
and visit shops to absorb fashion trends, identify the strong features of a new season, and study how the garments of market leaders and competitors are constructed. Some designers, most famously Vivienne Westwood, also draw ideas from historic designs. . photographs of garments: designers study fashion magazines and trend publications to gain an overview of fashion. A photograph does not show technical details, but it communicates the mood of a design and the image of the target wearer. . artefacts and images of artefacts: other textiles, designed objects and fine art are often used as sources of inspiration. Designers make extensive use of books of photographs. . natural objects and phenomena and images of them: designers take motifs, colour combinations and cultural connotations from nature in the same way as from man-made objects. Sources of inspiration are used extensively throughout the knitwear design process. Figure 1 shows the most important external inputs. They are used in two fundamentally different ways at different stages in the development of garments for a season: indirectly to create an understanding of the fashion context and directly as a basis for a particular design. Sources of inspiration are also used for communicating design ideas: As collections are planned and developed, images of objects and natural phenomena are displayed on mood boards to convey colour schemes as well as moods, themes and cultural connotations. When designers talk to each other about new designs they often refer to garments or other sources of inspiration they are all familiar with. Their features serve as a code for communicating the designers' own ideas. The listener redesigns a garment mentally from the speaker's description. Designers need to understand the fashion context: the space of possible garments permitted within the fashion of a season, and the images projected by garments in different regions of that space. High street fashion is created collectively by all the designers across the world studying the same inspiration materials, as well as the trend predictions produced by a small number of fashion forecasting bureaux. All designers study trend prediction material and catwalk clothes, as well as trade press write-ups about them. They look for recurring strong features and colours in different collections. Each
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designer interprets these findings for her 1 own company and target market ± identifying the region of the space of fashionable designs her company should occupy. Thus designers use sources of inspiration to develop their understanding of the design tasks they have to perform. While researching the fashion context designers already think in terms of concrete designs, which they visualize mentally or sketch. Sometimes these early designs are realized as garments, but often they serve as exemplars of classes of possible garments ± mental placeholders for designs that will be created later. This design research process is common to designers throughout the industry; it differs according to the constraints imposed by the design briefs for individual garments. Almost all knitwear designs are based on some source of inspiration. Knitted textures, and shape features such as necklines or pockets, are often lifted directly from other garments. While adapting fashionable features can be sharing the common currency of a season, designers are often required to imitate other garments as closely as copyright law will allow. Motifs are often based on artefacts or natural objects, just as the fish motif is adapted from the picture of a herring in figure 3. Colour schemes are often derived from images of works of fine art or natural phenomena. At the end of the design research process, designers work out a plan for the types of designs that they want to create, either to market as a collection or to present to buyers for retail chains, such as two fair isle sweaters, one sweater with a big intarsia motif, two plain cardigans and so on. For each design they have a rough idea of what they want. For instance, the sweater in figure 2 was based on the idea of an aquatic scene with a variety of different fish. But the objects or images that inspired this design intention may not be available or suitable for direct adaptation into a knitwear design ± they may be memories, or objects conveying a theme or mood rather than a shape or texture. In this case designers search for suitable sources of structural elements or motifs. Once a source is selected it is adapted into a knitting pattern. Figure 3 shows the adaptation of a picture of a herring into a colour pattern motif. The designer evaluates the adapted design. If she does not like it, she might change the adaptation (the grid pattern), or try using another similar source; or possibly give up on the idea for the garment altogether. Once she has settled on a specific design, it needs to be converted into a set of knitting machine instructions and knitted. Our observations
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Figure 1. The uses of sources of inspiration in the knitwear design process.
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Figure 2. Fish sweater.
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have shown that when problems occur at this stage, designers and technicians try everything to make a particular design work, but the original selection of the source is rarely questioned. Figure 4 shows the sequence of operations through which an idea (reliant on a source of inspiration, or several) is developed into a garment, with the backtracking steps that designers take when they meet problems.
The selection of a source of inspiration is driven by the source. Designers comment that they look at an appropriate source and see it instantly as a knitwear design. Sometimes they come across a source of inspiration and an idea for a garment strikes them; at other times they search through books and past designs until they find a suitable source (for instance figure 3). This search is focused by the available mappings from the designers' ideas about what garments they want to the ways they know about to search for material. For example, a designer wanting a sweater in an ``Arabian Nights'' theme might look through a book about Persian carpets. (The fact that Iranians and Afghans aren't Arabs wouldn't worry most knitwear designers.) Very often designers know what emergent aesthetic properties they want to achieve (likely derived from sources of ideas that can't be directly adapted): these may be perceptual; or abstract, moods like ``calm, aquatic'' or cultural associations like ``1920s Jazz Age''. They search for a source of inspiration that has those emergent properties as well as structural properties that permit adaptation into a knitting pattern.
Practical lessons for the knitwear industry Figure 4. Direct use of a source of inspiration. The adaptation of a source into a design element can be: . ``literal'', when the design is kept as close as
possible to the original sources;
. an abstraction, when certain features are
isolated and highlighted. As knitwear has such a low resolution even the closest designs require some degree of abstraction; . an association, when the designer comes up with an idea loosely connected to the source, belonging to the same topic or context as the source. For example a designer looking at fish might draw a seahorse from memory. The adaptation process translates the structural characteristics of the source ± size, shape, colour, resolution, texture ± modifying them to fit the demands of the medium (in knitwear, a grid of discrete stitches). It usually attempts to preserve emergent aesthetic properties of the source such as colour balance, elegance/cuteness, cultural connotations and so on.
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Although knitwear designers recognize the critical importance of design research in the design process, it is often not understood by their managers. Understanding the state of current fashion, and searching for ideas and sources of inspiration involves looking at nice objects and art books, going on trips to places like Paris and New York, visiting museums and going on country walks. This is often seen as artistic selfindulgence and as a waste of working time. In fact it is when designers are most creative: they generate most of the ideas they use at work when directly exposed to the sources of those ideas. Designers often make major design decisions, determining the direction their companies take for a season, on trips or at home when no one thinks they are designing. Designers' access to the sources of inspiration they need is often restricted because they have inadequate resources and no opportunities to travel to shows and exhibitions or to fashion centres like New York, London or Paris. As many knitwear companies are located in traditional textile producing areas where labour costs are low, they are often quite distant from the nearest
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good bookshop. In consequence innovation is severely limited, as designs produced under time pressure are based on a narrow pool of readily available sources of inspiration, or are reworked from recent garments. We recommend the following practical steps to enhance the creativity of knitwear designers by supporting their renewal of their intellectual resources (Eckert 1997a). . Designers need immediate access to appro-
. .
. .
.
priate sources of ideas when working under time pressure. Provide a budget for a company library of books on art and design, and other inspiration material, controlled by the designers themselves. Designers re-use elements of old designs to continue a company style. Maintain a company archive of its own garments. Designers and technicians increase their vocabulary of design features by studying other garments. Maintain a company archive of inspirational garments collected on shopping trips. Junior designers do most of the designing. Pay for them rather than managers to go on trips to fashion shows and big city shops. Company productivity is maximized by enabling designers to do design research and to design when and where they are most productive. Support flexible working arrangements. Designers take opportunities to do design research. Reward designers for working in their own time, for instance by paying travel expenses for going to museums and exhibitions.
The importance of these management actions is clearly recognized by working designers, who complain bitterly about not having these resources; those who have this kind of support say that they benefit greatly from it.
Implications for managing continuing creativity One lesson to be drawn from our study is that effective management of knitwear design requires both an understanding of how creativity works in the industry, and an understanding of how the renewal of creative resources works. Management is visibly worse when managers fail to understand. This lesson is relevant to all creative activities. Design-driven industries differ widely in the demands they make on designers' funds of knowledge and experience, but the cyclic relationship between learning and creation is strikingly similar in all of them.
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The degree to which the importance of sources of inspiration is recognized varies; more in fields where designers need to produce large numbers of designs under time pressure ± such as knitwear design ± and so need procedures for generating ideas; and more in fields where the constraints of fashion are relatively tight and designers are required to imitate other designers' work ± such as fashion design. However architects and civil engineers often acknowledge the sources of design objectives and critical ideas, such as the shape of a rhubarb leaf for the structure of a bridge (the Kingsgate footbridge in Durham, England, designed by Ove Arup; see Walker with Cross 1983). Our study of knitwear design has the most direct implications for the management of other types of aesthetic design, such as fashion and textiles design, furniture design, product design and architecture. Designs need to be timely, neither before nor after the time when the culture will accept them. So designing for aesthetic appeal depends on an awareness of the cultural context ± what is fashionable, what are the cultural connotations of shapes and motifs ± though the sharpness of the boundaries of fashion differs between industries, depending on how often manufacturers update their products and how long customers keep using them. (Clothes and buildings are opposite extremes: architects are influenced by fashion ± shared changes in taste ± and the stock of ideas they have to draw on, but buildings are built to outlast fashions though they are often designed to convey cultural messages.) Successful innovation as well as subtle expression of mood and image depends on an awareness of innovations in other types of design and a broad understanding of cultural changes. Technical designers depend on keeping up with developments in their own field, but radical innovation requires breadth of vision: awareness of potential analogies among the products and techniques of other industries. The fortune that favours designers with prepared minds is design projects to be done quickly to deadlines. To have prepared minds, designers need to do continuous research and collect likely sources of inspiration, to absorb the Zeitgeist and keep up with technical development. This requires vigorous proactive management: . Invest resources in a library of sources of
ideas and information;
. Encourage continuous research, by exploit-
ing designers' private enthusiasms, and by
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. . .
. .
setting aside time for research and rewarding designers for doing it; Balance periods of exclusive product focus with periods of professional development; Encourage designers to develop their awareness of technical and cultural developments beyond their own fields; Create working arrangements that enable specialists in different fields to meet and talk quickly and easily, to learn from each other; Create a working culture in which ideas are freely exchanged between designers; Support the development of innovations for future designs, not just current projects.
None of these points should be surprising to engineers or other working designers. But the importance of investing management effort in intellectual renewal is underestimated in all design-driven industries.
Acknowledgements Claudia Eckert's research has been supported by SERC ACME grant GR/J40331 at Loughborough University, and by ESRC grant L12730100173 for the MIND Project (Mechanisms of Inspiration in Novel Design) at the Open University. Part of Martin Stacey's contribution to this work was made when he was in the Computing Department at the Open University, as part of the FACADE Project, which was supported by EPSRC grant GR/J48689. We have benefited from conversations with Helen Sharp, Marian Petre, Nigel Cross, Jeff Johnson, Kenneth Stacey and Monica Jandrisits. Rachel Lander commented helpfully on an earlier draft of this paper. We are grateful to our informants in the knitwear industry and other design fields for the time and effort they have taken to talk to us. The herring comes from The Complete Book of Nature, edited by J. Glassborow and published by Collins under the Dragon imprint, London 1989, and appears courtesy of HarperCollins, London.
Note 1. Knitwear designers are almost all female; male designers are more common in fashion design. For a discussion of sex roles in the knitwear industry see Eckert & Stacey (1994).
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References Chi, M.T.H., Glaser, R. and Farr, M.J. (1988) The Nature of Expertise. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale NJ. Cross, N.G. (1989) Engineering Design Methods. Wiley, Chichester, UK. Eckert, C.M. (1997a) Design inspiration and design performance. In Proceedings of the 78th World Conference of the Textile Institute, Textile Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece. Eckert, C.M. (1997b) Intelligent Support for Knitwear Design. PhD Thesis, Department of Design and Innovation, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. Eckert, C.M. and Demaid, A. (1997) Concurrent design. In Proceedings of the 78th World Conference of the Textile Institute, Textile Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece. Eckert, C.M. and Stacey, M.K. (1994) CAD systems and the division of labour in knitwear design. In Adams, A., Emms, J., Green, E. and Owen, J. (eds), Women, Work and Computerization: Breaking Old Boundaries ± Building New Forms, NorthHolland, Amsterdam, Netherlands, pp. 409±422. Giere, R.N. (1988) Explaining Science. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Glinski, G. von (1997) Tattoo Kunst. Die Zeit Magazin, No. 16, pp. 16±27. Maynard Smith, J. ( 1976) Evolution and the theory of games. American Scientist, 64, 41±45. Maynard Smith, J. (1978) The evolution of behavior. Scientific American, 239, 176±191. Roy, R. (1992) Creativity and Conceptual Design (Open University Course T264 Design: Principles and Practice, Unit Block 3). The Open University Press, Milton Keynes, UK. SchoÈn, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic, New York, NY. SchoÈn, D.A. and Wiggins, G. (1992) Kinds of seeing in designing. Creativity and Innovation Management, 1, 68±74. Vallery-Radot, R. (1903) La Vie de Pasteur. Paris. Walker, D.J. with Cross, N.G. (1983) An Introduction to Design (Open University Course T263 Design: Processes and Products, Unit 1). The Open University Press, Milton Keynes, UK.
Claudia Eckert is Research Fellow in Computer Science, The Computing Department, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. Martin Stacey is Senior Lecturer in Information Systems, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, De Montfort University, Milton Keynes, UK.
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Viewpoint: Towards a New Theory X Jan Buijs This paper addresses the issue of the management of the design or innovation process in relation to the integration of different disciplines involved. A new Theory X is suggested, in which X stands for as much diversity as necessary ± which is usually much more than people and organizations realize and accept. If implemented the new Theory X will influence the way work is organized; including career development, reward systems and recruitment criteria.
Introduction
I
n the early sixties McGregor introduced Theory Y as a contrast to Theory X. People who behaved according to Theory X were outer directed, only interested in money and had to be directed by punishment. People are lazy, stupid and selfish. McGregor proposed in his Theory Y that people are human beings with high self-guiding principles; they are interested in each other, they like to work because they are interested in it. People are real social beings, self-motivated and altruistic. Later, in the early eighties, Ouchi proposed Theory Z. This theory is about a version of the Japanese management style which was also effective in non-Japanese cultures. He especially contrasted his theory with Theory A; which was the typical American management style, and with Theory J; which was the prototypical Japanese style. In the domain of product design there is, traditionally, a lot of attention paid to design methods, some with very specific names and there is a tendency to talk about Design for Assembly or Design for Manufacturing or Design for the Disabled or Design for All. Finally everybody is talking about Design for This or Design for That; this is usually summarized as DfX: Design for X (see for example: Cross 1994, and Roozenburg & Eekels 1995). In this paper I will address the issue of the management of the design or innovation process in relation to the integration of different disciplines involved in the process. In other words the issue of multi-disciplinary design teams. Due to my consulting experiences in industry I usually like to enlarge this term. For better design quality we do not only need numerous disciplines, but also different
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organizational functions are involved, and also people from different cultural backgrounds, different value systems, different countries and of course of both genders! I prefer to talk about multi-X organizations and multi-X teams and multi-X management. So this paper is aiming at a new Theory X, in which X stands for as much diversity as needed ± which is usually much more than most people and organizations realise and accept.
Dealing with diversity
The design task Designers have to come up with good quality solutions for problems of future users. Sometimes these problems are well known to the users, sometimes they are less aware of these problems and in some cases they even deny that they have problems. Problems which designers are addressing range from chairs and tables, to cars and aeroplanes, clothes and spectacles, to user interfaces, computer software and public graphics. Design problems are usually ill-defined, are dealing with a lot of different and often conflicting aspects, are rationally stated but are emotionally bought and used. The problems change over time and are very challenging. Design problems are context and situation dependent. Furthermore, designers have to work in an environment that is also changing; they not only have to deal with their principal (who could be inside the same company, but also from an outside client), but with co-makers, codesigners, advertising agents and distribution systems. Designers not only design products but are also involved in packaging design, product graphics, display design, logos and corporate identity systems.
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So the designer's world is a pretty complex one and so is her or his task. Very few are able to execute this task alone. Design work is teamwork, not only because it is too huge for one person to handle, but especially because the design task in itself is so complex and complicated.
Multi-X design teams
Teams manage complexity
Survival in a competitive world
The design process is a process of information processing. Information about the customer, the competitors and its products, the manufacturing processes, the available materials, the environmental consequences, the logistics, the after-sales service, the maintenance, the safety regulations, the legal standards, the quality, the distribution system, and about the socio-cultural context in which the customers want to use the new product. I know this list is not complete, but it shows the wide variety of information which plays an important role in product design. Although Public Graphics may be seen as a little bit simpler, it is still a very complex and complicated design task. To handle this complex task, designers join hands and work in teams. Teams just with peers are easy to handle but are so monodisciplinary that the task is incompletely executed. Really good design teams are multi-disciplinary. Not only designers, but also specialists in the fields of manufacturing, marketing, purchase and after sales service are involved. If you have to work with outside resources the team also has members from the outside world, like comakers, distributors and sometimes even the real customer. If the product is aimed at selling in the whole of Europe you have to think of your team not only in terms of disciplines but also in different nationalities and different cultures. Teams like this have the tendency to grow larger and larger. I still like to work with large teams which represent all the qualities we need for solving the design problem, than to have a small, simple-to-manage work team to do the origination ± and then afterwards getting the agreement of all the other parties involved. Of course you have to work quite hard in the beginning with such large and complicated teams, but it is worth trying. Multi-X teams are no luxury, but a necessity.
Team management We talk quite easily about teams, but it is a highly confusing term. We first have to define
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what we are talking about. Is it a team with a routine task, as in manufacturing jobs, or is it a team with innovative tasks, as in marketing, R&D or design? Is it a team with the same members over a long period of time, or is it a team with many in- and outgoing members? Is the team's objective to be competitive, like for instance design teams, or is it a noncompetitive team, like the catering staff in the company's restaurant. If we not only want to talk about teams, but also want to be successful with teams we have to spend time and energy to discuss these matters and to make some right decisions. One of the major problems in team management is that most of our people, at least in the West, are trained as individuals. We studied at school or university as an individual, we received or own personal grade, our own diploma or certificate. Our career was based on our personal performance, not on the performance of our colleagues or co-workers. So if we want team success we have to deal with this dilemma. Another dilemma is that our usual behaviour looks more like fighting than cooperation. All those well-known problems about throwing items over the departmental walls, have to do with this individual fighting behaviour. This has to do with our preoccupation with the idea that the task (usually the short term task) is of much more importance than the people who have to perform the task. The industrial world is still a mechanical, machine-type world. If the task is not performed as it should be, we just replace one of the workers as if she or he was a cogwheel in a malfunctioning gearbox. But human beings are not cogwheels! People have emotions, have motivations, need challenges, want love, sometimes have sick children at home, or feel misunderstood. So team management is all about people management. To illustrate how difficult it is, just look at one of the terms describing this kind of multidisciplinary design work: collaborative product design. It may sound a good term in English or American, but in continental European languages a collaborator is a traitor; you are working with the enemy! The main objective of multi-X-team management is to get synergy. The corporate problems are too big and too complicated to be solved by bright but isolated individuals. We have to combine forces to survive in this highly competitive world. So when setting up teams we want to integrate multi-disciplinary knowledge, multi-functional capacities and multi-departmental interests. These are the well-known aspects of team work, but we often forget that it is also important to look at
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the multi-cultural aspects, the multi-national aspects, the multi-racial aspects and the multi-gender aspects. These multi-X-teams are not easy to handle, but they will not only lead to a better acceptance of the solutions they come up with but they will come up with better solutions in the first place. Working in teams really means working together. Real co-operation is based on sharing information, knowledge and resources, but also on helping each other and on caring for each other. Especially these last elements are not the most common ones in the corporate arena. This means that other ways of stimulation and motivation are necessary for successful teamwork. It also calls for another way of leadingship (I explicitly use this word because leadership is once again linked to an individual who is the leader; the leading of teams is a shared responsibility, not only of the ``leader'' but also of the ``followers''). My experience in more than 20 years of management consulting and training is that teamwork is not normal corporate behaviour. The average corporate animal loves to fight, sees only very limited, departmental interests, and is usually oriented to personal success only. So if we are serious about team management, we really have to do something about it.
Sports teams as analogies In the world of sports teamwork is well known. And quite often corporate executives use this analogy to start or stimulate their corporate (design) teams. But not all sports teams are alike, and some sports teams are not a team at all. The traditional European football team has eleven players; one with a very special task (the goalkeeper) but the other ten are usually kept to specific tasks as well. In basketball the team is limited to five, but they can be interchanged. A volleyball team has six members on the field, but the actual team is much larger. Here the players have specific tasks per subset of players (attackers versus defenders). A Davis Cup tennis team is a completely different kind of team (usually two individual players and two others for the doubles). In baseball the team even has different tasks per half innings. In one half they all have to perform different and very specific tasks on the field, in the other half they all have to perform the same task (hitting the ball). And in Formula One racing again the team is completely different from the teams mentioned above.
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Be aware of all these differences. If you want to start a multi-X-team inside your company, and you use this sports team analogy, be sure the team members have the same kind of sports team in their mind as you do. Besides all these differences most sports teams share a couple of important characteristics. The most important one is that all the players are selected as a result of extensive scouting, training and evaluation procedures; which often take years and years. Nearly all sports teams (not only in professional sports, but also on the amateur level) are guided and supervised by a professional trainer/coach. And this coach is responsible for both the task performances and the interpersonal relationships. Usually sports teams have excellent facilities (gymnasia, training fields, training weekends, etc.) and professional support groups (doctors, dieticians, physiotherapists, physical trainers, etc.). Another characteristic of sports teams is that you have stars and workhorses. A football team with eleven Johan Cruijfs or Romarios would be a very lousy team! Looking at the working hours of a sports team it is interesting to note that most of their time is spent on the preparation for the real game. They usually spend about five days per week on training, and just a couple of hours per week on the actual league game. If we look at the characteristics of teams in the corporate world we get a completely different picture. Most corporate (design) teams start on an ad hoc basis. There is no training, no scouting, no real selection and no coach or trainer. Most industrial teams are thrown in at the deep end without any professional help. There are limited facilities, there is no support group and there is definitely no team building! The objectives of most organizational teams are obscure or even missing; the brief is poor and is often changed overnight. The role ambiguity is high (do I have to defend my departmental interests and who will get the honours?) and the team orientation is on getting results very fast. If we really want to learn from the world of sports we have to invest in scouting, training and coaching, in team building, in setting up clear goals and in giving the X-team the right facilities and support. In the world of sports we all know that the champions of this season were created in the seasons before. Becoming a (world) champion is the result of a very long and very hard process. If we want to be champions in the corporate world we have a long way to go.
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Choice of team leader
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High performance multi-X-teams
Important conditions for teamwork include the notion that a team is more than just a group of people; that these potential team members are willing to co-operate and that they share and accept the tasks and objectives. So the first thing you have to do is to carefully hand pick the team members and to invest in team building. Usually teams go through different stages. The first one is called the Forming stage. This is the period in which the team members are selected. In the ideal situation the objectives for the team are clear and you can deduct the types of (team) qualities you need to perform the task. Then in the second stage, the Storming stage, these team members have to get to know each other. They have to find out about each other's specific qualities, specific experiences, reasons why they are in the team, corporate history, personal lives, etc. Here the basis for the co-operation is laid, here the basis for the potential synergy is organized. In the third phase, the Norming stage, the group of people is turned into a high performance team. Now the norms for optimal behaviour are made clear. This is the beginning of their own code of conduct, their own team language (we are X-ing this afternoon), their own team jokes (Mary is our X-boss), etc. Now the team is ready for the most important phase: the Performing stage. The team is doing its work, it is achieving its objectives and it is making the right deliveries, with the right qualities and the right time. Finally they have reached the finishing point, they have completed their task and the team members have to say goodbye. We are now in the fifth stage: the Adjourning stage. The team members have to be prepared to go back to their ``normal'' work and find out how life has changed in their departments; how the careers of their former colleagues have evolved, what kind of atmosphere is there, who are their new colleagues, etc. Both the starting-up stages (forming, storming and norming) and the re-entry period (re-entering in the ``normal'' organization; the adjourning stage) are neglected stages in most organizations. We are so concentrated on performing the multi-X-task, that we usually forget about preparing and rounding up. But these stages are very important for the success of the teams. Without preparation there is no present performance, and without rounding-up there will be no future performances.
High performance teams are usually specially selected and trained for the job. So the first thing to do is to think about the organizational setting of the design teams. Is it just a team within one or two departments (i.e. Design and Marketing) or will it become an autonomously working team, in which all departments and functions are included? The best first step is to have a team leader to do the selection, and to have her or him as a co-compositor of the team. The topmanagement and the selected team leader together start setting up the objectives, define which personal qualities they need and look for potential candidates. The team leader is chosen because of her or his domain knowledge, the ability to deal with company politics, the stage of their career and their leadingship qualities. It is important that other members of the organization have confidence in the team leader, especially with design teams with their innovative task, the results will have influence on the organization as a whole. In order to have the results accepted in the organization, the organization has to have confidence that the new team leader is able to do the job. So it is important for the team leader to have great social skills, to be able to persuade others and to have great perseverance. Due to the fact that one of the roles of the team leader is comparable to that of professional coach in sports teams, coaching and counselling skills are essential, as is the ability to stimulate and influence the other team members so that they are able to perform at their highest level of competence. Part of this is the willingness to share power; all the team members are very competent professionals and the traditional autocratic style of leadership is of very limited use for stimulating professionals. The main tasks of the team leader are structuring the project/team-task, co-selecting the team members, (co-)training the members in specific project task related items and tools, coaching, managing the process, motivating and stimulating. Finally she or he is the focus of all the communication; both internal as well as external. The team leader is the spokesperson on all team- and task related subjects. Clark & Wheelwright (1992) describe the five roles of the heavyweight project manager as follows:
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1. direct market interpreter (first hand information, visit dealers and shows, has his own budget for market studies, direct contact with customers);
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2. multilingual translator (fluency in language of customers, engineers, marketeers, stylists; translator between customer experience/requirements and engineering specifications); 3. direct engineering manager (direct contact, looks over engineers' shoulders, evangelist of conceptual integrity, shows up in drafting room); 4. program manager in motion (out of the office, not too many meetings, face-toface communication, conflict resolution manager); 5. concept infuser (concept guardian, ultimate decision maker, co-ordinator of details and creator of harmony).
aspects alone (the so-called hard X-parts), but it is also necessary to record the behavioural aspects of the team (the softer X-parts). If organizations want to improve the results of their high performing design teams, they have to do this type of recording. You can only learn from experience if you know what has happened. Finally the team needs to be aware that it is only a temporary miniorganization working for the organization at large. So make sure that there is good communication between the team and the organization. Some teams forget the interest of all the others, but all those others are more or less the customers of the team.
Team members are the real workforce of the team. Their selection is based on the needs of the team. They come from different Xs (discipline, department, business unit, culture, gender . . .). They are usually experts in their field; preferable even in rank, experience and corporate status. They have to be aware of their departmental/functional responsibilities as well as the project/team responsibilities. In the ideal situation (which is never the case in real life) you should look for special individual qualities like creative skills, external orientation (if I can choose between two equally qualified persons: someone who has been in the same company for his or her whole professional life, and someone who has seen different organizations from the inside, I would always choose the latter). Learning styles (for instance Kolb's Learning Style Inventory would give some indication), problem solving styles (Kirton's AdaptorInnovator test will give some clues to that) and their team role repertoire (Belbin's Teamrole test) will be helpful. In Europe we are relatively reluctant to use these kinds of psychometric tests extensively, but they are quite good in offering the team members a new language to discuss some of their more personal and intuitive problems in human interaction. In most cases you are not able to select all the qualities you want in your team. These tests and other team building tools enable the team leader (and the team) to identify the differences between the ideal team and the actual team. They give indications for special points of attention (for the team leader) and they make the team members aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. Another neglected aspect in multi-X-team performance is the lack of attention to documentation and administration. If this is done at all, it is usually limited to the task
Final remarks
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Successful multi-X-team management needs explicit top management attention. It also needs time for preparation and it requires special qualities inside the organization. If it is done properly it will cause synergy between disciplines, departments and functions. It will empower people inside the organization, which means it will have its effect on all workers. Organizations in which team management is a normal behaviour, work differently from ``normal'' organizations. Those organizations are organized in a different way. They really resemble Mintzberg's ad hocracies. Based on my experiences with more than 200 different product innovation teams, successful teams have a relatively large core group of about 10 to 15 persons (Buijs 1991, 1993). They are really multi-X and the gender is mixed (not equal, but every little gender mix seems to improve team performance). There is explicit time and attention for special start-up workshops and kick-off meetings. The successful teams pay special attention to training in team building and in training specific skills like creativity techniques and networking. The team leader is an excellent facilitator. Finally high performance teams put more work effort in performing the task than less successful teams. A field study among 500 German managers, carried out in 1992 (Berth 1993) reported that 70% of all implemented ideas were generated by multi-X teams; and 85% of all flops were generated by mono-X teams. Of course, multi-X-team management is not corporate heaven. There are also problems and conflicts. The biggest single problem in team management proves to be the changing of team members. With every change of a team member the stages of storming and norming start all over again. On the other
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hand if you leave your team unchanged for a very long period, then rigidity sneaks in and discussing certain aspects will become a taboo (groupthink). Team leaders who are not aware of this phenomenon have problems in maintaining the right team spirit. If you want to implement this new Theory X be aware that it will influence the whole way of organizing: for instance, the way careers are developing (now it is all upward directed, in team based organizations it will be horizontally directed; individual rewards have to be changed to team-based rewards), or the way you are hiring new personnel (not the brightest, but those who contribute most to team performance). If you dare to take up this opportunity and concentrate on the human side or organizing and if you allow time for the necessary preparation you will see that synergy can happen overnight. To be honest I do not want to introduce a new theory ± all I want to do is to emphasize the need for multi-X-teams as an instrument to get better designs and innovations. I hope this paper shows that in order to get team results you not only have to invest in people, but also have to love people!
Buijs, J.A. (1991) The Project Industrial Innovation, a Dutch example of innovation stimulation at a national level. In Henry, D. (ed.), Forecasting Technological Innovation. ECSC, EEC, Brussels and Luxembourg. Buijs, J.A. (1993) Creativity and Innovation in the Netherlands: Project Industrial Innovation and its implications. In Isaksen, S.G., Murdock, M.C., Firestien, F.L. and Treffinger, D.J. (eds.), Nurturing and Developing Creativity: the Emergence of a Discipline. Ablex, Norwood, NJ. Clark, K.B. and Wheelwright, S.C. (1992) Revolutionising Product Development: Quantum Leaps in Speed, Efficiency and Quality. Free, New York. Cross, N.G. (1994) Engineering Design Methods: Strategies for Product Design, 2nd edn. Wiley, Chichester. Katzenbach, J.R. and Smith, D.K. (1993) The Wisdom of Teams. Harvard Business School Press, Boston. Kirton, M.J. (1987) Kirton Adaptation-innovation Inventory. Occupational Research Centre, Hatfield, UK. Kolb, D.A. (1976) Learning Style Inventory: Technical Manual. McBer. McGregor, D. (1960) The Human Side of Enterprise. McGraw-Hill, New York. Ouchi, W.G. (1981) Theory Z. Avon, New York. Roozenburg, N.F.M. and Eekels, J. (1995) Product Design: Fundamentals and Methods. Wiley, Chichester.
References Belbin, W.M. (1981) Management Teams. Heinemann, London. Berth, R. (1993) Implementing innovation with superiority. Paper presented at the 4th European Creativity and Innovation Conference, Darmstadt, August.
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Jan Buijs is Professor at the Department of New Product Development, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
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Managing Creativity in Organizations: a Total System Approach Gilbert Tan Organizations need creativity to adapt to the fast-changing environment and revitalize itself. In response to this need, managers have invested in various single approaches, such as, creativity training programmes, team-building, and leadership development to improve creativity. This paper argues that managing creativity in organization is a complex problem and thus requires a more integrated approach. In this paper, I have provided a theoretical framework to explain how managers can foster and sustain creativity in their organizations using a total systems approach. In the framework, I depict the organization as having four subsystems, namely, culture, techno-structural subsystems, management and people. Each subsystem will create unique barriers to creativity. The framework identifies three types of interventions (cultural, organization and design, and training development) that can help develop the ingredients of creativity (foundations, competencies, and support).
Introduction
O
rganizations need creativity to develop new products, improve customer services and to revitalize themselves. A recent article in Fortune mentioned that creative workers are the ``hottest competitive resource'' for the company (Farnham 1994; p. 62). While most managers would agree that creativity plays an important role in contributing to organizational success, there is little consensus, even among management experts, on how organizations can foster, sustain and harness the creative energy of their employees. Depending on one's theoretical orientations, the approaches taken to manage creativity vary. Proponents of the dispositional theory of creativity ± the notion that creativity is dependent on a set of individual traits and characteristics (e.g., Singh 1986), will emphasize on the stringent selection procedures to identify creative candidates for the company. In contrast, those who adopt the process perspective of creativity (e.g., Stein 1974), believe that creativity can be taught, and thus they will rely on formal training programmes to enhance creativity in organizations. It appears that this approach is popular among managers. Programmes like Edward de Bono's (1977) lateral thinking, Tony Buzan's (1995) mind-mapping techniques, and the # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS) (Isaksen 1989) are examples of the better known programmes adopted by managers. Still another approach to managing creativity is through the cultural track (Raudsepp 1987). Supporters of this approach believe that organizational culture has a powerful impact on creativity. Hence, it is not uncommon to find managers working hard to ensure that their organizations have a nurturing environment to encourage creativity. Although, there are success stories that testify the effectiveness of these single approaches in making organizations more creative, in reality, managing creativity is a complex problem. As noted by Kilmann (1989), a complex problem cannot rely on single approaches for solutions, but instead, it requires multiple approaches leveraging at different parts of the organization in order to arrive at longer-term solutions. This paper proposes a conceptual framework on how to promote creativity in organizations using a total system approach. The theoretical roots of this proposed approach can be traced to the works of early systems thinkers, such as Churchman (1968), Katz and Khan (1966), Optner (1968), and Tilles (1963). The systems approach offers a set of powerful tools to study the dynamics of organizations and organizational change. In this approach, organizations are conceived to
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be ``made up of sets of components that work together for the overall objective of the whole'' (Churchman 1968, p. 11). In essence, the systems approach is interested in the interdependency, interconnectedness and interrelatedness of a set of components that constitute the identifiable whole, i.e., the organization. The applicability of the systems approach in understanding and solving organizational problems has gained acceptance by contemporary management scholars over the years (e.g. Pasmore 1988, Stacey 1996). Recently, Senge (1990) affirms the relevance of the systems approach in his works on learning organizations. According to him, learning organizations need to have five disciplines ± personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. He felt that, among the disciplines, systems thinking is the most important one. He emphasized that ``. . . Without a systemic orientation, there is no motivation to look at how the disciplines interrelate. By enhancing each of the other disciplines, it continually reminds us that the whole can exceed the sum of its parts'' (Senge 1990, p. 12). Thus, the total system approach as proposed in this paper is solidly grounded in the management literature.
Theoretical framework Figure 1 provides a parsimonious model capturing the essence of an organization. The total system approach as proposed in this paper, analyzes the organization from a system perspective. This means that there is inter-connectedness among the organization's subsystems. It also means that interventions directed at any subsystems of the organization will have effects on the rest. My model depicts an organization as having four subsystems, namely, culture, techno-structural subsystems, management and people. There are specific barriers to creativity associated with each and every one of these subsystems. To improve creativity in organizations, managers have to direct interventions at the subsystems. The interventions should aim at sensitizing the organization to its change dynamics and should suggest ways of working towards more change-oriented practices and structures. If successfully implemented, the intervention will help cultivate the ingredients of creativity ± foundations, competencies, and support. These ingredients, in turn, will encourage the development of desired creative outcomes in the organization.
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Subsystems of organization and the barriers they create Culture Every organization has a culture that influences how its employees think, feel and act. It provides meaning, direction, and mobilizes employees into action. Experiences from companies have shown that organizational culture is linked to creativity. For example, IDEO, a contract R&D firm, consciously foster creativity through its strong corporate culture. IDEO keeps its staff creative by removing bureaucracy, encouraging cross-fertilisation of ideas, and allowing its employees ``to fail in a culture of try it, fix it, try it again, and learn from the experience'' (Perry 1995, p. 16). Recent research by scholars has also provided evidence on the culture?creativity relationship (Turnipseed 1994). The organizational culture can create barriers to creativity in the following ways. First, when individuals are bound by a strong corporate culture, there is a danger that they may adopt fixed mind-sets to solve problems. Second, culture involves assumptions, beliefs and values that can be deep-rooted within the members of organizations. These things cannot be changed easily, especially, when the company has been doing well. As noted by Pascale, ``nothing fails like success'' (Brown 1991, p. 13). Once a company is locked into a culture that has proven itself to be successful in the past, it will be difficult to convince its members to adopt alternative ways of doing things in the organization. Techno-structural subsystems The technostructural subsystems of an organization include tasks, procedures, programmes, technology, rewards systems, control systems and communications systems, etc. Many companies have installed specific programmes to promote creativity. For example, Unocal's Science & Technology Division organizes the Creativity Week to enable its staff to exchange ideas about their projects and discuss issues that affect the division, and honour the outstanding creative efforts of its researchers (Anderson 1991). Recently, a relatively new set of computerbased tools, known as Creativity Support Systems (CSS) have been invented to help organizations augment their creativity (Abraham and Boone 1994). In essence, these computer softwares are designed to facilitate assumption-testing and boundary-breaking during problem-solving. For example, some CSSs are programmed to ask open-ended question-and-answer options for generating ideas; others are programmed to provide
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Figure 1. A total system framework on managing creativity in organizations.
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Rewards may stifle creativity
more structured approaches for exploring ideas (Dayton 1991, Young 1989). There are many potential barriers to creativity that can be traced to the technostructural subsystems. For instance, once the company has installed certain systems, there will be inertia to change. People are not willing to change simply because the systems already exist. Rules, regulations, and procedures can be another set of obstacles hindering creativity in organizations. When these rules, regulations and procedures become ends by themselves, employees will just rigidly apply them in every situation, even in those that are not appropriate. The reward systems can stifle creativity when it is not properly designed. When the reward systems are too punitive on failures, they will discourage employees from taking risks. In other words, reward systems that punish failure clearly support the risk-averse systemic forces. Sometimes, reward systems that over-emphasize individual creativity may discourage group creativity. Thus, managers must be more aware of these systematic points when they design reward systems to improve creativity at the workplace. Management The top management provides the vision and mission of the organization. When the management is strong, there is leadership and sense of purpose. Although there may be constraints exerted by the external environment of the organization, generally, the top management can have an impact on the organization's culture and the other subsystems. For example, top management can make choices on technology, organizational designs, and the kind of people that they want to hire. Indirectly, these choices will have an impact on the organization's culture. Top management would be more systemically enabling if it creates shared visions that arise from their understanding of the dynamics of the systems in the organizations. Another point that management should note is that leadership behaviour can stifle or enhance creativity depending on how they lead the organization. When management leads in a style that kills ideas prematurely, discourages risk-taking and experimentation, and inhibits feedback from the ground, creativity is hindered. People Organization achieves its objectives through people ± individuals and groups. Managers need to understand the human side of the organization in order to spark creativity. Some companies such as Microsoft and IDEO believe creativity starts with hiring the right people. Microsoft ``look for a certain
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level of intelligence'' and technical competence in its employees (Field 1988). IDEO wants individuals with ``high levels of intellectual curiosity ± people who are always interested in doing something new'' (Perry 1995). People-related barriers to creativity include resistance to change, conflicts, and incompetence. Creativity means changes and resistance to change is a natural dynamic phenomenon. To promote creativity in organizations we must be more aware of the unhelpful reactions to change, such as, rejections of ideas and status-dominated evaluations. Often the root of most of these unhealthy reactions to changes can be traced to insecurity. People find security in status quo. Things are more predictable with status quo. When employees are in constant conflicts with one another, they refuse to cooperate, share information, and refuse to see each other's perspective. Conflicts make people defensive of their stand, reinforcing the status quo. Sometimes, organizations are not creative simply because employees do not know how to be creative, and/or managers do not how to lead and motivate employees to contribute creatively towards the organizational goals and objectives.
Interventions Cultural interventions These are interventions aimed at the organizational culture. There are many ways to intervene at the cultural level. For example, managers may influence the cultural subsystems through redesigning jobs and reward systems, teambuilding, leadership training, selection, etc. An integrated approach is offered by Kilmann (1989), in his book Managing Beyond the Quick Fix. In the book, he devoted one whole chapter to how to change the culture of the organization. His five-step approach involves influencing culture at the norms level ± a) identifying the actual norms of the organization; b) defining desired norms; c) measuring the gap between actual and desired norms; d) closing the ``culture-gap'' through group sanctions; and, e) sustaining the cultural change effort. Organization and design Another set of interventions which managers can apply to improve creativity in organizations is through organization and design. These interventions are directed at the techno-structural subsystems. Common organization and design interventions include activities, such as, designing autonomous jobs, installing systems to improve communications, aligning reward and appraisal systems to recognize creative
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efforts of employees, investing in technology, such as CSSs, and organizing specific programmes to stimulate creativity. To cite a few examples of these interventions in practice ± employees in Broderbund enjoy tremendous autonomy in their jobs (Verespej 1995); Microsoft uses electronic mail as a communicative tool to brainstorm ideas (Field 1988); 3M, well-known for its product innovations, has reward systems that allow employees to advance down the technical track (Fry 1987); and General Electric has its ``Work-Out'' programme to encourage employees to interact and exchange ideas with one another (Braham 1992). Training and development These interventions are directed at the people and management of the organization. Intuitively, organizations recognize the importance of training employees in creativity skills, such as lateral thinking, mind-mapping techniques, and creative problem solving (CPS), to enhance creativity in organizations. In practice, besides those mentioned above, there are other creativity training programmes. For example, Chaparral Steel, a leader in the US steel industry, invests in creative writing programmes conducted by instructors from the local university to stimulate employees' creativity (Luthans 1991). While creativity skills are important, managers should not neglect the role of technical/ operational skills (or what Amabile (1988) refer to as domain-relevant skills) in the creative process. Creativity cannot exist in a vacuum void of context. Creativity skills alone without the necessary technical competence will not help individuals or groups to arrive at creative solutions to job-related problems. In contrast to creativity training programmes that are usually conducted in class-room context by external trainers, technical training programmes can be conducted in-house or on-the-job by supervisors. There is also a behavioural dimension to stimulating creativity in organizations. Creative members can be threatening to others because they upset the status quo. To improve creativity in an organization, there is a need for human relations training. For example, employees should be trained on basic communications skills such as active listening, giving and receiving feedback, etc. Moreover, since people will inevitably have to work in groups, team building programmes will also be helpful. Leadership practices can strongly influence how subordinates behave in organizations. Hence, it is important that managers and supervisors lead in a style that is supportive of creativity. Any effort by organizations to
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manage creativity among its employees should also include leadership training. While the details of these programmes depend on the needs of the organization, it is important that these programmes make managers and supervisors more aware of how they could have hindered creativity and what they could do positively to enhance creativity in their organizations. In addition, managers and supervisors should also be trained to be good coaches so that they can effectively impart technical or domain-relevant skills to their subordinates (Amabile 1988). Ingredients of creativity When properly implemented, the above-mentioned interventions will lead to the development of three important ingredients of creativity ± foundations, competencies, and support. Consistent with the systems approach, any interventions on any subsystems of the organizations will have indirect effects on the others. This makes it difficult to trace exactly how the various interventions affect each ingredient of creativity. In practice, we expect the interventions to mutually reinforce each other to produce the desired effects. Foundations At the individual level, the foundation for creativity is the belief systems. Both employees and managers must have positive belief systems. Employees must think positively of themselves and believe that they can be creative. Self-esteem is a precursor to individual creativity (Korman 1971). When the employee has positive self-esteem, he/she will be more willing to take risks and experiment with new ways of doing things. However, when he/she has a low self-esteem, he/she will not dare to rock the boat but resort to just complying with existing rules and procedures. Similarly, to support creativity, managers and supervisors must have positive beliefs regarding their subordinates. They must believe that their subordinates are able and want to contribute creatively to the organization. If not, they will not give their subordinates the freedom to exercise initiatives and take risks. At the organizational level, culture forms the foundation for nurturing creativity. There must be trust, respect for individual differences and open communication to support creativity. When trust is lacking, people will not dare to take risk. Respect for individual differences enable individuals to share different perspectives and explore alternative ways of doing things. These are behaviours that may lead to creative outcomes. Open communication is important because ideas and
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Creativity output as feedback
information are the life-blood of creativity. When communication is blocked, there will be no exchange of ideas or information within the organization, thus stifling creativity. Competencies Individuals need to be competent in order to be creative. As mentioned earlier, employees need to have a mix of creativity, technical and human relations skills in order to exercise creativity effectively in organizations. As noted by Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, leaders should be role models to their employees (Field 1988). This means that managers and supervisors should also have the necessary creative, technical, and human relations skills. In addition, they should also know how to foster a creative climate for the development of creative ideas in the organization and know how to be good coaches. Support Besides competencies, employees need support ± resources, authority, time and information, from the organization to be creative. The avenues for providing support are many. For example, 3M is well known for supporting the creative efforts of their employees by allowing them to devote up to 15% of their time to any pet projects. The company also stages many celebrations to reward and give moral support to their creative employees (Leob 1996). Likewise, Broderbund, an innovative software company in California, supports creativity by allowing its workers to work on ideas even if they might fail (Verespej 1995). Creative outcomes Foundations, competencies, and support are necessary ingredients to produce creative outcomes. At the individual level, the outcomes of creativity will manifest themselves in the form of new ideas at the workplace. These ideas may be suggestions of new products and services, or improvement in work procedures and practices. When these suggestions are translated into action plans that get implemented, they become creative outcomes for the organizations. The tangible forms of organizational creative outcomes include product innovations, continuous improvement, and improved services. These are all organizationally desirable outcomes that will eventually lead to better business results and revitalisation. Feedback The dotted lines in figure 1 show the feedback loops of the system. Feedback in our model implies dynamic ``homeostatic'' systems. There are various feedback loops. Both the ingredients of creativity and
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creativity outputs can be sources of feedback to the organization and barriers caused by the various subsystems as shown by the dotted lines connecting these elements in the diagram. For example, cultivating the ingredients of creativity, such as fostering a positive belief systems towards the employees, developing technical, creativity and human-relations skills that promote creativity, and providing conducive support for creativity will positively affect culture, management, people and techno-structural subsystems of the organization and make them more supportive of creativity. Likewise, the ingredients of creativity will also affect the barriers created by the various components of the organization. For example, enhancing the competencies of employees can directly help to reduce people-related barriers, such as lacking in creativity skills. Another set of feedback loops are those connecting the ingredients of creativity and creativity outputs to the interventions. In other words, the effectiveness of the various interventions can be gauged by their impact on ingredients of creativity and creativity outputs. This is important because managers can then use this feedback information to monitor the progress of their interventions.
Discussion The framework as proposed in this paper calls for a total system approach. There is no quick fix in managing creativity in organizations. Single approaches, such as creativity training programmes, team-building, or even leadership development will not be able to sustain the drive for higher creativity in the organization in the long-run. This is because the impact of single approaches tends to be localized at the subsystems level. However, organizations are more complex. Interventions at any subsystems need to be reinforced by changes at the other subsystems. For instance, it will be pointless to train employees to be creative when the organizational culture is hostile towards creative people. For creative individuals to contribute effectively to their organizations, there is the need for conducive work environment, supportive leadership, and organic structure and systems. The total system approach to managing creativity implies that it must be wellplanned. It calls for proper diagnosis of the organization. The proposed framework can serve as a diagnostic tool for managers to analyse the needs of their organizations. Managers should diagnose the strengths and limitations of each subsystem of the organ-
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ization and also examine the nature of the barriers to creativity caused by it before deciding what to do next. For example, an organization may have inheritated an outdated organization structure with many rigid rules and regulations even though it has good managers and employees that are ready for and desire creativity. Unfortunately, too often managers tend to take a copy-cat approach to solving organizational problem. Just because a particular creativity programme is successful in one company, it does not necessarily mean that it can be transferable to another organization. For example, Organization X may have its creativity blocked by rigid procedures and regulations, and Organization Y may have employees who lack creativity skills. Obviously, these two organizations need different strategies to spark creativity in their workplace. A proper diagnosis will not only enable the manager to decide what interventions to adopt but it will also give him/her suggestions on how to sequent these interventions. For example, when the company is ready for creativity, i.e., when management and employees see the need for creativity, but they lack the skill to do so, the company will get the most leverage by implementing creativity training first. Other interventions can then follow later to reinforce the training interventions. In contrast, when the company's culture is not ready for creativity, perhaps the first thing that it needs are cultural interventions. In addition to the proper sequencing of interventions, there is also the need to closely monitor the implementation process and make necessary refinements accordingly. It is impossible to foresee to every detail during the planning stage. Thus, the manager needs to be flexible while implementing the interventions. For example, if during training, certain problems surface regarding rigid procedures and policies that have not been identified previously, the management should then quickly address these concerns. Likewise, while implementing the technostructural interventions, such as, redesigning jobs, the employees may identify certain training needs that have not been foreseen by the management. In other words, the implementation process should be organic. Constant feedback is important to ensure successful implementation of the interventions designed to enhance creativity. What has been described so far is similar to the process of action research as documented in the Organization Development literature. One way to see action research is ``the application of the scientific method of fact-finding and experimentation to practical
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problems requiring action solutions and involving the collaboration and cooperation of scientists, practitioners, and laypersons'' (French and Bell 1995, p. 140). Action research involves a cyclical process of diagnosis, data collection, feedback to client-group, joint action-planning, and implementation of action plans. Action research assumes that the kind of interventions required by the organizations will be unique to their situations and contexts, based on the diagnosis, and derived from information obtained during the data-collection. After the diagnosis and data-collection, the next step involves discussing and working between the consultants (either internal or external) and the management to develop a coherent action plan for implementation. It is through joint action-planning that interventions are coordinated and implementation details finalized. Even then, the action research approach dictates that implementation of action plans be closely monitored and refinement be made to the action plans if necessary. A necessary factor for success in action research is the close collaboration between the consultants and the management. Another point to note is that action research rejects the idea of ``one right answer'' and this is consistent with the notion of ``equifinality'' in systems thinking. As can be seen from the above discussion, to operationalize the total system approach to managing creativity in organizations requires tremendous commitment from top management. More importantly, top management must develop its own systemic openness to promote creativity in organizations. The total system framework prescribes an approach to examine the organization holistically. This usually leads to organization-wide changes which require active participation from the top management. It will be dangerous to rely solely on external consultants even though they may be more objective. Under normal circumstances, qualified consultants are able to bring in the needed know-how to change the organization. Still, they need to work closely with the client-organization to do their jobs properly ± from gathering data to interpreting results, and from planning interventions to implementing and evaluating the programmes. Although, every manager wants to enjoy the fruits of creativity, not all are willing to bear the full costs. What then is the full cost? It is the commitment of time and resources. Top management has to invest time and give full attention to the change programmes. It is not a one-shot affair. Implementing large-scale, organization-wide
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changes as suggested by the total system framework is an on-going process. Top management must be willing to take the lead role. It cannot be fully delegated to the external consultant or even to the Human Resource Department. Besides spending time and attention on the project, management must also be willing to commit resources. A large-scale, comprehensive programme as suggested by the framework can be costly in terms of finance and human resources. Experience shows that innovative companies have to invest tremendous resources before they can harvest the fruits of creativity. For example, 3M increased spending on R&D and committed themselves to various programmes including giving lifetime careers even when times were tough. This testifies the level of commitment that 3M was willing to take in order to foster creative thinking and innovative behaviours (Leob 1995). Perhaps one reason why single approach, quick fixes appeal to managers is because these approaches promise immediate results. No doubt employees having attended creativity courses will acquire some new skills to improve their creativity. And, if the training is well designed and delivered, there may even be a transfer of learning from the training classroom to real-life working situations (Basadur et al. 1986). However, these desired effects will be short-lived if the training intervention is not supported by culture, leadership styles, and organizational design. Given the complexity of the challenge, managers need to have realistic expectations. They cannot expect their organization to change overnight. Large-scale, organizational-wide changes take time. The outcomes of certain interventions, such as those of techno-structural interventions (e.g., changes in job design, new work procedures, etc.) may be more apparent. In contrast, culture changes may be less apparent and take a longer time to realize full benefits. Thus, managers looking at short-term benefits will be disappointed. In sum, managing creativity in organizations calls for a total system approach. Since organizations are complex and consist of various inter-dependent subsystems, single approaches such as creativity training, teambuilding, etc., will not be able to offer holistic solutions to the problem. Single approaches are usually directed at just one particular subsystem, thus their impacts would tend to be localized at the subsystems level. Unless these impacts are reinforced by other interventions leveraged at the other subsystems of the organization, their effective-
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ness would be limited. The total system approach addresses the challenge of managing creativity holistically. It ensures that all the subsystems of the organization mutually support one another and work towards the goal of creativity.
References Abraham, T. and Boone, L.W. (1994) Computerbased systems and organizational decision making: an architecture to support organizational innovation. Creativity Research Journal, April/ May, 111±123. Anderson, V. (1991) Kudos for creativity. Personnel Journal, September, 90±93. Amabile, T.M. (1988) A model of creativity and innovation in organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 10, 123±167. Basadur, M., Wakabaysashi, M., and Graen, G.B. (1990) Training effects on attitudes toward divergent-thinking among manufacturing engineers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71, 612±617. Braham, J. (1992) Eureka, Machine Design, February 6, 32±36. Brown, T. (1991) Richard Pascale: the Christopher Columbus' of management? Industry Week, January 7, 12±20. Buzan, T. (1995) The Mindmap Book. BBC Books, London. Churchman, C.W. (1968) The Systems Approach. Dell, New York. Dayton, D. (1991) Idea generators spark new solutions. PC Week, March 18, 109±110. de Bono, E. (1977) Lateral Thinking. Pelican, Middlesex. Farnham, A. (1994) How to nurture creative sparks. Fortune, January 10, 62±66. Field, A.R. (1988) Managing creative people. Success, October, 85±86. French, W.L. and Bell, C.H. (1995) Organization Development: Behavioral Science Interventions for Organization Improvement. 5th ed. Prentice Hall, New Jersey. Fry, A. (1987) The Post-It Note: An Intrapreneurial Success. Advanced Management Journal, Summer, 4±9. Isaksen, S.G. (1989) Creative Problem Solving: a Process for Creativity. Centre for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo, NY. Katz, D., and Kahn, R.L. (1966) The Social Psychology of Organizations. Wiley, New York. Kilmann, R.H. (1989) Managing Beyond the Quick Fix: a Completely Integrated Program for Creating and Maintaining Organizational Success. JossyBass Publishers, San Francisco, CA. Korman, A.K. (1971) Organizational achievement, aggression and creativity: some suggestions toward an integrated theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 6, 593±613. Leob, M. (1995) Ten commandments for managing creative people. Fortune, January 16, 135±136. Luthans, F. (1991) Conversation with Gordon Forward. Organizational Dynamics, 20 (1), 63±72.
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Optner, S. (1968) Systems Analysis for Business Management, 2nd ed. Prentice Hall, New York. Pasmore, W.A. Designing Effective Organizations: the Sociotechnical Systems Perspective. Wiley, New York. Perry, T.S. (1995) How small firms innovate: designing a culture for creativity. Research, Technology Management, March±April, 14±17. Raudsepp, E. (1987) Establishing a creative climate. Training and Development Journal, 50±53. Senge, P.M. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday, New York. Singh, B. (1986) Role of personality versus biographical factors in creativity. Psychological Studies, 31, 90±92. Stacey, R.D. (1996) Dynamic Strategic Management for the 1990s. Kogan Page, London. Stein, M.I. (1974) Stimulating Creativity. Academic, New York.
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Tilles, S. (1963) The manager's job: a systems approach. Harvard Business Review, 41, January± February, 74. Turnipseed, D. (1994) The relationship between social environment of organizations and the climate for innovation and creativity. Creativity and Innovation Management, 3 (3), 184±195. Verespej, M.A. (1995) Managing for creativity. Industry Week, April 17, 24±26. Young, L. (1989) Decision Support and Idea Processing Systems. W.C. Brown, Dubuque, IA.
Gilbert Tan is Lecturer at the Graduate School of Business, National University of Singapore.
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Making Sense with Backcasting: the Future Perfect A creative method and its backgrounds illustrated through a practical case
Marc Tassoul 1 During his work as a creativity practitioner and researcher, the author has developed a Future Perfect approach to achieve a collaborative sense and vision about issues of change. This article reports the experience of both participants and facilitator in using this process, in a project undertaken to develop new approaches to clean textiles in the context of sustainable development. The process is described in part on the basis of McWhinney's `Six Systems Model' and Catford and Ray's `Path of the Everyday Hero'. The experience is then developed into helpful hints for creativity practitioners.
Introduction
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Changes delve into assumptions
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n an ongoing path of research and consulting, I have come across a process which shows great potential to achieve a collaborative sense or vision about future developments around some issue: the Future Perfect.2 In this paper, you will find some of the reflections and insights acquired over time on using this process. It will be illustrated through one particular event where this process was used explicitly to develop a perspective on new technologies to clean textiles. The paper starts with a description of the project in which this process was used. It will then move to more conceptual considerations on change. This is followed by a `six systems model' as developed by McWhinney (1992, 1995), which will provide for a map to depict the Future Perfect process in an explicit and insightful way. Once the stage is set, the Future Perfect process will be presented step by step, illustrated with examples from the clean textile project and some of its results. The paper will end with reflections on this project both from the participants and the facilitators, through which potential pitfalls and helpful hints will be developed for facilitators.
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Clean textiles: a test case for the Future Perfect 3 The Clean Textile project was initiated by DTO, a Dutch governmental programme aimed at developing methods for technological innovation in order to achieve sustainable development. The program's central methodology is `back-casting': working backwards from a long term perspective, 40±50 years in the future. The DTO program is aimed at exploring methods to help develop technologies and products with a higher consideration for a sustainable world.4 At the moment, all kinds of scenarios are being developed on the implications of present policy decisions on longer term development of our planet and society, the main consideration being our ever growing population on a `fixed sized' globe. These scenarios talk of reducing our use of natural resources and pollution to levels varying from one quarter to 1/20 of present levels if we are to guarantee some kind of sustainability of our planet. One can argue about these figures, but I assume that everybody will agree that substantial reductions will be necessary. Such changes may delve deep into our habits in terms of beliefs and priorities. For example the ownership of products: do I really want to own the car I am # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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using or could I share 2 cars with 5 other households, thereby limiting the total number of cars being produced and disposed of? Such changes delve deep into our habits, values and basic assumptions about wealth, personal expression, independence and co-operation in communities. The objective for this particular project was twofold: on the one hand to test methods to work with multi-disciplinary groups in developing ideas for future technologies in the context of Sustainable Development, on the other hand, to obtain useful results in the field of detergents, washing machines, consumer consciousness, etc., in short 'The Future of Clean Textiles'. For the workshop, we invited representatives from various organizations in the field. This included people from the industry, consumer organizations, universities and applied research institutions. As Weisbord (1993, p. 143) puts it: `Get the whole system in the room.' We ended up with a group of 25 people working in a conference centre in a park on the border of The Hague at walking distance from the North Sea. The workshop was planned on a Thursday evening and a Friday. The evening program served three purposes: getting aquainted, presenting the objectives and sharing some expert's views on the subject. In doing so, on the Friday morning we could start with the creative part of the program: generating scenarios through imagery, drawing and other so-called right-brain exercises. The afternoon was spent on `extracting' more concrete and realistic scenarios on `The Future of Clean Textiles' and agreeing on the next steps for this project. It was interesting to see that some preliminary work on clean textiles done by a work-group called 'Friday Washing Day' (Vergragt et al. 1995) from the Delft University, presented on the Thursday evening, got to be criticized by the experts, but it did open up a space for possible outcomes. In fact, looking at the outcome, many of these ideas showed up again in the course of the workshop as valuable options. The next morning, the group was split up into 5 smaller groups. This was done to obtain a wider range of potentially useful results, and to achieve a more intense interaction for each participant. This was done by the facilitators on the basis of two criteria: a personality test (the Reality Inquiry, McWhinney and McCulley 1994) and the idea we wanted `new teams', in other words, groups of people who hadn't worked together before. Then, after a warm-up, the group went into a number of imagery exercises, set up
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around imagining and drawing an animal zoo for the year 2025. Then, they had to imagine how health care was organized for the animals in that zoo. Following that was the actual Future Perfect: the participants had to imagine themselves being in a situation where they had actually realized this zoo (in 2025) and explain to other `zoo-creating' teams how they had achieved this result. One of the instructions for this speech was that it had to be a story or fairy tale with some heroic features, in other words, they had to share some of the pitfalls they had gone through. And it had to start with: `Once upon a time, in 1995, we did this session in The Hague, and then . . .', thus showing a sequence of events and activities. After each creative step, there were plenary presentations so that each one could have an overview of the ideas `forming'. This provided for a possibility to `guide' the flow of ideas and for `cross-fertilization' between groups. The afternoon was spent on coming back from the zoo fantasy to concretize ideas into concrete plans. Elements from both the zoo health care system and the stories leading to that system had to be `force-fitted' 5 back to the original issue of `the future of clean textiles'. In other words, principles that had been imagined for animal health care and the path leading to this result had to be translated back into respectively ideas for `clean textile care' and a path on how this might emerge/ develop from our present situation. Simply put, this resulted in 5 scenarios (one per group) around the future of Clean Textiles and, as we found out afterwards, an enthusiastic community of experts, eager to continue this collaboration.
Multiple frames of reference Possibly starting with military practice but later on during the industrial revolution, larger organizations have been principally led by splitting up tasks into small controllable units. With today's fall of barriers, in part caused by the availability of modern communication technology, and the ensuing confrontation with effects of one's dealings, this isolation of departments and specializations becomes almost impossible to maintain, both in terms of the problems that we face and the tools we need. One has to deal with multiple realities, whether one wants to or not. The engineer developing a new product and then passing it on to the marketeer to solve the sales problem is passeÂ. Co-operation, integration and sharing
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Picture 1. An imaginative animal zoo : a human being of ones responsibilities have become a necessity of present entrepreneurial and organizational life. In 1986, Morgan published a book called Images of Organisations in which he demonstrated that different frames of reference (in this case metaphors) lead to different observations, and that each of these frames can be as important or real. In his book, he describes organizations in terms of machines, organisms, brains, cultures, political systems and psychic prisons. With each of these frames showing particular aspects of organizations. A conclusion of the book is that for a proper analysis of an organization, the organization should be looked at in a number of perspectives, of course depending on the issue at hand. But no serious analysis should be based on a simple single frame approach. In the same way as Morgan looks at organizations, issues have to be looked at through multiple frames. As an illustration of a `multiple-frame approach': during our
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workshop it became clear that the issues we were looking at could not simply be solved through a technological approach. Societal and cultural aspects have to be taken into account if one wants to obtain useful results on the environmental front. But also for a society as a whole: we have to deal with short term versus long term choices, ecological issues in relation to economic consequences, ethical and political aspects, etc. These are all inter-connected. There is no such thing as a 'single frame' approach. Issues dealt with in single frames will almost by definition lead to 'spillovers' in other words to effects in domains not foreseen, and often unwanted, by the problemsolver.
Paradigms and Paradigm Change What Morgan described in terms of metaphors can be applied to paradigms and
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frames of reference. Kuhn (1970) describes paradigms on the basis of the history of science. He writes of how within one paradigm, a consistent set of rules is formed on `how to act' within a particular scientific domain. But he also describes how new paradigms evolve, often coming forth from observations that cannot be given sense within the present set of rules. Often at first, these observations are not noticed, or if noticed, they are qualified as non relevant (e.g. faulty measurement). The paradox is that the efforts to make a school of thought consistent and knowledgeable also become the strongholds of that system. It is clear that all kinds of conflicts come to the surface when new systems start to emerge. A well known example is the discussion between Copernicus and the Church about our planet and its place in the universe. If I remember correctly, Copernicus had observed moons turning around Jupiter, concluding that we (the earth) are not at the centre of every object revolving in space. Of course, the church at that time didn't appreciate this proposition: `We acknowledge your scientific efforts, but please don't mess up the system we have so carefully built up over time'. The switch between two paradigms and the subsisting of two paradigms next to each other is often coupled with different groupings in society; this happens in religion, politics, science, etc. As long as they aren't dependent on one another, they can survive without too much conflict. They can even develop rules to guide interactions, e.g. in a democratic dialogue. It is different when people from different paradigms have to come up with some consensus or when, within some community, a basic paradigm doesn't provide the means to explain the observed world. A good example of such an event was described by Levitt (1960) in which the decline of the American railroads is depicted in the context of rising road and air transportation, where their business definition didn't allow the railroads to see this new upcoming competition.
Change and transformation Unfreeze, change, refreeze, an often cited model for change originally coined by Lewin (1951) provides an excellent basis to develop the subject. Looking at snow crystals, I'm not sure, but I believe there are innumerable variations. Each crystal is different. But within each crystal, one finds symmetry. This would imply that when a crystal is forming, there are rules for water molecules connecting
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to an existing structure, it has to follow a symmetry. Somehow, at the first formation of a crystal, rules are called up that deny further variation and force new molecules into a particular behaviour. Taking the analogy back to systems and products, this might mean that early on in the formation of a system, the first random events lead to rules that cannot be influenced or changed by later additions. So, to change a system, one would have to break it down to some initial state (liquid or gaseous) before a different system can reemerge. Taking this analogy6 back to the context of creating new meaning, similar processes can be described, e.g. when locating and questioning assumptions. What this does is to make the present situation less obvious or stable. By `unfreezing' our mental models, we provide a space where new images can emerge, where new and valuable perspectives on an issue may be discovered. I would like to note that to many people, this is not a comfortable place to be in. Leaving behind habitual survival strategies will generally lead to some anxiety which can be both beneficial in terms of motivation, and a nuisance to the process in the sense of not being able to let go. Especially with untrained groups,7 this effect has to be taken into account. But in any case, attention has to be put into creating an atmosphere of trust. One should also look at so-called 'right brain' activities, e.g. metaphors and analogies, drawing, imagery, story telling, etc., actually techniques we used as children but often forgot once reaching adulthood. Children spend a great deal of their time learning, exploring, experimenting, most of it through play. It is through play that one finds the relaxation, an uninhibited approach, the flexibility to experiment and discover, and acquire and accumulate successful behaviours and knowledge. It is in play that we take initiatives without trying to figure out beforehand whether that initiative is right or wrong. We will find out along the way. The moral of these paragraphs is that successful change might be dependent on having some alternative space where ideas can be `unfrozen' for some length of time, to permit the emergence of new images, new connections, separate from the battered trails of our habitual thinking patterns. To integrate some of the ideas presented above, I would like to add a model on change as described by Catford and Ray (1991) which provides important additional insights on the `snow-flake change process (see fig. 1). The path starts with innocence. One feels comfortable with the situation, there is no
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Figure 1. The Path of the Everyday Hero ( Catford and Ray, 1991). need to do anything. At some point, there may be a call, one recognizes a challenge, or some problem appears. By delving into it, we get familiar with the subject, we start to understand where the challenges are, it is a time of setting oneself open, to let go of earlier assumptions. At some point, we start to make connections, we find allies, both in people and in theories. In the meantime, in parallel with this initiation and the finding of allies, an hypothesis8 may form about the issues we are dealing with, sometimes in the form an `AHA erlebniss'. The breakthrough, in this model, happens when one discovers the idea really does work in the world. This is an inhabitual way of looking at the AHA and the breakthrough as much of the literature on creativity deals with these two terms as being one. I suppose this is due to the fact that this literature is often limited to the conceptual activity of generating ideas and doesn't deal explicitly with the realization of an idea. In this model one can see how there is a breakthrough in the forming of an idea or gestalt, yet vague, but of which one has the feeling it might work, and at a later stage, another breakthrough when finding out that this (at first hypothetical) gestalt really gets you to a useful outcome. The final stage on this path, the celebration, is what one might call the symbolic return home, in a new state, a new being which has left behind its previous habits, providing for a myth of origin as the foundation for a newly formed system. In this context I'd like to cite Teilhard de Chardin in The Divine Milieu (as referred to by McWhinney 1992):
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And so, for the first time in life perhaps (although I am supposed to meditate every day!), I took the lamp and, leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything is clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from the conventional certainties by which social life is superficially illumi-
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nated, I became aware that I was loosing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came ± arising I know not from where ± the current which I dare to call my life. Stirred by my discovery, I then wanted to return to the light of day and forget the disturbing enigma in the comfortable surroundings of familiar things ± to begin living again at the surface without imprudently plumbing the depths of the abyss. But then, beneath this very spectacle of the turmoil of life, there re-appeared, before my newly opened eyes, the unknown that I wanted to escape. This time it was not hiding at the bottom of the abyss; it was concealed beneath the innumerable strands which form the web of chance, the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven. I would see this process as an extreme form of 'going back' to an unformed stage, where all external habits have been disentangled, where the darkness, the nudity are faced, and then coming back to the surface, a new essence at the nucleus, leading 'unconsciously, as by magic' to new external forms.
McWhinney's realities The models we have at our disposal to explain processes and interventions often do not permit the explanation of what we intuitively feel or guess is right. We name it experience, intuition, or use phrases such as 'if you get my point'. In his book Paths of Change (1992) and in later work (1993, 1995), McWhinney has developed a model based on the premise that processes of change move through different realities, each with their particular aspects of importance.
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Picture 2. An animal zoo as a transformational experience, a place and time where you can be your mythic self. McWhinney describes how change processes as found in myths, history and in present political and organizational life can be looked at as moving through this `space'
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which can be divided into four realities: sensory, unitary, social and mythical. Next to a number of smaller paths, two major paths are described: a revitalization path and a renaissance path. The first one, revitalization might be presented as `what are we on about?', going back to the first principles of an organization. As McWhinney states: `It may begin with an effort to recover the radical, core belief or with insisting on an expanded interpretation of the maintained truths'. Once this `essence' is reactualized, it moves to convincing others in the organization about the importance of that core belief. The topdown approach of management is a good example of this path. The second one, the renaissance path deals with the setting of a new system, a complete turnaround of an organization or system when the old state can no longer be maintained, when the old meaning systems have
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renaissance
revitalization
Figure 3. Renaissance and revitalization. lost their `power of integration'. The diagram in figure 3 shows the consecutive phases when going through this process. The first steps consist of evoking individual values and visions in the social reality after which a shared vision is created in the mythic reality. A new meaning system starts to form on the basis of which more concrete actions and strategies can start to grow. This phase of establishing takes place in the unitary reality. The habitual procedures then take place in the interaction of rules and agreements (unitary) versus observation of the world (sensory). The choice for one or the other path and the scale in which it is to be followed through depends in part of the loss (or change) of the existing culture and the appearance of fundamental dysfunctions in meanings that are normally not confronted in daily routine. The existing structures and cultures form a facËade for the lack of meaning which is often hidden behind. Without a clear image of a path of resolution, it can be recommendable to choose the existing hell above openly dealing with some anomaly. The theory of paths provides a means to depict a course, but one should never forget the means and the courage needed to choose a particular path and follow it through (McWhinney, 1992).
Future Perfect
Moving away from the expert domain
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When we look at stories like that of Jules Verne's Voyage into the Moon it will be clear that it doesn't look at all like the Apollo 11 trip. But that doesn't take away the fact that next to making such a venture imaginable, the actual fact of sending human beings to the moon, a number of aspects were explored and elaborated into quite realistic forms. And there are other examples, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, etc. To a more or lesser degree, we can date these works, but they contain surprisingly good descriptions
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and elaborations of future events. What counts is that through these works of art, a first notion is formed of what might be possible at some point in the future. This is exactly what is attempted through the Future Perfect process: to generate images that will guide our efforts in terms of possibilities, principles, priorities, etc. without necessarily being an exact description of things to come. The term Future Perfect is normally used as a grammatical tense indicating that some action will have been accomplished before some point in the future. Examples: `I will have finished this paper before April 15', or `This time next year I will have collected enough empirical data to demonstrate the effects of using the Future Perfect.' This principle of the Future Perfect tense can serve as a starting point for a creative process. There are different ways to go at it. In the version described by Mcwhinney and McCulley (1993) participants put themselves somewhere in the future and create a story how they got to where they are. They start the story with the session and then each participant, in turn, makes up story lines about events and actions as they develop over time till the point in the future where they are `now'. In this procedure, participants don't know beforehand where the story will lead to, there is no a priori image of some future state they have to reach. In doing so, the participants have to concentrate on initiatives they take themselves; miraculous events such as, `. . . and then, with no apparent reason, management gave us a huge budget, so that we were able to . . . ' are not permitted. If the process is done properly, participants will feel empowered to take action and some initiatives will actually just `happen' without reference to the session. The course of action has become reality `as if by magic' (see above Teilhard de Chardin). In this project an expanded version was used. Where the original version works in the expert domain,9 in this version, a future state and a path leading to that state are first developed through analogy. Afterwards, principles discovered in this analogy are force-fitted back to the issue. One of the reasons for using this expanded version was that we wanted to avoid generating `more of the same' kind of ideas, we wanted to, at least temporarily, move away from the expert domain, thus permitting more really new ideas to emerge.10 In fact, what we did was to combine the Future Perfect with a Synectics (Gordon 1961) approach. With this in mind, we see the following process taking form:
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1. experts on the present situation, their views on the issue, an inventory of expectations, etc. In other words, build a shared understanding on the subject by sharing each other's perspectives. 2. a creative phase, with the Future Perfect, with metaphors and analogies, first in an initiative to let go of the familiar, and secondly, to provide a language (or space) in which new principles can emerge and become `obvious' approaches to the issue. 3. a translation of the metaphorical images into concrete solutions and actions.
Elaboration of the process Taking the Realities (figure 2) into consideration and the Renaissance Path (figure 3) as it moves through the Realities, the following steps were defined: 0. Introduction A warm-up, getting to know one another, building trust, inventorise expectations and provide an image of the process that awaits the group; 1. Analysis of the issue (Unitary V Sensory) What do different experts say about the issue, what has already been done and achieved in this respect, formulating problem statements and finding an agreement on the objective for the workshop with the whole group; 2. Individual values and preferences in connection to the issue (Sensory V Social) ± what do you personally find important / of essence ? ± what do others think is important ? acknowledgement of these different sets of values and priorities 3. A synthesis between these different sets of values through analogy and metaphor (Social V mythic) This is mainly a `right-brain' exercise: imagination, fantasy, metaphors, analogies, drawing and storying are the common activities. 4. Force-fit of these (Mythic) images back to a realistic approach or plan (Mythic V Unitary) This is the hardest creative act throughout the process. Useful principles are to be recognized and force-fitted back into realistic options or concepts. Deferring judgement and thinking in terms of possibilities is essential at this point.
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At this stage ideas are like little seedlings, in need of great care, the tendency is to go back to an habitual expert style ± keep that atmosphere of playful experimentation going: `What if . . . ?' and `How could we improve this ?' It is a phase of hypothesis formulation, not one of testing! 5. Take decisions, defining a list of actions (establishing in the Unitary) Although expertise is important throughout the process, in this phase, the experts are essential to assess ideas for their potential (but giving ideas the advantage of the doubt) to find out or develop ways on how to make these ideas real, in terms of content and in a social context (political and budgeterial frames) and finally to establish some kind of consensus and defining action plans. 6. Reflection with the group on the process and the results These steps are summed up in figure 4.
Some results 11 It is not easy to summarize the outcomes of the workshop. A division into product oriented innovations, process innovations and cultural changes did not serve as a guideline in advance, but turned out to be useful as a framework in which the main results can be clustered. The groups paid a lot of attention to the strong entanglement of product, process and culture. Especially the possibility of new relations between textiletechnology, function and design of clothing and alternative washing methods were discussed. Some examples of potentially successful developments: . new textile technologies: to prevent dirt
. . .
.
from attaching to textiles, special fibre coating should be developed. Fibre coating can also speed up the time required for drying, which can save considerable amounts of energy. it is worth considering the use of disposable textiles for clothes with a high washing frequency, e.g. underwear. the use of detachable garments to separate often washed parts from less critical parts from garments. a distinction between different functions: the expressive function could be taken over by ornaments, jewelry and accessories. better climate control in buildings, this reduces the need for insulation, various
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Figure 4. The Future Perfect. ideas to diminish the amount of clothes needed . bacteriological washing leading to the `bacteriophages' in laundry-closet bacteria eat, so to speak, the dirt out of dirty laundry. . the time clothes wait in the laundry basket is made productive by enzymatic soaking and prewashing. Next to these technology and product ideas, many suggestions were made on process innovations and cultural change, e.g.: . by characterizing textile as personal (a
dress, for instance) and non-personal (sheets, towels), one can choose to keep the small, more expensive laundry at home in a smaller or simpler process. The other laundry is handled by specialized companies as a washing service. . washing seems to fulfil not only a material need but perhaps also a ritual and symbolic need, understanding these might help reduce the frequency of washing garments, e.g. is it necessary to always wash `whiter than white' ? This is only a subset from the ideas resulting from the workshop, not to mention other effects such as an understanding of each other's perspectives on such an issue as `clean textiles'. Some of these less explicit effects are described in the following paragraphs.
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Evaluation on the basis of comments from the participants. At the end of the session, the participants were asked to make a short evaluation of the workshop on the basis of: 1. What is good about it ? 2. What would you improve ? and 3. What are you taking with you as an important learning ? Apart from some remarks on the location (low budget), all the participants indicated that they went through a very worthwhile experience in developing new perspectives on the future of `Clean Textiles'. A very positive general comment was on the quality of the group. Here we had a multidisciplinary group of representatives from a wide variety of organizations in the Netherlands listening to one another and sharing their views on the subject, with some restraint on information with a competitive or strategic content, but overall in great openness. Interacting with one another provided an important opportunity to meet with people from other organizations in a collaborative atmosphere, getting to know one another, whereas in other circumstances, such quality of meeting is seldom realized. The technique used, the Future Perfect, was also evaluated as a very positive exercise, both in terms of process and interaction as in terms of results. The opportunity to share different views on the subject, with an
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Picture 3. What we might look like in 40 years time ? Minimal clothing, jewelry for personal distinction. emphasis on values and possibilities, seems to be part of this positive evaluation. Some of the participants noted that more time should have been reserved to come back from fantasizing (letting new perspectives emerge) into the reality of one's priorities and agendas. The `What next ?' question is mentioned in some of the evaluations. It is not clear yet, either to the participants or to the organizers what the next steps should be. A dilemma is that the quality of the content result is partly due to the non-preconceived ideas about these results. Participants allowed themselves to be taken into a process and, in a trustful atmosphere, accepted the emergence of new perspectives. This aspect of `suspension of disbelief' seems to be an important condition to have experts get into new, inhabitual approaches to an issue. It would seem that a process like this frees a lot of energy and enthusiasm from
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the participants. The readiness to partake in following steps is obvious. How this should be done is not clear yet, maybe just by setting a new date with the group to talk about what would be worthwhile developing on the basis of what we have: a (starting) community of different disciplines, all in the field of `clean textiles', a shared experience of a process in terms of an initiation, and a number of scenarios and visions that should be of help to guide our efforts.
Learnings and recommendations for facilitators The workshop is built up of a number of different activities each with their particular work style, respectively expertise, fantasy, through design and planning, back to expertise. In practice, the switch between one style of activity and the next can be hard to
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achieve. For example, when switching from expertise to fantasy, suddenly there are no limits, everything is possible, we go exactly against an expert's work style. In the case of this particular workshop, we did the expert's step the preceding evening, so the next morning we could start fresh with our excursions. In other words, the switch was made in a natural way. More pitfalls lie on the path: at some point, we need to come back from fantasizing to distilling useful principles and integrating these into our design or `force-fit'. This part is tough for untrained participants. Only after one has done this successfully a couple of times, one becomes familiar with this technique. It will always be hard to do, but one learns that it always works (it works because you believe it works). Another pitfall has to do with the translation of ideas into concrete action plans. Next to the fact that the participants have already spent lots of energy in a creative excursion, one suddenly comes back into the daily prac-
tice of agendas, priorities, personal consequences of particular plans, etc. The group can then easily block if the conditions for the workshop have not been set right (e.g. trust and shared ownership). One should try to stay away from `standard meeting procedures' and politics (i.e. influencing each other's values and priorities) as this might take the group away from consensus. If during the different phases of the process, different sets of conditions are in order, in general terms, the following list of recommendations applies most of the time: 1. work to obtain an atmosphere of openness, trust and playful learning and discovery; 2. keep a balance between active input and passive listening for participants in the group; 3. lots of air, light, short breaks and movement; 4. provide a possibility for each person to express their 'personality', e.g. let experts be experts ± once people have been
Picture 4. One of the more concrete ideas: the `Fridge-O-Mat'.
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allowed to demonstrate their selves to themselves and to others in the group ± then participants will more easily suspend judgement and accept moves to new, unfamiliar domains; 5. provide information on the process and the kind of results that might be expected. This is somewhat paradoxical, as one doesn't want to lead participants to pre-established ideas. During this workshop, we presented a number of solutions (scenarios) prepared before the workshop. The experts criticised these, but at the same time got an idea of what might be expected. In other words: an image within the expected solution-space is provided and at the same time, through the opposing action, the content is `broken down'. Afterwards, we did see ideas similar to the ones proposed, but these were newly generated by the participants. The idea is that the participants should be able to trust the process for a useful outcome, whatever that may become. 6. as social scientists might tell you, the facilitator has a key role in the process. The state of mind of the facilitator is reflected back by the group. In other words: the dynamics of the group will find a basis in the facilitator's demonstration of integrity, trust and creativity.
Concluding remarks Special approaches (processes and interventions) are needed when systems become obsolete, when the meanings that served to maintain and explain a system in a particular context cannot keep that system together any longer, e.g. in this case, systems to provide for the function of `clean textiles' in the context of changing environmental demands and sustainable development. Having to deal with the need for new solutions and the letting go of old habits make it a hazardous experience for the various parties in such a field. Politicians, experts, managers, consumers, users and entrepreneurs, all have their habitual ways to act within a particular context, and till then with success. But under changing circumstances, the rules of the game change, even the games themselves, and the reasons why we play these games sometimes become obsolete. An approach to deal with an event like this is to create a space in which participants from different disciplines find the courage and the trust to `suspend disbelief' to let new mean-
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ings and paths emerge. An effect of the future perfect process is that the participants will recognize themselves in the results, and through these, develop a sense of ownership, thereby improving the chance of a successful implementation. Dealing with pluriformity and complexity is one of the important challenges in today's society. To develop processes that make it possible to develop shared visions in this context is an important challenge for process consultants. The Future Perfect looks to be one of these.
Notes 1. A word of thanks to Will McWhinney (Enthusion, Venice CA) for his continuous mentorship and assistance and to Bas van den Broek (student at the Delft University) for reproducing the flip-chart drawings so beautifully. 2. The Future Perfect as described in this paper is an extended version of the Future Perfect as described in McWhinney and McCulley (1993) and Ziegler (1982). 3. This project was initiated by Prof. Philip Vergragt of the DTO program and co-facilitated by Rens Meijkamp and Helga Hohn. 4. For more information on Sustainable Development, you might want to look at Magretta (1997), Hart (1997) and van den Berg and Mooij (1996) 5. The `force-fit' is a procedure used in creative thinking to make connections between some analogy (in this case the zoo) and the original issue: clean textiles. It comes forth from the Synectics procedure (Gordon 1961). 6. Later on in the text, I will refer to this perspective as the `snow flake analogy'. 7. By `untrained group' I mean groups of people not familiar with creative activities, a.o. with the frustration that can precede some creative breakthrough. 8. The word hypothesis is used instead of `idea' because the AHA or creative breakthrough can happen in terms of an idea, but also in terms of reframing the problem, or finding more useful perspective on some issue. 9. At this point, I make a distinction between two domains from which to look at the world, one being the literal `expert' domain with its jargon and skills, and implicitly, with the habits, values, criteria and thinking patterns that come with the trade, it is goal oriented, overseeing consequences, politically correct, etc., and another domain which is more intuitive, where analogies and metaphors play an important role, where play and fun `lure' the participant into `being in the moment', in other words, to facilitate a state of `suspension of disbelief'. Put simply (but arguable): a left-brain and a right brain approach. 10. With reference to the earlier described snow flake analogy, in which the solid and the liquid
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state stand for respectively the expert domain and the fantasy domain. 11. These ideas are meant as illustrations of possible outcomes. It is not a full report of results. These were presented in van der Wel's contribution `Results of the Workshop ``Washing Services''' in Vergragt et al. 1995.
References Bateson, Gregory (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Jason Aronson, Northvale. Bergh, J. van den, and de Mooij, R. (1996) Economische Groei en Milieubehoud: Visies vergeleken. Milieu, The Netherlands. Buijs, Jan (1992) Fantasies as strategic stepping stones: from swot analysis to SWOT synthesis. In Creativity and Innovation: Quality Breakthroughs. ICG, TNO, Delft, The Netherlands. Catford, Lorna and Ray, Michael (1991) The Path of the Everyday Hero: Drawing on the Power of Myth to Meet Life's Most Important Challenges. Jeremy Tarcher, Los Angeles. Clarck, Kim B. and Fujimoto, Takahiro (1990) The power of product integrity. Harvard Business Review, November/December. Feldman, David Henry, Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Gardner, Howard (1994) Changing the World: A Framework for the Study of Creativity. Praeger, Westport, USA. Foster, Richard N. (1986) Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage. Summit, New York. Frankl, Victor E. (1959) Man's Search for Meaning. Washington Square Press, New York. Fritz, Robert (1984, 1989) The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Life. Ballantine, New York. Gordon, William J.J. (1961) Synectics. Harper and Row, New York. Hart, Stuart L. (1997) Beyond greening, strategies for a sustainable world. Harvard Business Review, January/February. Hicks, Michael J. (1991) Problem Solving in Business and Management, Hard, Soft and Creative Approaches. Chapman and Hall, London. Kolb, D.A. (1976) Management and the learning process, California Management Review, XVIII. Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. Chicago Press. Land, George and Jarman, Beth (1992) Breakpoint and Beyond, Mastering the Future Today. Harper Business. Levitt, T. (1960) Marketing myopia, Harvard Business Review, July/August. Lewin, Kurt (1951) Field Theory in Social Science. Harper and Row, New York. Magretta, Joan, (1997) Growth through global sustainability, an interview with Monsanto's CEO, Robert B. Shapiro, Harvard Business Review, January/February. Martin, John N.T. and Henry, Jane (1990) Problem solving by manipulation of imagery. In Creativity and Innovation: Learning from Practice.
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Innovation Consulting Group TNO, Delft, The Netherlands. May, Rollo (1975) The Courage to Create, Norton, New York. McWhinney, Will (1992) Paths of Change: Strategic Choices for Organizations and Society. Sage, Newbury Park. McWhinney, Will and McCulley, Eleanor (1993) Creating Paths of Change. Enthusion, Venice, CA. McWhinney, Will, (1993) All creative people are not alike, Creativity and Innovation Management, 2 (1), 3±16. McWhinney, Will (1995) The matter of Einstein square dancing with Magritte. Paper presented at the VUB conference `Einstein meets Magritte' in Brussels. Morgan, Gareth (1986) Images of Organizations. Sage, Beverly Hills. Nolan, Vincent (1989) The Innovator's Handbook: Problem Solving, Communication and Teamwork. Penguin Books, London. Parker, Marjorie (1990) Creating Shared Vision: The Story of a Pioneering Approach to Organizational Revitalization. Norwegian Center for Leadership Development, Norway. Sandner, Donald (1979) Navaho Symbols of Healing: A Jungian Exploration of Ritual, Image & Medicine, Healing Arts Press, Vermont, USA. SchoÈn, Donald, A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic, Harper Collins. SchoÈn, Donald A. and Rein, Martin (1994) Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies. Basic, Harper Collins. Senge, Peter, M. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. Doubleday, NY. Schein, Edgar, H. (1991) Organizational Culture and Leadership. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Schein, Edgar H. (1987) Process Consultation, Volume II: Lessons for Managers and Consultants. Addison-Wesley, Reading, USA. Schein, Edgar H. (1988) Process Consultation, Volume I (2nd edn). Its Role in Organization Development. Addison-Wesley, Reading, USA. Sievers, Burkhard (1984) Motivation as a surrogate for meaning. Arbeitspapiere des Fachbereichs Wirtschaftswissenschaft der Bergischen UniversitaÈt ± Gesamthochschule Wuppertal, Germany. Sievers, Burkard (1994) Work, Death and Life Itself: Essays on Management and Organization. de Gruyter, Berlin. Tassoul, Marc (1994) A session that made sense. In Creativity and Innovation: The Power of Synergy. Fourth European Conference on C&I, Geschka & Partner, Darmstadt, Germany. Tassoul, Marc (1994) book review `Creating paths of change, strategic choices for organizations and society', Will McWhinney, in: M&O, 48ste jaargang, November/December. Tassoul, Marc (1997) Making sense of design. In IMPACT, the Fifth European conference on Creativity and Innovation, EACI, The Netherlands. Vanosmael, Pros and De Bruijn, Roger (1990) Handboek voor Creatief Denken. DNB/Pelckmans, Kapellen, Belgium.
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Vergragt, Philip, van der Wel, Marjan, Meykamp, Rens and Tassoul, Marc (1995) Involving Industry in Back-Casting Scenario Building, 4th Greening of Industry Conference, Toronto, Canada. Vroom, Piet (1989) De tranen van de krokodil (The tears of the Crocodile). Ambo, Baarn, The Netherlands. Weisbord, Marvin R. (1993) Discovering Common Ground. Berret-Koehler, San Francisco, USA.
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Ziegler, Warren L. (1982). A Mindbook of Exercises for Future Invention. Future Invention Associates, Denver, USA.
Marc Tassoul works at the Department of Industrial Design, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands.
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Book of the Quarter Reviewed by Tudor Rickards Herbert A. Simon (1997) Models of Bounded Rationality Vol 3: Empirically Grounded Reason, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, UK, ISBN 0 262 19372 8, 457pp, Index. £42.50 cloth.
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decade and a half ago, as Herbert Simon explains in the introduction to this book, the author completed the second volume of his collected works in the economic and social sciences. Fortunately for him and his many admirers, his abilities and energies have been sustained into his eighth decade. This volume contains collected papers from the 1980s and 1990s, and will be an obligatory reference text for many organisational researchers. Fortunately, this is not just a book for specialists. It does contain a few mathematical papers, but even these are not too demanding, and non-specialists should at least be able to follow their general intention and relevance. For the most part the book contains work that is both rich conceptually and yet accessible. Simon has a reputation of a polymath, working in many fields, sometimes dominating the debate ± for example in areas of artificial intelligence and computer creativity, and even more controversially, in the debate into the human decision-processes and the assumptions of modern (`neo-classical') economics. Here we see the great unifying preoccupations to which Simon returns (or maybe never leaves) over the years. Business students learn a few almost mythic facts about Simon. His long-term association with Carnegie-Mellon Institute where he shared the pioneering work into a behavioural theory of the firm with Richard Cyert, and James March. His Nobel Laureate in economics, although his work has been consistently opposed to some of the most deeply held theoretical formulations still taught as economic orthodoxy. If anything, this book confirms the importance that Simon continues to attach to what he sees as the profound weakness of economic theories, a failure to incorporate empirically convincing features of individual behaviour. He targets in these pages the assumption needed for economic models to
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work, which he terms the assumption of substantively rational economic actors. He is at pains to point out that he does not deny that many economic decisions result from a kind of rationality of reasoning, that he calls procedural rationality. The former substantive rationality assumes that decision outcomes are those that arise as if the decisions have been objectively taken. Procedural rationality concerns itself with whether the behaviours are recognisably reasonable ± regardless of theoretical outcomes. Simon says firmly that all the evidence favours procedural rationality, but not substantive rationality. He further believes that attempts to defend substantive rationality with contemporary economics have developed cunning means of justifying this basic flaw. Milton Friedman, for example, argues that the as if assumption is valuable, and at least harmless, as long as the observed economic outcomes fit the theory. Simon remains unconvinced, and suggests that radical changes to the theory are needed. He points to the difficulties from such a starting point of substantive rationality in formulating a consistent theoretical about various observed features of the economic world including individual altruism, business cycles, and inflation characteristics. These turn out to be very important issues for the future of economic thought. According to Simon, the various disputes remain peripheral to the deeper sets of agreements among economists. He is particularly interesting in his illustrations from proposals that might be considered more to the left or right of a political spectrum. Keynes, to the left, challenges contemporary economic thought only by assuming a lapse in rationality among workers who fail to distinguish wages and real value of those wages. Lucas, to the right, assumes a lapse in rationality among business people who confuse a rise in monetary prices and `real' prices. In a delightful turn of phrase Simon observes dryly: # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
BOOK OF THE QUARTER
`In the case of Keynes, the liberal, the money illusion is suffered by labour; in the case of Lucas, the conservative, it is suffered by businessmen. Presumably we know our friends better than we know strangers! (p. 426)' He points out that each of the two distinguished theorists shared core beliefs, and merely added a different grain of irrationality, which lead to very different theories and policy implications.
Bounded rationality and creativity Simon's high level goal is to bring a deeper empirical and behavioural dimension into economic thought. This contributes to his other intellectual contributions. He has worked extensively on artificial intelligence problems. Might computers provide a means of complementing the limited procedural rationality of over-stretched human brains? Perhaps. He concludes that the economic and social consequences of the information technology revolution will depend on the wider social and political decisions that will be made. In any event we need to become more sensitised to the importance of `the growing imbalance between our capacity for producing information and our capacity for absorbing it' (p. 134). Perhaps inevitably he has found the concept of creativity to be of relevance to his wider interests. He has directed research towards demonstrating that creativity can be at least replicated by computers. Claims have been made of computer programmes that can discover natural laws, and even discover some previously unknown ones. There seems scope for a greater integration of ideas about bounded rationality and creativity. Might some of the empirical studies of the latter suggest mechanisms for the former? If not it is possibly because Simon seems as suspicious of the irrationality of the notion of creative insight as he is of the unfeasibility of `pure' substantive rationality. Someone like de Bono would argue that human information processing is smart because it is limited and biased. Charles Handy has made a related case of unreasonable ideas and actions as a means of progressing in an `age of unreason'. Simon is not comfortable with such a defence of what he might see as anti-rational. Bounded rationality remains a weakened but necessary kind of rationality. Computers can compensate for the weakness. This may well be a shrewd strategic decision to gain acceptance for his
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ideas ± he hints as much in the book. This explains why he has consistently chosen to present his ideas in the language of economic orthodoxy. Similarly, a majority of `serious' researchers into creativity have espoused the language of cognitive psychology, although as far as I am aware none has won a Nobel prize.
Assessing Simon's contributions It is a daunting task to attempt any kind of judgement on the collective works of Herbert Simon. It is some consolation that no single reviewer is likely to be able to assess the various and wide-ranging contributions. Subject experts will continue to content the finer details of his assertions in learned journals for years to come. And yet there are some rather straightforward conclusions that can be drawn from a reading of this volume. First, Simon is a brilliant communicator of complex ideas. For this alone he deserves to be read and studied as a way into research controversies (some of which he has rather singlehandedly triggered). Secondly he is both a serious researcher and revolutionary. Sometimes he seems to conceal his revolutionary intentions beneath the cloak of the disinterested researcher. For example, his ideas on altruism seem closer to philosophy than a convincing theory-linked analysis, although he gets up to the kinds of practice ± of mathematical analysis from somewhat doubtful premises ± of which he is so dismissive in the work of neo-classical economists. Thirdly he is a visionary who is suspicious of such dangerous behavioural processes, and professes belief in the power of reason, albeit limited by human information processing capabilities and procedures.
Own or borrow I cannot recommend this book too highly. It is a must for anyone wishing to study the processes of human decision-making. It stands as an example of how complex matters can be communicated through lucidity of prose style. As a more convincing theory of creativity is developed it will have to take into account Simon's ideas. On the other hand I concede that many practical managers may feel the subject is too far removed from influencing their day to day decisions to warrant purchase. Even then I would suggest that you borrow a copy and read it as one of the most authoritative statements available of human information processes.
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Book Review Bengt Karlof, Conflicts of leadership: good for people or good for business? 1996, ISBN 0-47196641-X, hardback, 153pp., Wiley, UK. £24.95 Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth James MacGregor Burns, Leadership
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t the top of the agenda of AMA's 1996 Top Management Forum (TMF) was leadership ± what does it mean, and what can it contribute to the workplace? One of the major conclusions was that leadership is always going to be a subject for discussion as corporations continue to define and refine who they are' (Johnson 1996). Understanding leadership is never easy, but in a time of global recession and unsettling political and social upheavals, exercising powerful and successful leadership is more difficult than ever before (Sarros et al. 1993). In keeping with these issues the author, a consultant/ partner in Karlof Consulting, Stockholm, Sweden, has written this book. It has tried to identify the main conflicts faced in the business of corporate leadership, and has developed a model (COCE (customers, owners, costs and employees) ). This shows how leadership conflicts act and react on the interest of these four groups. The author is not concerned with a leader's reputation in terms of what sort of person he or she is, but in terms of how well the enterprise is run with reference to: Customers (users); Owners or equivalent principals; Costs (productivity); Employees or those who depend on the enterprise for their livelihood (pp. 5±6). I have no problem with these four building-blocks of the model, but the author has provided no rationale or previous literature backing his choice of building-blocks. The basic idea is borrowed from Roger Sperry's research on the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The author takes the view that the human mind is better equipped to cope with either value or productivity, i.e. to create value for customers and the need to do so at a low enough cost to assure the future of the enterprise and show some kind of profit (p. 11).
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The author has applied this idea to Value vs Productivity; Operative Leadership vs Strategic Leadership; Continual Improvement vs Breakthrough Improvement; Fact Base vs Judgement; Organic Growth vs Structural Growth; Centralization vs Decentralization; Market Economy vs Planned Economy; Business Management vs Capital Management; Thought vs Action; and Good Times vs Bad Times. As one can imagine, the author has shown a great deal of ambition to cover all this material in a volume of 146 pages. It is impossible to go into any sort of depth about these issues given the length of the book; consequently the treatment of the topics is inevitably superficial. Hence for me, as an academic, this book falls into what I call the `Pop Book' category. However, I would like to point out that this aspect of the book makes it a very good simple guide which would be an interesting read for consultants and managers, who sometimes cannot spare time to go into the theoretical details of all these issues. This book also presents `to the point' examples from the real world of business (e.g. GM, Ford, Astra Pharmaceuticals, SAS and many more) which beautifully underpins the theory the author presents.
References Burns, J.M. (1978) Leadership. Harper & Row, New York. Johnson, M. (1996) Taking the lid off leadership, Management Review, 85 (11), 59±61. Sarros, J.C. and Woodman, D.S. (1993) Leadership in Australia and its organisational outcomes, Leadership & Organisation Development Journal, 14 (4), 3±9.
Faisal Q. Khokhar Manchester Business School
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Book Notices Susan Moger Makimoto, Tsugio and Manners, David (1997) Digital Nomad, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, ISBN 0-471-97499-4 paperback, 245pp, indexed £14.99
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his book examines the future consequences of two factors; mankind's interest in travel and the technological possibilities which will permit instant communication from anywhere on the globe. Unlike other work which merely marvels at the capacity to wear a computer on your wrist and the potential for microchips to transform industrial processes, the authors consider the political and social impacts of major
technological changes. They argue that these developments may lead to the rise of the global nomad; someone who earns their sustenance by the power of their brain and because of the sophistication of communications technology is not tied to living in one place. They suggest that the potentially politically and economically destabilising effects of lack of permanent residence will need to be considered.
Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline, (1996) Kellogg's Six-Hour Day, Temple University Press, Philadephia, PA, paperback, ISBN 1-56639-448-1, 262pp, indexed. Benajmin Kline Hunnicutt is Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Iowa. In this book he describes the establishment of a daily six-hour shift system at the Kellogg's cereal factory in Battle Creek, Michigan, USA, and its subsequent influence on the debate concerning work and leisure in the heart of Capitalist America. Replacing the previous three shifts of eight hours each, the scheme was designed to give more employment in the Battle Creek area during the depression years. Hunnicutt argues that it was the first manifestation of `Liberation Capitalism' and suggests that; This form of capitalist organisation would be founded on freedom ± the free choice of the capitalist to reduce work time, and the free choice of the workers to accept shorter hours as a benefit, on a par with higher wages. The worker, manager and owner were making sound, free choices for their
own benefit. The result would be a shift of the centre of American life from necessity/ work to freedom/leisure. p. 14 Fundamentally the system meant that the workplace was no longer the centre of life; work was a means to earn the capacity to do other things, which took as much if not more attention than the job. More leisure meant the opportunity to build meaningful activities, involving family and community, outside the work environment. Following World War II the six hour shift was gradually phased out and increasingly, according to Hunnicutt, the workplace once again became the focus of peoples' lives; giving meaning and structure to their existence. This book deals with an important subject; how our lives can be defined by the way our work is structured. It will be of interest to anyone who wishes to go more deeply into the impact of work organization.
Glacel, Barbara Pate and Robert, Emile, A. (1997) Lightbulbs for Leaders: A Guidebook for Team Learning, John Wiley & Sons, hardback, 146 pp, ISBN 0-471-14663-3, no index, £14.99 This book features `A Tale of Teamwork and Continuous Learning'; a fictional account of the practice of leadership in teams devoted # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
to continuous improvement in manufacturing industry. Using the well-established teamwork cycle `Forming, Storming, Norming,
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and Performing', the first part of the book is an extended case study demonstrating the key learning principles of team formation and process. The second section, The Light Bulbs indicates the principles of team work. Showing up, being attentive, telling the truth, being open to outcomes, are key lessons here. The title of this book may not appeal to many conventially educated managers. This
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is a pity, because it deals with important issues succinctly and well. The authors invite the reader to compare their experiences with those of the fictional team and thus apply the case study to their own experience. This work will be valuable to all those grappling with the issues of team based working and could provide the basis of a vocabulary of change leadership within a team or organisation.
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Tribute ± J. Daniel Couger PhD It was with great sadness that we learned of the death of Dan Couger, on 20 October 1997, following a long and courageous battle with cancer. He was 68. Dan was Distinguished Professor of Information Systems in the College of Business, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA. He joined the University in 1965 and was a founding faculty member of the campus, and founder and Director of the Center for Research on Creativity and Innovation. He became one of the leading experts in information systems in the US and combined his expertise in this field with a deep interest in creativity and creative problem solving. He received numerous awards and honours, including being named a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (the first person from Colorado and the first from the University of Colorado system to receive that honour.) Recently the J. Daniel Couger Professorship in Information Systems (the first of its kind) was established in conjunction with former student Scott Oki of Microsoft Corporation.
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Tudor Rickards and I met Dan through our involvement with European and North American creativity conferences. We were fortunate enough to be asked to present the outcome of some of our work at the Hawaii International Conference Systems Sciences (HICSS), participating in the research track Dan organized. Readers of this journal will remember that he was our guest editor for volume 5, number 4, and that his book, Creative Problem Solving and Opportunity Finding, was the Book of the Quarter for that volume. Our abiding memory of Dan will be of a gifted, immensely knowledgeable colleague, whose wisdom, experience and integrity contributed so much to his field and his personal relationships. We send our condolences to his family and colleagues around the world. He will be sorely missed.
Susan Moger
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