Creativity and Discipline

Creative Abrasion

The group must be able to generate new ideas through discourse and debate.

Instead of obediently following the instructions, the members must debate and argue. Creative abrasion has two essential ingredients: intellectual diver-sity and intellectual conflict.

Creative Agility

The organisation must be able to test new ideas quickly with multiple exper-iments. This must be followed by a reflection on and learning from the results of the experiments. Then plans must be adjusted on the basis of the newly acquired knowledge, and new tests and experiments must follow. This cycle must be repeated until a good solution is found or it becomes clear that the basic idea is not going to work.

Creative Resolution

The organisation must be able to make integrative decisions that combine disparate or even opposing ideas.

flawed analysis, a lack of transparency or poor management. Google, for ex-ample, can encourage risk-taking and tolerate failures because it can be sure that most of its employees are fully competent since each year the company gets over two million applications for five thousand positions.

Maintaining a healthy balance between tolerating failures and eliminating incompetence is not easy. A series of interviews with over 100 employees of Amazon included stories of employees crying at their desks amid enormous performance pressures. One reason that makes striking a balance difficult is that the causes of failure are not always clear.

Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined

Organisations that embrace experimentation are accustomed to uncertainty and ambiguity. They tend to experiment to learn rather than to create a prod-uct that is immediately marketable. However, without discipline, almost an-ything can be labeled as an experiment. Discipline-oriented organisations se-lect experiments with due consideration, on the basis of their potential learn-ing value, and they design them in a way that they can yield as much infor-mation as possible compared to the costs. Right at the outset, they establish clear criteria for deciding whether to move forward with, modify, or kill an experiment. They face the facts generated by the experiments in an unbiased manner, i.e. they admit if their initial hypothesis was wrong, and they are willing to kill or significantly modify even those projects that once seemed promising. Being disciplined about killing unsuccessful projects reduces the risk of trying new things. Senior executives must set an example, for in-stance, by demonstrating a willingness to kill projects they personally initi-ated or to change their minds on the basis of the data generiniti-ated by the exper-iments.

Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid

In a psychologically safe organisational climate, individuals can speak openly about problems without fear of reprisal. Psychological safety is a two-way street: it is safe for us to criticize the ideas of others, and it is also safe for them to criticize mine – whether they are higher or lower in the organisa-tion. Unvarnished candor is critical to innovation because it fosters the de-velopment of new ideas.

In some organisations, confronting one another about different ideas, meth-ods, and results, as well as sharp criticism is all part of the game. Everyone is expected to be able to defend their proposals with data and logic. In other organisations, the climate is overly polite, and words are carefully selected,

criticism is muffled (at least in the open) because to challenge too strongly is to risk looking like one is not a team player.

When it comes to innovation, the candid organisation will always outperform the nice one. The latter confuses politeness and niceness with respect. Frank-ness is not opposed to respecting, in fact, frank criticism is one of the hall-marks of respect. We can only accept a devastating critique of our own ideas if we respect the contrary opinion of others.

Brutally candid organisations are not necessarily the most comfortable envi-ronments in which to work. To outsiders and newcomers, the atmosphere may seem to be aggressive and hard-edged. People do not mince their words.

Everything anyone says is scrutinized by the others, regardless of the per-son’s position.

Building a culture of the open debate may be challenging in organisations where people tend to shy away from confrontation or where debate is viewed as violating norms of civility. Senior executives need to set an example by criticizing others’ ideas constructively yet without being abrasive. They can encourage this culture of debate by demanding criticism of their own ideas and proposals.

Collaboration but with Individual Accountability

People who work in a collaborative culture find it natural to seek help from colleagues, regardless of whether providing such help is included in their colleagues’ formal job descriptions. They have a sense of collective respon-sibility for their work. Nevertheless, collaboration often gets confused with consensus. An exaggerated focus on reaching consensus can be detrimental to rapid decision-making. Someone has to make a decision and be accounta-ble for it. Committees might prepare decisions, teams might put forward pro-posals, but at the end of the day, specific individuals have to make critical decisions—deciding about product features, the selection of suppliers, strat-egies, marketing plans, among others.

Collaboration and personal accountability complement each other. Any de-cision-maker shutting themselves off from feedback or from collaboration with who could help them would commit an error.

Flat but Strong Leadership

An organisational chart shows the structural flatness of a company but re-veals nothing about its cultural flatness. In culturally flat organisations, peo-ple are given ampeo-ple scope for taking actions, making decisions, and voicing

their opinions. Deference is based on competence, not the title. Culturally flat organisations tend to respond more quickly to rapidly changing circum-stances because decision-making is decentralized and closer to the sources of relevant information. They typically generate a richer diversity of ideas than hierarchical organisations, because they tap the knowledge, expertise, and perspectives of a larger number of contributors.

A lack of hierarchy, however, does not mean a lack of leadership. Flat organ-isations require stronger leadership than hierarchical ones. If the leaders fail to set and communicate clear strategic priorities and to give directions, flat organisations slide into chaos. Both Amazon and Google are very flat organ-isations in which decision-making and accountability are delegated to lower levels and employees at all levels enjoy a high degree of autonomy to pursue their innovative ideas. At the same time, both companies have extremely strong and visionary leaders, who clearly communicate the goals and how their respective organisations should operate.

Flatness does not mean that the management distances itself from operational details or projects. On the contrary, flatness allows leaders to be closer to them. They must be capable of articulating compelling visions and clearly explaining the strategies while simultaneously being competent with tech-nical and operational issues. Steve Jobs was a great example of such a leader:

he laid out strong visions for Apple while being passionately focused on tech-nical and design issues. As regards employees, flatness requires them to de-velop their own leadership capacities, to be comfortable with taking inde-pendent actions, and to be accountable for their decisions.

There are three obstacles that make it difficult to build and sustain an inno-vative culture¹⁰¹. First, an innovative culture requires a combination of ap-parently contradictory behaviours and, thus, might create confusion. For ex-ample, if a major project fails, it is difficult to decide how to react. Should we hold someone accountable? Should we have made different decisions?

What can we learn from this failure? And so on.

Second, certain behaviours required for an innovative culture can be em-braced more easily than others. Those who view innovation as a free-for-all will see discipline as an unnecessary constraint on their creativity, while those who like the anonymity of consensus will be reluctant to accept per-sonal accountability.

101 Pisano, Gary P. op. cit.

Third, innovative cultures are systems of interdependent behaviours, which cannot be implemented in a piecemeal fashion, only together and concur-rently. Behavioural patterns complement and reinforce each other. Highly competent people find it natural to make decisions and to be accountable;

thus, their ‘failures’ are likely to yield learning rather than waste. Disciplined experimentation will cost less and yield more useful information. Accounta-bility makes it easier to become flat, and in flat organisations, information flows faster, which leads to quicker and smarter decision-making.

Leaders must make it clear to their entire organisation that an innovative cul-ture is not all fun and games, but it also entails discipline and responsibility.

They must be aware that there are no short cuts in building an innovative culture. Breaking the organisation into smaller units or creating autonomous

‘skunk works’ can be similar to innovative start-up culture, yet they rarely work. Breaking a bureaucratic organisation into smaller units might be use-ful, but it does not magically create the required entrepreneurial spirit. That requires a change in values, norms, and behaviours as well. The challenge of building innovative cultures should not be underestimated.

Innovative cultures can be unstable, and when the signs of imbalance appear, intervention is needed to restore balance. This requires leaders to demon-strate, with their own efforts, the ability to strike that balance themselves.

Pál Danyi

3.4. Corporate Entrepreneurship and