by Robyn Bolton | Aug 28, 2024 | Innovation, Leadership, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
You were born creative. As an infant, you had to figure many things out—how to get fed or changed, get help or attention, and make a onesie covered in spit-up still look adorable. As you grew older, your creativity grew, too. You drew pictures, wrote stories, played dress-up, and acted out imaginary stories.
Then you went to school, and it was time to be serious. Suddenly, creativity had a time and place. It became an elective or a hobby. Something you did just enough of to be “well-rounded” but not so much that you would be judged irresponsible or impractical.
When you entered the “real world,” your job determined whether you were creative. Advertising, design, marketing, innovation? Creative. Business, medicine, law, engineering? Not creative.
As if Job-title-a-determinant-of-creativity wasn’t silly enough, in 2022, a paper was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology that declared that, based on a meta-analysis of 259 studies (n=79,915), there is a “male advantage in creative performance.”
Somewhere, Don Draper, Pablo Picasso, and Norman Mailer high-fived.
But, as every good researcher (and innovator) knows, the headline is rarely the truth. The truth is that it’s contextual and complicated, and everything from how the original studies collected data to how “creativity” was defined matters.
But that’s not what got reported. It’s also not what people remember when they reference this study (and I have heard more than a few people invoke these findings in the three years since publication).
That is why I was happy to see Fortune report on a new study just published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The study cites findings from a meta-analysis of 753 studies (n=265,762 individuals) that show men and women are equally creative. When “usefulness (of an idea) is explicitly incorporated in creativity assessment,” women’s creativity is “stronger.”
Somewhere, Mary Wells Lawrence, Frida Kahlo, and Virginia Woolf high-fived.
Of course, this finding is also contextual.
What makes someone “creative?”
Both studies defined creativity as “the generation of novel and useful ideas.”
However, while the first study focused on how context drives creativity, the second study looked deeper, focusing on two essential elements of creativity: risk-taking and empathy. The authors argued that risk-taking is critical to generating novel ideas, while empathy is essential to developing useful ideas.
Does gender influence creativity?
It can. But even when it does, it doesn’t make one gender more or less creative than the other.
Given “contextual moderators” like country-level culture, industry gender composition, and role status, men tend to follow an “agentic pathway” (creativity via risk-taking), so they are more likely to generate novel ideas.
However, given the same contextual moderators, women follow a “communal pathway” (creativity via empathy), so they are more likely to generate useful ideas.
How you can use this to maximize creativity
Innovation and creativity go hand in hand. Both focus on creating something new (novel) and valuable (useful). So, to maximize innovation within your team or organization, maximize creativity by:
- Explicitly incorporate novelty and usefulness in assessment criteria. If you focus only on usefulness, you’ll end up with extremely safe and incremental improvements. If you focus only on novelty, you’ll end up with impractical and useless ideas.
- Recruit for risk-taking and empathy. While the manifestation of these two skills tends to fall along gender lines, don’t be sexist and assume that’s always the case. When seeking people to join your team or your brainstorming session, find people who have demonstrated strong risk-taking or empathy-focused behaviors and invite them in.
- Always consider the context. Just as “contextual moderators” impact people’s creative pathways, so too does the environment you create. If you want people to take risks, be vulnerable, and exhibit empathy, you must establish a psychologically safe environment first. And that starts with making sure there aren’t any “tokens” (one of a “type”) in the group.
Which brings us back to the beginning.
You ARE creative.
How will you be creative today?
by Robyn Bolton | Aug 18, 2024 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
AI is everywhere: in our workplaces, homes, schools, art galleries, concert halls, and even neighborhood coffee shops. We can’t seem to escape it. Some hope it will unlock our full potential and usher in an era of creativity, prosperity, and peace. Others worry it will eventually replace us. While both outcomes are extreme, if you’ve ever used AI to conduct research with synthetic users, the idea of being “replaced” isn’t so wild.
For the past month, I’ve beta-tested Crowdwave, an AI research tool that allows you to create surveys, specify segments of respondents, send the survey to synthetic respondents (AI-generated personas), and get results within minutes.
Sound too good to be true?
Here are the results from my initial test:
- 150 respondents in 3 niche segments (50 respondents each)
- 51 questions, including ten open-ended questions requiring short prose responses
- 1 hour to complete and generate an AI executive summary and full data set of individual responses, enabling further analysis
The Tool is Brilliant
It took just one hour to gather data that traditional survey methods require a month or more to collect, clean, and synthesize. Think of how much time you’ve spent waiting for survey results, checking interim data, and cleaning up messy responses. I certainly did and it made me cry.
The qualitative responses were on-topic, useful, and featured enough quirks to seem somewhat human. I’m pretty sure that has never happened in the history of surveys. Typically, respondents skip open-ended questions or use them to air unrelated opinions.
Every respondent completed the entire survey! There is no need to look for respondents who went too quickly, chose the same option repeatedly, or abandoned the effort altogether. You no longer need to spend hours cleaning data, weeding out partial responses, and hoping you’re left with enough that you can generate statistically significant findings.
The Results are Dangerous
When I presented the results to my client, complete with caveats about AI’s limitations and the tool’s early-stage development, they did what any reasonable person would do – they started making decisions based on the survey results.
STOP!
As humans, we want to solve problems. In business, we are rewarded for solving problems. So, when we see something that looks like a solution, we jump at it.
However, strategic or financially significant decisions should never rely ona single data source. They are too complex, risky, and costly. And they definitely shouldn’t be made based on fake people’s answers to survey questions!
They’re Also Useful.
Although the synthetic respondents’ data may not be true, it is probably directionally correct because it is based on millions and maybe billions of data points. So, while you shouldn’t make pricing decisions based on data showing that 40% of your target consumers are willing to pay a 30%+ premium for your product, it’s reasonable to believe they may be willing to pay more for your product.
The ability to field an absurdly long survey was also valuable. My client is not unusual in their desire to ask everything they may ever need to know for fear that they won’t have another chance to gather quantitative data (and budgets being what they are, they’re usually right). They often ignore warnings that long surveys lead to abandonment and declining response quality. With AI, we could ask all the questions and then identify the most critical ones for follow-up surveys sent to actual humans.
We Aren’t Being Replaced, We’re Being Spared
AI consumer research won’t replace humans. But it will spare us the drudgery of long surveys filled with useless questions, months of waiting for results, and weeks of data cleaning and analysis. It may just free us up to be creative and spend time with other humans. And that is brilliant.
by Robyn Bolton | Jul 31, 2024 | Leadership
Stop me if this sounds familiar. A new hire bounces into your office and, with all the joy and enthusiasm of a new puppy, rattles off a list of ideas. You smile and, just like with new puppies, explain why their ideas won’t work, and encourage them to be patient and get to know the organization.
Congratulations! You just cost your company money. Not because the new hire’s idea was the silver bullet you’ve been seeking but because you taught them that it’s more critical for them to do their jobs and maintain the status quo than to ask questions and share ideas.
If that seems harsh, read the new research from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson.
Year 1: Rainbows and Unicorns (mostly)
From 2017 through 2021, Dr. Edmonson and her colleagues collected data from over 10,000 physicians. Using biannual (every two years) surveys, they asked physicians to rate on a 5-point scale how comfortable they felt offering opinions or calling out the mistakes of colleagues or superiors.
It was little surprise that agreement with statements like “I can report patient safety mistakes without fear of punishment” were highest amongst people with less than one year of service at their employer.
These results all come down to one thing: high levels of psychological safety.
Years 2+: Resignation and Unhappiness
However, psychological safety erodes quickly in the first year because:
- There’s a gap between words and actions: When new hires join an organization, they believe what they hear about its culture, values, priorities, and openness. Once they’re in the organization and observe their colleagues’ and superiors’ daily behavior, they experience the disconnect, lose trust, and shift into self-protection mode.
- Their feedback and ideas are rebuffed: This scenario is described above, but it’s not the only one. Another common situation occurs when a new hire responds to requests for feedback only to be met with silence or exasperation, a lack of follow-through or follow-up, or is openly mocked or met with harsh pushback
- Expectations increase with experience: It’s easier to ask questions when you’re new, and no one expects you to know the answers. Over time, however, you are expected to learn the answers and you no longer feel comfortable asking questions, even if there’s no way you could know the answer.
20 years to regain what was lost in 1
According to Edmondson’s research, it takes up to 20 years to rebuild the safety lost in the first year.
As a leader, you can slow that erosion and accelerate the rebuilding when you:
- Recognize the Risk: Knowing that new hires will experience a drop in psychological safety, staff them on teams that have higher levels of safety
- Walk the Talk: Double down on demonstrating the behaviors you want. Immediately act on feedback that points out a gap between your words and actions.
- Ask questions: Demonstrate your openness by being curious, asking questions, and asking follow-up questions. As Edmonson writes, “You are training people to contribute by constantly asking questions.”
- Promises Made = Promises Kept: If you ask for feedback, act on it. If you ask for ideas, act on some and explain why you’re not executing others.
- Be Vulnerable: Admit your mistakes and uncertainties. It sets a powerful example that it’s okay to be imperfect and to ask for help. It also creates an environment for others to do the same.
The Cost of Silence vs. The Cost of Time
Building and maintaining psychological safety takes time and effort. It takes 5 minutes to listen to and respond to an idea. It takes hours to ensure new hires join safe teams. It takes weeks to plan and secure support for post-hackathon ideas.
But how does that compare to 20 years of lost ideas, improvements, innovations, and revenue? To 20 years of lost collaboration, productivity, and peak effectiveness? To 20 years of slow progress, inefficiency, and cost?
How many of your employees stick around 20 years to give you the chance to rebuild what was lost?
by Robyn Bolton | Jun 26, 2024 | Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
It’s not easy leading innovation. Especially these days. You need to do more with less. Take risks while guaranteeing results. Keep up with competition through incremental innovation and redefine the industry with radical and disruptive innovation. It’s maddening. Until you find the Goldilocks Zone of adjacent innovation.
Adjacent Innovation: From Middle Child to Just Right
As HBS Professor Regina E. Herzlinger and her co-authors point out in a recent HBR article, the US is in the midst of an innovation crisis. The cost of lost productivity, estimated at over $10 trillion between 2006 and 2018, is a stark reminder of the economic consequences of a lack of innovation. This figure, equivalent to $95,000 per US worker, should serve as a wake-up call to the importance of innovation in driving economic growth.
The authors identify the root cause of this loss as the ‘polarized approach companies take to innovation.’ While companies focus on incremental innovation, the safe and reliable oldest child of the innovation family, the VCs chase after radical, transformative innovations, the wild, charismatic, free-spirited youngest child. Meanwhile, adjacent innovation – new offerings and business models fo existing customers or new customers for existing offerings and business models – is, like the middle child, too often overlooked.
It’s time to rediscover it. In fact, it’s also time to embrace and pursue it as the most promising path back to growth. While incremental innovation is safe and reliable, it’s also the equivalent of cold porridge. Radical or transformative innovation is sexy, but, like hot porridge, it’s more likely to scorch than sustain you. Adjacent innovation, however, is just right – daring enough to change the game and leapfrog the competition and safe enough to merit investment and generate short-term growth.
Proof in the Porridge: 4x the returns in ½ the time
Last year, I worked with an industrial goods company. Their products aren’t sexy, and their brands are far from household names, but they make the things that make America run and keep workers (and the public) safe. The pandemic’s supply chain disruptions battered their business, and their backlog ballooned from weeks to months and even years. Yet amidst these challenges, they continued to look ahead, and what they saw was a $6M revenue cliff that had to be filled in three years and a product and innovation pipeline covered in dust and cobwebs.
From Day 1, we agreed to focus on adjacent innovation. For four weeks, we brainstormed, interviewed customers, and analyzed their existing offerings and capabilities, ultimately developing three concepts – two new products for existing customers and one existing product repositioned to serve a new customer. After eight more weeks of work, we had gathered enough data to reject one of the concepts and double down on the other two. Three months later, the teams had developed business cases to support piloting two of the concepts.
It took 6 months to go from a blank piece of paper to pilot approval.
It took just another 12 months to record nearly $25M in new revenue.
Those results are more than “just right.”
Be Goldilocks. Pursue Adjacent Innovation
Every organization can pursue adjacent innovation. In fact, most of the companies we consider amongst the world’s “Most Innovative” have that reputation because of adjacent innovation.
How will you become your organization’s Innovation Goldilocks and use adjacent innovation to create “just right” growth?
by Robyn Bolton | May 14, 2024 | Press Mentions
