Henning Asks Chris Conley About Building a Creative Culture

by Henning Fischer
October 9, 2007

Henning Fischer had a chance to speak with Chris Conley of Gravity Tank and the Institute of Design about his upcoming MX East presentation, Building a Creative Culture.

Henning Fischer [HF]: Hi, Chris. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. This is my chance to ask you the questions I wish I had while I was at the Institute of Design. My first question is why is a creative and productive organizational culture so hard to create?

Chris Conley [CC]: I think there are a few issues. The first is people have a lack of alignment in an organization around achieving a specific objective. And I’m not talking military clarity here, but a sense of shared purpose. Most organizations have a very sketchy idea of the broader purpose they have as a group. A company may be making mobile phones, but how is their ultimate purpose different than their best competitors? Young companies often start with this strong sense of purpose. But by the time a company grows in any significant way, it is harder and harder to maintain.

A second reason is that in the absence of a strong purpose, individuals simply try to do their job really well so they can advance. And there is nothing wrong with that, but unfortunately, prioritizing your job does not necessarily maximize the benefit to the organization overall.

Finally, organizations have simply lost a sense of what it actually means to be creative. For some reason, thinking and speaking are accepted as a more important work than thinking and making.

There is a tacit assumption that making is a production activity rather than a critical, informative one. Anyone who has ever been a part of a productive R&D team realizes that trying things and doing experiments is the fastest way to break into new territory. By putting a priority on thinking and talking (through email, meetings, and PowerPoint) our work activities and environments have become sterile and devoid of the tangible aspects of what were in business to create! You can’t tell by going into the offices of most companies what business they are actually in! Consider how challenging that inherently makes it for new people in the organization to understand and contribute creatively.

HF: I have been to a couple of those offices where you can’t tell what’s really going on. It’s especially depressing when those offices belong to the design group.

Does survivorship bias contribute to creative stagnation? To me there seems to be an almost reactionary thing going on. Organizations will break new ground, and then do almost everything they can to stop and consolidate that position and maximize returns. Motorola did that with the Razr and look where it got them. Before long, the organization realizes that it needs to recapture its creative voice and so begins the endless back and forth between breaking into new territory and holding your hard earned ground. The continuous need for bright, shiny, new strategies seems to be fed by the factors you described. What can people new to organizations, especially managers, do to refocus creatively stagnant groups?

CC: I think there are two big targets for action. The first is to really understand how new offerings get defined, developed, and launched in the organization. I am surprised by how many managers simply do not know how the organization brings ideas to market. It’s not that it is easy, but anyone who desires to drive new offerings to market should have a very good awareness of the organizational, cultural, and political contexts of how things really get done. Meeting with a wide range of people, interviewing folks about prior successes, and visually mapping this understanding is a great enabler.

The second action is to establish the right environment for the group to do great work. In a nutshell this involves mindset, approach to the work, and environment, or where you do the work. The mindset has to be one of prolific exploration focused on value creation. By this I mean knowing enough about the market, the company’s capabilities, and its business to explore ideas that address the organization’s opportunities. I contrast this with just working on ideas in isolation and pitching them to the organization. The approach to the work has to be tangible, iterative, and include very strong feedback mechanisms. This means the prolific exploration has to be regularly shared and the feedback given by the organization (and market) needs to help shape the ideas. Finally, the environment should support the visual display of the work and ideas and the interaction between people. The walls and tables should have the work of the group posted and be persistent. Also, having the teams work in these spaces is more productive than each working alone back in their cubicles.

HF: Are there minimum or basic requirements that you must have to build this kind of culture?

CC: I suppose the answer to this lies somewhat in my response to your first question. For example, a shared purpose larger than any given project must exist. This purpose will include values, beliefs, and the character of products or services the company feels only it can create. “Lexus: The relentless pursuit of excellence” and “Google: Search.” In this way, people can create new initiatives that are inline with that purpose and don’t lose their way as much.

The organization also needs two very important things: A culture of experimentation and a culture of critique. Experimentation is what gets new things out for others to experience. It is important to note that an experiment must be a tangible manifestation of the idea — not a verbal description! We can only think about ideas that people describe — you can’t experience them and you can’t know everything that could go wrong. And good experimentation “fails” at least 50% of the time — it means you’re learning something. So a company needs to try things at all levels: From small everyday ideas to new ideas about a whole business unit.

The second part, a culture of critique, means that people know how to evaluate and receive feedback on ideas. People who are evaluating have it easier. They should pretty much be allowed to try it out and say what they think. The person receiving criticism has to be able to listen to everything that is said and in turn, make the work better — to move it forward. A lot of organizations see critique as negative. But it is not; it should be exploratory.

Of course, having an organization that appreciates, manages, and rewards talent is also necessary. The emphasis on thinking and generic business skills has watered down organizations’ ability to recognize and reward specific talent. It’s ironic that in our private lives, we make such a big deal about talent i.e., from nurturing our kids to the passion we have for sports players and musicians. But in the word of business, we’ve gotten serious and sterile. What has happened to the recruitment and nurturing of specialists in consumer understanding, marketing, product design, and interaction design? Real talents! The best are orders of magnitude better than most other practitioners. But talent also needs creative direction. This is partly provided by the organization’s raison d’etre but a creative director should also guide it. Creative direction is not just for folks in the fashion and entertainment industries. They should be in our corporations R&D labs, marketing departments, and strategy groups. Creative direction helps relate abstract ideas to tangible manifestations that PEOPLE can understand or resonate with. What could be more necessary in out overly technology-mediated world?

HF: Where do you put that creative direction (and yourself)? Some people in the business press would take creative direction and the strengths of design thinking even further. Bruce Nussbaum over at Business Week claims that “managers have to BECOME designers, not just hire them,” all the way up to the CEO level. This seems a bit extreme. At the same time, Michael Bierut comes out saying (with significant justification) that we as designers might want to rethink our desire to get ourselves a place at the big table where decisions are made. Designers posing as grand strategists seem to be just as absurd as CEOs posing as designers.

CC: The trouble here is that we are equating or confusing the skills of a discipline, the traditional definition of a design professional, and roles/departments in an organization. As I posted on Bruce and Bierut’s blogs, thinking of designers becoming strategists or CEOs becoming designers is not the issue. It is whether some CEOs can adopt some of the mindset, principles, and values of design thinking in the work that they do. Essentially, is there an opportunity in the current context to accelerate the number of “design-enlightened” CEOs? Conversely, it is a question of whether some designers can carry their disciplinary background beyond the design department into other roles in an organization, such as strategy, marketing, or operations. In these new roles, the challenge for designers is to recognize the purpose and outcomes of strategy work are very different than the purpose and outcomes of development work. Neither is more important than the other, they are simply different. So you don’t practice design in the same way in the strategy group, nor in the marketing department, as you would in the design department.

HF: In the past you have frequently cited the way Pixar works as an example of high performance creativity. How do we reconcile Pixar’s approach with the EEEMP (emails, emails, emails, meetings, presentations) reality of corporate America? What is to be done?

CC: I really want to call up Pixar and ask if I can license their name for “The Pixar Management Method.” I think it would be the antidote to McKinsey, but cost more! The trouble is you can’t reconcile Pixar’s approach with a culture built around email, meetings, and presentations. It is because emails, meetings, and presentations are used for description and abbreviated communication — not experimentation and making.

Pixar is a great example for many reasons. Their animated feature film record of success is unprecedented. They basically create a new billion dollar franchise every four years or so. Most serious business people can only strategize about such success! The other reason is that they work very differently than most any corporation. The question is, “How do they do it?”

Well, they do many of the things that I have talked about and more. Pixar has a higher purpose that no competitor adheres to as strongly, “To create great stories.” This is a fundamentally human-centered mission. If moms, dads, and kids don’t relate to the story being told, all of the fancy computer graphics in the world won’t make it better. They believe this. They are also a director-led studio, this means the director holds responsibility for the quality of the film and guides the talent. They pair the director with a producer — a creatively different person who has responsibility for managing the time and budget. The director-producer relationship is critical — they need to fight regularly, not take it personally, and move the film along. Pixar recruits for artists and technologists that can make their work better through critique. And finally, they shape their films through a highly iterative and tangible process: They describe and make simultaneously and they don’t spend a couple of years researching and planning a film to “know” what they want to make and then release it into production. They begin sketching, painting, and experimenting from day one. This is how they figure out the film they need to make.

If corporations were to adopt these principles, behaviors, and values in their innovation-oriented work, they would be orders of magnitude more successful. Unfortunately there is a dearth of business talent that knows how to work this way. But I have found if you put pretty much anyone in the right creative context, they’ll start responding creatively and lose some of the counter productive behaviors that are so common in business environments today.

HF: This is very closely related to my first follow-up question, which was “What can people new to organizations, especially managers, do to refocus creatively stagnant groups?

The “right” creative context conjures up mental images of studios, whiteboards, prototyping labs, and all the goodies associated with those things. Where do you start building something like that, and how do you make that growth sustainable? That’s one of the top questions I have been asked by clients this year.

CC: There is no mystery about where you start. Indeed, studios, whiteboards, and prototyping labs are EXACTLY what should be built in the space they currently dedicate to cubes and meeting rooms. The challenge is that your clients may have lost the conviction that those things matter or are simply naive about how they would use them. The “new” way of working is to re-train the organization. I put scare quotes around it because it is exactly how we used to work. You remember photos from the 50s of all of our great companies like General Motors, Lockheed, IBM? The photos were of folks in rooms full of prototypes, drawings on the tables, and walls that were blackboards with sketches and drawings. They were building the businesses. That’s gone. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that tangible things don’t matter. To be fair, many people have a hard time knowing how to make their work tangible. But it can start by printing out and posting your Powerpoints on the wall as your working on them. As we’ve mentioned earlier, we only have generic offices and no sense of what we’re working on. So we need to train our corporate colleagues about how to work on something together — how to build things together. That will make it sustainable in any organization that believes in and commits to building an innovative culture.

HF: Chris, thanks so much. I’m going to try and dig up some of those old photos to use with clients. Looking forward to seeing you at MX East.

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