5 Psychological Traits of Highly Innovative Organizations – Innovation Excellence
When creating an innovation team, we often put a lot of thought and effort into bringing the right functional expertise together. Making sure we have diverse marketing, design, engineering, product supply, finance, research and innovation working together early in the process is certainly smart. But for a team to deliver big, disruptive ideas that will have separation and longevity versus competition, focusing only on functional expertise is not enough. We also need the right mix of personalities, of youth and experience, cognitive diversity, and need to hit the ‘sweet-spot’ between narrow and broad expertise. Getting this mix right helps ensure not only good team dynamics, but also a team that naturally challenges itself, and balances speed of execution with an innate propensity to reach beyond the usual suspects, and strive for big, disruptive, game changing ideas. Of course, it’s much easier to get the right balance of technical capability than some of these other, sometimes more intangible traits. But tools like personality tests, together with identifying and bringing in analogical innovators and deep critical thinkers, and then wrapping the team in principles derived from the scientific method can help us to create high performing innovation teams that go beyond a simple, albeit essential mix of functional expertise.
But to do this consistently also requires thinking beyond individual teams. Who we can bring into an innovation team is obviously highly dependant upon our talent pool, and this is in turn dependant upon who we recruit, retain and develop within the broader organization. But many companies struggle to recruit and develop ‘different’ or analogical thinkers. For example, analogical thinkers tend to be late bloomers, simply because they have many interests, and so often lack the narrow focus that delivers the early track record of success we look for in high achievers straight out of college. We also tend to deselect people who don’t ‘fit the mold’, and a lot of corporate training is still designed to fill ‘gaps’ in performance, which risks further the talent pool, and/or weeding out the different. Even when a maverick slips through the net, many survive despite of, not because of the culture and reward system! This is all quite understandable, as atypical people require more time and resource. But in an innovation context, it’s hard to deliver disruptive innovation without cultivating and retaining some disruptive people, and organizations that do so will likely have a growing advantage as the pace of innovation increases. I suspect that unintended homogenization is a contributing factor to why big companies can struggle to disrupt themselves, although there are obviously many other factors that tie the hands of incumbent market leaders. At the end or this article, I’ll also share some anecdotes around my time at P&G, and how we tried, with varying levels of success, to manage this challenge. But first, a few general thoughts on how we can increase cognitive diversity in both organizations and teams, and use the scientific method to productively manage the creative tensions that, when harnessed effectively, can catalyze disruptive thinking.
I promised I’d also come back to evolution, and somebody smarter than I could probably write an entire book on the benefits to innovation of understanding evolution. For example, there are well documented benefits to understanding evolutionary trends, as in TRIZ, or the TIPS theory of inventive problem solving. Pulsed evolution is a powerful analogy that can help us understand when early adopters and/or disruptive technology may or may not be valuable. Evolutionary psychology is a powerful tool for understanding and separating real from imagined gender differences and overlaps. Looking at growth through an evolutionary lens can help us to manage non-linear trends, and provide insights into how to manage external variation in growth and resources. Perhaps most valuable of all, evolution can provide insights into developing more sustainable innovations from the life cycle and systems perspective, rather than from the viewpoint of the individual initiative. In nature, nothing is wasted, and any residue or pollutant represents a resource and evolutionary niche for some adaptation.
Personality Models. I promised I’d dive a bit deeper into personality models. These are of course not new to the corporate world, where we’ve been using personality tests like Myers Briggs for years. But we’ve typically used these to weed out unsuitable candidates far more than we’ve used then to build cognitive diversity into our organizations or teams. And, frankly, there are far better models than Myers-Briggs, such as OCEAN and HEXACO, that are better supported by cognitive science. Until recently, I favored OCEAN (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), and discussed this in detail in an Innovation Excellence blog a few years ago. It’s still a great model, but David Buss, a leading evolutionary psychologist from the University of Texas recently introduced me to a modification of this called HEXACO that I now prefer, and which is gaining ground with the psychology community in general.
Honesty-Humility. Apart from the obvious, this measures how likely someone is to manipulate others, and to break rules.
Emotional Stability.Susceptible to negative emotions.
eXtroversion.Externally orientated, comfortable in the limelight
Agreeableness.Desire to get on with others, and to be liked.
Concientiousness.Tendency to keep order, complete tasks, and follow rules
Openess.Openness to new ideas, and to promote innovative and diverse thinking.
As with most good personality tests, these are not pass-fail criteria, but instead measure continuums. Most people sit somewhere nearer the middle than the ends, and indeed, being at one end of the continuum usually comes with both pros and cons. For example, as implied earlier, being high in agreeableness favors getting along with people, being popular, and welcomed into teams. But people high in agreeableness also struggle to give useful feedback, or to stand up and yell ‘stop’ when it is really needed. Have you ever been on a team where you always come out of meetings feeling upbeat, aligned, but yet mysteriously never seem to achieve anything? Maybe it has too many people who are high in agreeableness, and a person who pushes in another direction was needed? But a team where everyone is low in agreeableness will have its own, easy to anticipate issues! Likewise, conscientiousness is good, but only to a point. We need some people on a team who do what they say they will, and when they say they will, and to keep the team aware of it’s commitments. However, rules, and adherence to past behaviors and/or deadlines can also constrain creativity, and a team full of people high in conscientiousness is unlikely to step too far out of the box, or disrupt the status quo. Again, it’s not good or bad, and probably the only rule is that we want diversity in all of the traits spread across a team for it to operate optimally. The ideal balance can also depend on what and where we are innovating. We want conscientiousness in pilots, or surgical teams for routine surgery. “Hi, I’m your surgeon, and just for fun I’m going to try something completely new this morning” is not something many of us want to hear! But if we need to disrupt a category, this may be exactly the playful mindset we need. On an innovation team, we need a tension between some people who will step out of the box, and others who will herd us towards decisions, actions and progress. Likewise, it’s great to have at least one extrovert on the team, as they create energy, and often promote the team to others. But too many, and smart introverts don’t get a word in, and the team drowns in a sea of unaligned but powerfully articulated opinions. Even Neuroticism can be useful. Team members who are overly susceptible to negative emotions can be draining, but I’ve been grateful on more than one occasion to an experienced cynic playing a devil’s advocate role, and helping a team to be appropriately self critical before pushing too far ahead with inviting but fatally flawed ideas.
But how do we actually use Hexaco? At one extreme, we could ask everyone in an organization to take and share a test, and use the results to create balanced teams. However, realistically that comes with all sorts of challenges. Not everyone wants to bare their soul, and certainly shouldn’t be forced to do so. But knowing yourself, and developing the skills, empathy, and emotional intelligence to guestimate the personalities of others is less intimidating, and can still be very helpful, and simply understanding these traits can help this to happen. The first step to this is self testing. There arenumerous sites on the web where you can do this for free, but my personal favorite is http://hexaco.org/hexaco-online
The Curse of the Proctoid?I also promised to touch on my P&G experience, where I spent much of my corporate career. This is by no means a criticism of P&G, which has an admirable innovation track record. But, like most big organizations, it has had it’s ups and downs, needs to constantly reinvent itself to keep up with a rapidly changing world. It would probably also be the first to admit that it would love to come up with more big ideas, and deliver them faster. I’m personally a bit T-shaped when it comes to company experience. I’m deep at P&G where I spent 25 years, but also have experience of big pharma, banking, oil, hospitality, fashion, retail, music and various other areas from my career both before and after P&G, and I try to look through this somewhat prismatic lens. One of the most transferable insights I take from a hindsight heavy look at P&G is what I’ll call the curse of the Proctoid. At P&G we were often called ‘Proctoids’. This referred to a sort of clone or corporate ‘Stepford Wife’, and reflected how similar we must have appeared to ‘outsiders’. We thought, with some justification, that we were more creative and varied than we must have appeared, but there was likely also some truth to the ‘clone’ observation. There are enormous benefits to ‘cognitive homogeneity’ in large organizations, especially for day-to-day work. Consistent business models, frameworks, training to fill ‘skill gaps’, common processes, language, behavioral and even thinking styles are efficient, especially in large, global corporations. And highly structured global recruitment, training, rewards and HR systems commonly evolve to take advantage of these efficiencies. This was my experience at P&G, but it is far from alone in this, and anecdotally I’ve found it quite common for companies to be populated with a lot of quite similar personalities that often reflect senior management. But at P&G, I suspect a fairly strict promote from within policy reinforced and amplified these effects. I also suspect that we were more similar than we realized, as groups of similar people tend to become sensitive to small differences within themselves, and so overestimate their own diversity.
The Proctoid moniker was a caricature, but it highlights a real challenge for many large or growing organizations. Disruptive innovations need disruptive thinkers, and even some disruptive behavior. Rigid cultures make it hard for disruptive thinkers to thrive; if we squeeze too hard for efficiency, we squeeze out creativity. At P&G this was clearly recognized, at least to some degree, and there were deliberate attempts to accommodate and nurture ‘different’ thinking styles, most notably by developing parallel technical and management career tracks in numerous disciplines. These were not perfect, and tended to assume people were ‘either’ ‘or’. I, along with a number of others bounced between these two career tracks, because we didn’t fit neatly into either of the bimodal ‘boxes’. But these frameworks, together with some functions did provide an oasis for cognitive diversity. But the point is not that P&G’s system was ideal, but that all organizations will need to find their own ways to both recruit and nurture more agile, disruptive thinkers. And recruitment is often the biggest missed opportunity, as all too often, the successful mavericks in organizations are recruiting accidents. They weren’t hired because they were unusual or disruptive, instead their uniqueness slipped through the cracks. And we need integrate them into organizations, rather than placing them safely away from the mainstream business. It’s a delicate, and ever changing balancing act, as we will still need day-to-day efficiency, and innovation is about balancing idea creation and efficient execution. But as the pace of change inevitably accelerates, I suspect many companies will need to shift the balance away from the efficiency of cognitive homogeneity and towards the agility of cognitive diversity, and so will likely need more mavericks; people who can flow with change. We’ll still need experts, but more and more we’ll need people who can adapt to new knowledge and new technologies, life long learner who can jump specialties. The lifespan of an expert is contracting, and if our organization isn’t recruiting for that cognitive agility now, it will likely struggle in the face of rapid change later.
Conclusion: This is not physics, and building cultures and teams with cognitive diversity and liberal dustings of analogical, critical and deep thinkers will likely never be as easy as ensuring we have the right mix of functions such as marketing, finance and technical expertise. But I do believe that organizations who try will have significant, and lasting advantages that can be coded deep into their cultural DNA, and that over time, this will pay out in the more frequent, and more game changing innovations that will increasing become survival traits in a world of accelerating change.
Image credit: Pixabay
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A twenty-five year Procter & Gamble veteran, Pete Foley has spent the last 8+ years applying insights from psychology and behavioral science to innovation, product design, and brand communication. He spent 17 years as a serial innovator, creating novel products, perfume delivery systems, cleaning technologies, devices and many other consumer-centric innovations, resulting in well over 100 granted or published patents. Follow him @foley_pete