How innovation is easier when you think in new boxes, the importance of belonging to performance and three strategies to create psychological safety
5 minute read
Friday Thoughts & Learnings
This week Luc de Brabandere helps me understand why we can’t think outside the box, we have to create entirely new ones to make it easier to innovate, Smiley Poswolsky tells me how important a culture of belonging is to current and future workplaces and Amy Edmonson gives me three strategies to create psychological safety in teams to help them better problem solve and innovate.
How innovation is easier when you think in new boxes
Thinking in New Boxes by Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny
Luc and Alan work with the Boston Consulting Group and have written this book to help people recognise the ‘mental boxes’ that commonly trap our thinking when we face uncertain problems and learn how to overcome them.
The way we have been taught and conditioned to see the world, they say, can unconsciously betray us by blocking good ideas out or feeling fear when we should feel excitement.
Mental boxes or models help us make sense of our complex reality. Our minds constantly develop models of the world to help conserve energy and make it easier for us to live. In fact, we can’t reason without these mental models – it’s how our brain works.
They argue you can’t really think outside the box. Rather, you need to create new boxes to help your mind think differently.
For example: replacing the earth is flat box with the world is a globe box meant people were no longer afraid they would fall off the earth if they sailed too far. This helped open the door to exploring new continents.
In their book, Luc and Alan suggest these strategies to help create new boxes to improve your ability to solve problems and innovate:
Don’t (always) trust your gut feeling: What feels familiar will tend to feel right. But this can be misleading if it’s based on outdated mental models.
Doubt your worldview constantly: Mental boxes simultaneously enable and constrain your thinking. Ask about key values, objectives, assumptions, and fears to help uncover what mental boxes may be constraining or overly influencing your thinking.
Arm yourself with fresh input: Gather data and use it to generate questions, not find answers to start with. It’s the questions that lead to creating new boxes that will help you develop better solutions to a problem.
Generate hypotheses: Develop a wide range of possible new boxes, no ideas should be excluded at this stage. The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of good ideas to choose from.
Develop criteria to evaluate the best options: Look for boxes that give you the biggest possible opportunity to succeed. Nintendo made playing cards before a shift in self-perception (new box) opened the door to video game production, merchandising and movies.
Plan for an uncertain future: Keep your mind open to many possible futures and regularly examine the mental boxes that could be constraining your view of reality and limiting your success.
The importance of belonging to performance
Smiley Poswolsky’s take on the future of work
This week my first work appointment was to jump on a webinar hosted by Smiley Poswolsky. He’s a workplace belonging expert who helps organisations create a culture of human connection.
He believes creating a culture of belonging is essential to overcome significant workplace challenges we face now and are emerging into the near future.
Key insights I took away from his presentation were:
There are five generations in the workforce right now – Silent (1928-45), Baby Boomers (1946-64), Gen X (1964-80), Millennials (1981-96), Gen Z (1997-2012)
In less than five years Millennials and Gen Z will make up roughly 70% of the workforce, following the eventual retirement of Baby Boomers
Studies show 50% of Gen Z live with high levels of anxiety
The average attention span of Gen Z university students is 19 seconds. Holding the attention span of the younger generation is a key challenge in the workplace
The average employee switches between applications 1,100 times a day
Studies show four out of five men don’t have a significant friend for social support – it’s referred to as a ‘friendship recession’
It takes ~90 hours of connection to develop a friendship
Smiley shared his thoughts on three key realities and opportunities shaping the future of work:
Reality #1: People are feeling overwhelmed and worried by AI
Opportunity: Create more reasons for human connection in the workplace
Reality #2: We are facing an epidemic of loneliness which will impact future productivity
Opportunity: Focus on making people feel like they belong and are valued for what they contribute
Reality #3: We are experiencing a mental health crisis that will soon significantly impact how organisations function
Opportunity: Create a culture that’s safe to speak up and be vulnerable
Three strategies to create psychological safety
How psychological safety is key to exceptional teamwork and problem solving
I recently came across research conducted by Google on what contributes most to high performing and effective teams.
Teams are widely used as a primary vehicle for critical problem solving and innovation. So learning how to make more teams at Google high performing would naturally make a big difference to their overall performance.
Google studied 180 teams and found the most important factor for an effective team is not who’s on the team but how the team is cooperating.
They found the most important factor for an effective team was psychological safety.
Google defined psychological safety as:
“An individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive."
"In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.”
One of the key contributors to a lack of psychological safety, according to Harvard professor Amy Edmonson in this TEDx talk, is that we have been conditioned to avoid speaking up from when we are very young.
We become focused on what she calls “impression management” — what impression are we creating on our peers and managers? We perceive it’s important not to be seen as ignorant, intrusive, or incompetent because we believe it could harm our career progress or worst case, lead us to be fired.
This perception can prevent us from asking important questions, offering ideas, or admitting mistakes.
When we don’t ask questions, we “rob ourselves and others of moments of learning and we stop contributing to creating a better organisation”, Amy says.
Where a team has high uncertainty and high interdependence, Amy says its vital the team has psychological safety to be high performing.
To increase the psychological safety of a team, Amy suggests taking these three actions:
Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem – Talk about the problem as having high uncertainty and interdependence and as a result you can’t be expected to know right away what the answer is. Therefore, the team needs everyone’s mind and voice in the game to work it out.
Acknowledge your own fallibility and admit when you are wrong – If you’re leading a team say: “I may miss something, so I need to hear from all of you”. This invites everyone’s contributions and makes it safer to speak up.
Model curiosity and ask lots of questions – This creates a necessity for people to voice their thoughts and provide responses, conditioning them to speak up more freely. Asking questions is especially important if you’re the leader of a team. Offering opinions and not asking questions, if you’re the leader, tends to lead to group think.
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