By Steven Kowalski, Ph.D.
Author, Creative Together: Sparking Innovation in the New World of Work
President and Founder, Creative LicenseTM Consulting Services
Creative Together offers a methodology for activating creativity to invent anywhere inside your organization. The insights and approaches can be applied in any domain—to spark innovation in arenas like product development, manufacturing, scientific discovery, engineering, and the invention of new technologies. Or the methodology can be applied to evolve core infrastructure, invent new platforms and systems, redesign service delivery models, reimagine core business processes, and shape external ecosystems in ways that support the enterprise mission.
Whatever your focus, as you bring conscious creativity forward every day to co-create solutions, you will make a difference. You will influence the culture of your organization naturally and organically, even if you don’t explicitly work on it directly and proactively. You will shape the norms and practices for how people interact and behave with each other.
At the same time, there may be some of you reading who are called to more actively and explicitly shape your organization’s culture to foster proactive, creative accountability. This is important work. And you can use everything we’ve explored about creativity and co-creation to instill new norms and practices that support creative expression for a broader circle of people than just those you work with today. And you can architect a culture that makes it easier for those who will join your organization in the future.
Over the years, I’ve led (and participated in) multiple efforts to directly and intentionally shape organizational culture to unleash collective, creative potential. I’ve discovered that three areas of focus are core and critical:
Focusing on only one or two of these areas yields less than optimal results. Together, they form a powerful foundation for evolving and transforming cultures into places that unleash both creative and leadership potential.
Why is mindset important? Our mindset includes our most deeply held values, beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and the world around us. It guides our aspirations (what we hope for), our motivation (what drives us forward), and the purposes to which we are attracted. It shapes how we view and navigate constraints and possibilities. And it influences your day-to-day choices about how to create inside of social systems; how much control you seek, whether to share or protect, whether you ask for permission or forgiveness, who you include, and so many other aspects of your creative life.
When mindset is unexplored, gaps can emerge. Here, you will notice a difference between what people say they want and what is true at a deeper level. For example, I often hear leaders and managers say they want more creativity and innovation from employees. But when it comes down to it, they don’t behave in ways that align with their words. There’s a gap between their request that people “innovate” and what they actually do (their behaviors, actions and decisions) and how they support (or don’t support) people. This is an example of the kinds of gaps you will need to confront if you want to change the culture of your organization. If people’s mindset is at odds with their aspirations, mindset will always win out in the long run.
Not long ago, I had the opportunity to work with a team of people in the Finance function of a mid-sized Bay Area based firm. Each of them had elected to join in a collective effort to change the culture within the Finance organization: to unleash creative potential. They participated in this culture change effort as volunteers, above and beyond their day-to-day roles and responsibilities. Each of them cared deeply about making their Department a place where people could raise ideas and pursue innovations that added value. In their eyes, this was urgent and important—not just for the engagement and satisfaction of the workforce but also so that they could continue to innovate in the changing business landscape they foresaw.
One of the challenges this team observed in their culture was a lack of available time to test and implement new ideas. There was more than enough time and space to have ideas. Having ideas for how to improve things or adapt or invent was not the problem. But feeling like it was safe to raise them (challenging the status quo) and finding the time and support to invest in testing out ideas—this is what was difficult.
Managers were reluctant to reduce the responsibilities of peoples’ role (what they were hired to do) to make time to co-create or work on “innovation projects.” That meant pursuing innovative ideas could only happen when they worked above and beyond their day-to-day responsibilities. Why not make it part of everyone’s job, they wondered? Why not makes sure anyone in their organization had the freedom to build coalitions amongst partners across boundaries, and inspire people to try new things out and change the way they were currently doing things? Why not reward this kind of behavior?
Pursuing these kinds of organizational changes required the team to confront their own values, assumptions, and beliefs about themselves; including their beliefs about creativity and who they were as creators, their sense of value and contribution to the organization, and what disturbed them about the way things were currently done. They had to confront the mindsets of their leaders – and how these mindsets translated into behavior that supported or diminished their efforts. They had to think differently about building partnerships with functions that could help make the changes needed to implement their ideas. And ultimately, they realized that in order to generate sustainable change, they would need to focus on changing the culture in the Finance department for everyone—and not just a select group of people.
As my clients in the Finance organization discovered, when you work directly and consciously to shift culture in ways that unleash creative potential, the first step involves taking a look in the mirror. That means scouring your own mindset, motivations, belief systems, values and your assumptions and intent, so you can clearly see what’s best for the broader system. Your mindset will shape how you engage. After all, you are a member in the community you seek to change. And as a member, there are beliefs and assumptions you may be taking for granted or which represent blind spots for you. These will need to be examined and addressed before real change can occur, starting with you.
Let’s start with your mindset about the process of culture change itself.
Here are some key questions:
Here, I’d like to add some perspective from my experience working on multiple longer-term efforts to shape organizational culture. I do believe it is possible to consciously enhance an organization’s capability for world-class discovery, creativity and innovation. Whether you’re forming a small start-up, aiming to shift how people work together in a large governmental agency or in a hundreds-year-old academic institution, or working to revitalize a 90,000-person global organization that’s dispersed across multiple continents, I believe that all organizations need to be – and continually become – places where adventure, play, mystery, surprise, creativity, collaboration, and innovation can flourish. Increasingly, people are being called to consciously fashion the work environment into not just a place for execution—not even simply a place for innovation—but into a place where adventure, discovery, and creative expression are the norm.
Despite what I read in the literature and popular blogosphere that warns that culture is hard to change, my experience has shown otherwise. It’s not that culture is particularly hard to change—but that it takes an active investment of energy, perseverance, a long-term vision, and continued attention and care. Maybe that’s why it seems difficult: because these qualities are often in short supply. Shaping culture also takes iteration and often involves leaps forward and steps backwards. Leaders need to model new behaviors, “stay the course,” and know when to let go and when to drive forward. And people throughout the organization must get involved in the change and own it for themselves.
In fact, shaping culture is a journey of discovery in and of itself – one that involves learning, invention, change, and transformation. There’s a reason why the learning process, the creative process, the Design Thinking process, the change process, and the Hero’s Journey all overlap and follow a similar, shared path of transformation. They are all processes of becoming anew; all requiring crossing the threshold into the unknown; all require passage through tests and swamps; and all requiring a compelling, meaningful purpose to spur forward movement despite the dangers of the unknown.
This is the mindset to take into your work to shape and evolve the culture of your organization – a mindset of discovery, adventure, and of becoming. Your creativity, and your skill in co-creating and sharing leadership, will be critical assets on this journey.
So, what levers can you pull on to help your organization live and breathe discovery, co-creation, and shared leadership—and leverage them to spark innovation? Three make the greatest difference:
The most important test of an organization’s culture is whether it supports and activates progress toward its mission and goals. Does your organization need creativity and discovery to achieve its mission? Are agility and innovation found in the business strategy? Are goals primarily focused on execution or are they also focused on improvement, invention, and pushing the boundaries of today’s standard practice? Do governance structures help focus creativity and promote invention and innovation—or do they stifle freedom, autonomy and creative expression? Is it easy for people to see how new ideas contribute to the organization’s mission? Because the senior leadership team has a key role in the answer to all these questions, it is imperative to get them involved from the start.
Unfortunately, the team working to change the culture within the Finance function missed this important step. When I joined them (after almost a year into their efforts), I was surprised to find that they had been operating without support from the senior leadership team (LT). Two sponsors from the LT had been assigned to guide their efforts, but neither was particularly interested in the team’s work. On top of that, each sponsor had very different ideas about what creativity was, who could be expected to “be creative,” and how to proceed in an effort like this. Because the LT did not get involved, and the sponsors were not much help, the team was operating under a great deal of uncertainty about whether anything they tried would be successful.
To make matters worse, the organization had a very hierarchical, top-down culture. People waited for permission and signals of support from leaders before adopting changes. And it wasn’t at all clear whether the LT believed creativity was necessary to achieve people’s individual goals or the broader goals of the Finance Department.
The confusion and conflict generated by the indifference of the Sponsors, along with the abdication of involvement by the rest of the LT, signaled that challenging the status quo was not worth the risk. Despite repeated requests, the LT declined to define innovation as a key priority in their strategy. They also decided not to set metrics that would track the value received from improvement and invention. They didn’t make time for the team. They failed to show up at team meetings when invited, and routinely knocked scheduled time for the team off their LT meeting agenda for other topics deemed more urgent or important.
Over time, some people left the team. There wasn’t clear evidence that the extra effort they were putting in—and the added stress in their day-to-day life—was worth it. Without a mandate, it seemed risky professionally to be involved, despite people’s passion for the topic and for the outcomes that were possible. Those that remained “swirled around the drain,” talking over and over about what they should do and deliver. They spent a lot of time talking about how to please the sponsors and the LT. Without support, engagement, and clear, principled direction from the LT, progress was much slower than other teams I worked with.
We learned a lot from this example. And it was helpful to observe the challenges this team faced compared to others I was working with at the same time— to see them in contrast with other LTs who did show up and do the hard work to shift their mindset. This provided perspective, and insights into what is most important to secure and set in motion with leaders early in the arc of an effort to transform culture. Some of our most valuable lessons follow:
1. Progress is accelerated when the LT takes an early, collective stand for the value of creativity and innovation in the future of the function. People want and need the LT to stand up—individually and collectively—and clearly articulate the link between creativity, innovation, and the day-to-day work of the function. They have to set clear expectations for everyone within the organization as well as for themselves. And they must demonstrate their collective commitment to those expectations, like showing up at events and forums, talking about creativity in collective gatherings within the function, and talking about it outside of the function. They need to demonstrate their commitment through decisions and actions, like re-allocating resources to work on projects that challenge the status quo.
The Leadership Team also needs to walk the talk. Do they co-create together or are they running siloed, autonomous functions? Are people encouraged and rewarded for crossing boundaries and collaborating with people outside their narrow remit? The LT needs to publicly acknowledge progress and recognize people and project teams who are pushing the boundaries. People across the organization will want to see that their leaders are proud of what’s happening, appreciate the effort people are expending, and recognize the value that’s being generated publicly.
2. The LT must develop themselves individually and collectively. The topic of creativity—and how to foster it and champion it—is not often the focus of management or leadership development programs. Amongst the LT, there will be variable understanding (and mis-understanding) about what creativity is, how innovation happens, and what leaders can do to either catalyze or inhibit creative expression. The LT will need to work on topics like empowerment and delegation, sharing leadership, transparency, courage and vulnerability, asking powerful questions and getting better at being a coach. They will need to get better at learning from failure and deriving value from undesired results. They will need to practice inspiring others—and then getting out of the way. They will need to know how to sponsor purposeful experiments and iteration, and advocate for the time it takes to test out new ideas despite uncertainty. They will need to learn about their blind-spots, how their own creative Style might get in the way, and how they can model the behaviors of the Collaborator. And, equally as importantly, they will need to cascade these expectations to the teams that report to them, as well as to the community of managers within their respective organizations.
This kind of learning doesn’t happen in a classroom. It happens along the path of the journey. And like every Hero’s Journey, your LT will need guides—whether that is you or an outside coach or facilitator—to help them look in the mirror, hear from voices out in the organization, and shape a collective understanding of what they want to work on together to change the culture. For some of the LT, business value will be the hook that engages them. For others, it may be value derived from developing people. For others still, it might be value for themselves in their career ambitions. I encourage you to explore and tap into all these motivations as you consider how to help your LT shift their mindset and behaviors.
3. Nothing focuses collective creativity better than making it a strategic priority. This can be accomplished by linking creativity directly to the business strategy of the function in the form of an “Innovation Challenge” or “Innovation Goal.” A challenge like this should require cross-functional collaboration for its achievement. It needs to be something no one group within the function could achieve alone. And it must contain some measure of stretch and creative tension—to make it crystal clear that things will have to be done differently. Some of the Innovation Challenges I’ve heard over the years include reducing costs while increasing customer satisfaction or reducing costs while developing technological advances. Others have focused on partnering externally while building internal capability or accelerating the delivery of value while improving efficiency.
Coming forward with an Innovation Challenge or Goal was a step that the Finance Leadership Team refused to take—and the team’s efforts suffered greatly. But fortunately, several groups I’ve worked with over the years have created multi-year plans to bring innovation into the strategy of their function. In one such effort, the LT of operations function formed an over-arching innovation challenge and used it to generate shared purpose—to let everyone know how to focus and direct their creative energies.
Despite the execution-oriented nature of their work, this LT and their leader recognized that unleashing creative potential was essential to drive innovation in their function in the form of process improvements, the elimination of waste, and in implementing best practices gleaned from experts outside the organization. They envisioned an organization that was alive with energy and passion—one that could discover and invent, self-organize around new ideas and projects, and one where people worked across functions to save time, reduce costs, and make the quality of the company’s operations a central element of attractiveness for employees and partners.
To put these aspirations into practice, the first year’s efforts focused on education and experimentation. We offered a number of curated learning experiences for a sub-set of the group (to see what worked), and we offered an opportunity for different cross-sections of the organization to experiment together in an Innovation Lab. The LT and their teams were deeply involved and participated in everything. They showed up and signaled to people that they believed it was worth the time. And over the first year, we carefully watched and tracked where people’s energy and passion were, what they chose to work on, and what kind of value they generated.
In the second year, the LT got more focused on targeted arenas that supported their innovation challenge and built on themes from year one. And they tracked the value generated. We adjusted our approach along the way; bringing in new people who hadn’t been involved in the first year and building on what resonated with former participants. And finally, in the third year, we invited the entire department to self-organize around multiple focus areas at the same time. People started working on their own projects across functional boundaries. We no longer “orchestrated” things—they took on a life of their own. Some of these projects lasted for just a month or two, and some lasted six-months and longer. We let go—and people stepped up to work together on purposeful experiments.
4. People engage when they can clearly see meaningful progress. When you tie culture transformation to key performance metrics, it’s easier for people to see and feel the impact their efforts are having. And it’s easier to identify the value of purposeful experiments. This will be of particular interest to leaders of your organization and to the leaders to whom they report—and will go a long way in building pride, commitment, and engagement. Some of the most common metrics include the reduction or acceleration of time (e.g., time to deliver, develop and produce, time to decision, etc.), an increase in customer satisfaction and benefit, a reduction in cost or waste generated, the transfer of downstream value to teams and groups who follow yours in the value chain, and an increase in the probability of success.
You will need to select and customize any of these metrics for your particular industry, organization and function. In addition, targets and the criteria for success have to be addressed differently depending on where you are aiming along a continuum from execution to discovery. For example, in new ventures, you can’t expect to use the same measures of progress and success that work for execution.
Surprisingly, the articulation of clear metrics can actually be one of the most challenging steps for teams working to change culture. One challenge is the effort needed to get everyone on board with common metrics for value across functions and types of work. Another challenge is convincing people to stop tracking progress in different formats and systems and use common tools and technologies to track value. If the information collected about progress on goal isn’t accessible and useable by all groups, it loses value. Still other difficulties include the challenge of gathering inventories of current baselines and starting points, such as the current statistics on customer satisfaction, time to deliver, waste produced, etc. And even then, you’ll have work to do to change habits so that people actually enter data and share information to keep your progress current.
The good news is that there are people who love this kind of work. And while it might not be an area of your greatest strength (it certainly isn’t one of my strengths), you can enroll partners and allies to help you showcase the progress you are making, analyze and illustrate how things are different, and help you tell the story of the value your efforts are making to the goals and mission of your organizational. Bring these folks into your efforts early and engage them as you design your path forward. Remember: demonstrating value is a core motivator for all Leadership Teams. Find out what metrics the leadership of your organization use and tie your efforts directly to those.
As you consider how to shape the culture in your broader organization, I encourage you to start “close to home,” in your own department. Think carefully about how you might take some of these suggestions to your own LT, as a first step. Approach it like a purposeful experiment and see what reaction you get. Your Leadership Team’s example will generate positive, creative tension within the organization and serve as a magnet to draw in others who are interested, who see the results you are getting in your department, and who want a piece of the action for themselves.
When you’re looking for metrics and working to change mindsets and behaviors around collecting metrics, your Finance colleagues will be great allies. When you’re seeking ways to enroll, engage, and inspire people to change behavior, or if you need to revamp reward structures to promote new kinds of choices, your Human Resources colleagues can provide insight and ideas. When your inventions bump up against policies, laws, and protection of value, your Legal partners will be important allies. When you’re seeking new ways to share knowledge in accessible, intelligent, and intuitive systems, your IT partners can help you build and adapt solutions. And when you’re looking for innovative ways to source materials and resources, you colleagues from Procurement can have invaluable perspectives. Each of these groups provides unique and important expertise that can make or break your efforts.
Show these folks the love by seeking them out early and letting them know you appreciate and value their contribution and partnership. It’s a common mistake to leave them out. Instead, include them and work together to foster a mindset of co-creating and sharing leadership. Help them stretch into ambiguity, discovery, adventure and into the unknown— typically, it’s not a place they often get to play. It may not feel comfortable for them at first. But if you stand with them, honor their expertise, and engage with them in open, transparent collaboration, you will find loyal and trusted partners. Together, you will generate and sustain the conditions for something new to keep emerging—for the organization to live in a constant state of becoming.
In order for lasting change in the culture, your efforts to unleash creative potential cannot be segmented to a specific group of people, relegated to one function or only a group of chartered teams, or located in a particular building or location within your organization’s campus. The work you do with the Leadership Team is important— but it is not enough. The partnerships you form with HR, Finance, IT, and Legal are also not enough. It needs to be clear that improvement, agile adaptation, invention, and disruption can come from anyone and any part of the ecosystem. While not everyone may choose to answer the call to bring their creative energies forward in service to the mission, everyone must receive the invitation. New folks joining your organization should feel a palpable sense of excitement and urgency, and observe visible, forward-leaning action coming from all corners of the organization. Everyone must be able to see how their ideas for improvements and for new approaches can contribute to innovation goals that benefit customers and your customer’s customers, the organization, the community, and serve the larger ecosystem.
With a “for all” mindset, every employee, contractor, partner and supplier understands the expectation to innovate and believes they can generate new value within the system. Everyone is encouraged and inspired to bring ideas forward in a climate of trust. And people are able to connect ideas to organizational goals, processes, and the mission to realize ideas and contribute value. Here are a few of the key activities I’ve implemented with clients to signal that everyone across the organization is invited to participate:
While content is important, mentors and coaches are even more valuable because they help people learn by doing. These are people who have traversed the unknown and can anticipate some of the challenges and share strategies. And while mentors need not be in a position of power, they need to be people who folks can look up to, who can personalize and tailor advice and coaching, and who can help people build their networks and connections.
But talking about the good news without addressing the tough issues will just make things worse. You will have to take bold, visible and tangible actions that make a difference for people in their daily worklife. Usually, the most common blocks to activating creative potential are not a lack of new ideas, but complex organizational issues like the ones we explored in chapter six of the second Adventure in Creative Together. To signal that things are changing, you will need to take tangible, visible steps to clear out the Swamp as much as possible: reducing organizational sludge, calling out toxic politics and routing out bad actors, and helping to make it safer to speak up.
What are the hard truths that might stifle creative potential? How are expectations communicated and rewarded? Do things have to be perfect, right out of the gate? Or is there a generous tolerance for the ambiguity that comes with more iterative, experimental, and emergent approaches? What happens when people mess up, or projects don’t succeed? Are learning and smart risks celebrated, or are people stigmatized? And finally, what are the myths that people propagate that may have a kernel of truth, or may have been true at one time, but not any longer? Work with people across the organization to identify myths and hard truths and address them head on.
When people see that you have identified some of the bad habits that inhibit creative expression and risk-taking—and are really taking action to clear the path, they will be more likely to join in and come forward. When they see that bad actors are removed from their positions and reward structures are shifted, they will begin to believe that things are changing for the better. When blame and judgment quiet down—especially at key interfaces and critical handoffs—people will get curious about what else could be different. Nothing can take the place of strong signals to the organization that things are opening up, becoming more transparent, and it’s getting easier to invent from inside.
I mentioned earlier that the two sponsors of the Finance team had very different perspectives on how to go about changing their culture to unleash creative potential. Sandra wanted the team to focus on changing mindsets and behaviors broadly across the function. She urged the team to come up with a few activities, like organizing training programs, bringing in external speakers, and selecting a few bad habits to focus on (like fear of failure) in hopes it would help free people up to “be creative.” Fredrik, on the other hand, had a more pragmatic perspective on what was needed. “We need to show results,” he said. “Get a few creative people on some key projects and don’t worry about everyone else.” Part of the challenge for the team was that Sandra and Fredrik were never available at the same time. Each one had to be managed separately—and each thought the other was wrong. There were virtually no opportunities to resolve these different approaches.
The team addressed this schism by forming two separate teams—one to focus on “Mindsets” and the other to focus on “Innovation Projects.” The teams operated independently, working to satisfy two very different views of how to proceed without realizing the potential for a combined approach. What neither team realized is that changing mindsets and behaviors is often best accomplished while making tangible progress on innovation goals. And conversely, successful innovation projects require that people think and behave differently.
This is where the second Focus Area becomes critical. One of the most vital strategies to shift your culture involves providing opportunities for people to learn and experiment “real-time” in organized, curated practice fields like Innovation Labs and Incubators. These are places for people to co-create, learn from each other, practice new behaviors, and exchange ideas in service to shared goals. And I’ve seen lots of them over the years. Some succeed, but most fail for what turns out to be very common errors in how they are set up, how the people working in them are supported, and how they are disbanded after they have served their use.
Innovation Incubator Labs are great for helping people become opportunity sleuths and innovation scouts. They help people get better at co-creation: developing and implementing ideas together. They are places where participants can safely practice dancing in the space between purpose, possibility and constraint— as well as the spaces between “me” and “we.” Together, people can learn to care for themselves and each other on journeys into the unknown, learn to confront hard truths about inventing inside, and grow their capabilities as Collaborators. For changing culture, there is no substitute for these kinds of opportunities to help people directly experience co-creating and sharing leadership.
For sustainable culture change, at some point you will have to turn your attention to the institutional processes, systems, and structures that guide how work gets done. These are the tangible manifestations of the dominant mindset of the organization, including IT platforms and knowledge-sharing tools, policies, metrics and reporting tools, work processes, governance structures, and reward systems. Think of it as you might imagine working on a car; you will need to look “under the hood” to see what kind of engine is powering your organization’s infrastructure; how it’s running, and whether it’s well-suited to get your organization where it needs to go both now and in the future. Is the engine running on a mindset of compliance, control, or protection? Is it running on a mindset of openness, purpose-driven experimentation, transparency, and sharing? How does that mindset play out in your version of what HP called the Rules of the Garage —the organizational values and principles that drive how you are structured, how infrastructure is developed, and how your organization’s operating system is set up?
Getting the structure and infrastructure “right” is not the aim. That’s because it’s not an end-state that you get to and then you’re done. In fact, there is no one template for an operating model that works for all organizations. As Carl Weinberg has said, “structures that support creativity should neither obstruct too much nor help too much; for people must recognize the possibility and value inherent in their own efforts. ” (Weinberg). The systems, processes, and infrastructure in your organization needs to deliver appropriate freedom— without making it a “free-for-all.” Infrastructure needs to support sustainable invention and even disruption, but it doesn’t need to be perfect— in fact it never will be. The key is to build dynamic tools, policies, and systems that can change and transform as the landscape of your context evolves.
I recommend that you work with an Organization Development professional and with your IT, Finance, HR, and Legal business partners as you consider what might need to be different to unleash everyone’s creative potential. Work on infrastructure in tandem with your work on mindsets and behaviors. Use the hurdles that show up in Incubator Labs as evidence for what needs to change. Make this third Focus Area part of your efforts to change culture from the start, but don’t put all your eggs in the basket of just changing Infrastructure.
Too often I have witnessed departments or business units focus early efforts on developing internal websites and portals with collections of tools and resources or implementing idea management or crowdsourcing software technologies— only to have these tools languish, unused. While these investments are tangible, and easier to “see,” on their own they cannot change behavior, culture and mindsets. They support and enable creative expression, but alone they cannot build innovation as an organizational capability that has energy and aliveness. Without the will and commitment to do the deeper work— addressing mindsets and behaviors— as soon as obstacles arise or a strong leader-advocate leaves, or budget cuts are instituted, or an innovation project does not yield the value that was promised, efforts to change infrastructure alone are abandoned and the teams working on them are disbanded.
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As I’ve suggested, working on changing the culture of your organization is both an honorable and formidable undertaking. Whether or not you feel called to actively and directly take steps to change your culture, I encourage you to build a deeper understanding of what is involved in looking more broadly at your organization from a systems perspective—and being a partner in improving things for others and for the people who will join in the future. This requires a different level of focus for your creativity—on benefit for a broader circle of people for both “today” and “tomorrow.”
At the very least, you will contribute to making your workplace one where it feels “safe” to create and where people have autonomy and feel empowered to make decisions about how to progress ideas. At best, you will join in a complex, challenging and important imperative that requires you to think beyond your own work, your domain, your projects, and your function. It requires you to think about both upstream and downstream inputs and consequences. And by working on your culture, you will develop important capabilities that come into play if you plan to extend your focus further afield—to big dreams and urgent imperatives beyond your organization and its mission.
i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_the_garage
ii Carl Weinberg, The Existential View of Creativity
© 2021 Steven Kowalski for Creative License Consulting™. All rights reserved.
