Creativity and Politics

Are you fed up with the current state of British Politics? Do you have plenty of ideas about how things could be better but don't know which way to turn? Well now there is a new political party just for you.

The Emergent Party was founded by fellow PSA member Barry Mapp and is based on creative principles. For those who are fed-up with more of the same and who have ideas to contribute it is both a Think Tank and a political party.

The Emergent Party was officially registered in Great Britain and Northern Ireland with the Electoral Commission in August 2005. It welcomes members who wish to be active and help us to develop and also members who just want to be part of what they can see is going to be something very different.

The Emergent Party plans to be the "breath of fresh air" in British Politics. The Party is emerging from the frustration with "more-of-the-same" policies and politics (and the policies are clearly not leading to real overall improvement and very often are actually making matters worse).

At the last election no-one was able to register their vote for a Party that was thinking differently about all the issues of today. (As Einstein said "we cannot solve the problems of today by the same thinking that created these problems in the first place).

As a Party they are possibly unique, for in pre-launch phase they have no manifesto or policies (yet) and these too, with the help of members, will be "emergent".

If you feel that you can contribute and help build something different then visit the Emergent Party website to find out more about this exciting fusion of Creativity and Politics.

Organisational Games that Block Creativity

Innovate or Perish?

The dynamics of modern business environment demand that we create and innovate faster and better than our competitors. Companies, and sometimes whole industries can be destroyed in record time due to their inability to innovate. Innovate or die!

Much has been researched, discovered and learned about how organisations can improve their ability to innovate. Many books have been written and whole new organisations have been created which now compete with each other to take their ideas about creative processes into other organisations. Which is very good news.

But what happens when the politics of self-interest come up against the creative process? What happens when ideas threaten egos? Much has been written about the obstacles to innovation. One blockage that gains little attention is the extent to which an organisation’s own internal politics can conspire against it and sabotage the creative process. Power, politics and innovation are uneasy bedfellows.

Anyone for Politics?
“Why is it that having great ideas isn’t the hard part of innovation? It’s the “making them happen” that hurts.”
(From: ?What If! by Dave Allan and others)

The team at Politics at Work Ltd are original thinkers, writers and trainers in this challenging area. Their catalogue of DirtyTricks at Work™ has identified over 50 political games, which inhibit organisational, team and individual performance, and many of these are worth learning and exploring in the creative context as they can directly undermine our attempts to be innovative.

If we are determined to nurture the creative spirit in our people and provide an organisational climate and environment where innovation and ideas flourish, then we must tackle these political games and negative thinking patterns directly.

Games of Resistance

So what does resistance to creativity and innovation look like and sound like? How will we know it when we experience it? The truth is that resistance in organisations takes many forms but much of it is quite subtle, it is indirect, and sadly much can even be deliberately covert or Machiavellian.

If we explore the myriad of interactions between people in organisations we discover a world of indirect transactions. People are frequently diverted away from clear and direct communication in the mistaken belief that others can’t or won’t be able to handle the truth. Also, many of us have concerns that voicing our doubts about an idea will be seen as rocking the boat or not being a team player.

Others are concerned that challenging the bosses great new idea (which might well be fundamentally flawed) might be a career decision. Because of this - mostly faulty - assumption, people interact obliquely, politically and indirectly.

There are many repetitive sequences of unhelpful interactions which take place and which we have defined as political games. What follows is a taster from the Politics at Work catalogue of DirtyTricks at Work™. More specifically these are some of the ways in which politics and innovation come into conflict with one another.

If we can learn how to recognise these inhibiting games, tactics and manoeuvres we have taken a big first step to increasing innovation. Further, if we are able to help people learn to counter them effectively, such a discovery would serve to protect the new, fresh, green shoots of ideas. These gems need to be nurtured through the first difficult stages of life if they are to make an impact to the competitive position of the business. These discoveries will start to transform the creative culture of the organisation.

Interesting Idea John…

As the great American business writer Peter Block observed, in its milder forms, resistance can be as simple as declaring that “I thought the ideas in your presentation were really interesting”. “Interesting” is the key word here, because it is the word people frequently use when they want to appear supportive and positive about an idea when really they are indirectly resisting. We say “interesting” when asked for feedback and we do not want to reveal our concerns and doubts. “Interesting” can even be code for “your work sucks and will spoil all my plans”.

Time Bandit

This is the tactic of resisting an idea or suggestion by pretending that the timing just isn’t right (and at the same time implying that at some future, unspecified date the timing will be more apposite) “Ben, the only thing wrong with your idea is the timing, come back in the spring and we’ll look at it again” Which is usually indirect code for “no way is this idea going any further!”

Of course there are times when an idea is a really good one, but the timing really is inappropriate and that to move it forward now would be a mistake. Under these circumstances this is not a game but a genuine interaction. However our research shows that playing Time Bandit is a highly popular tactic for resisting or sabotaging ideas that someone, usually out of political self-interest, does not want to see progressed.

The Creative Cuckoo

When Politics at Work first began research into organisational games, one of the first to be clarified was the Creative Cuckoo. Many of us will have had the misfortune to observe this game first hand. Many more will also have been taken in and exploited by this manoeuvre.

We have defined the Creative Cuckoo as “the tactic of stealing credit for the efforts or ideas of another”. The upside to this game is that at least the idea does get progressed. The huge downside is the betrayal of trust and damage to integrity, credibility, team working and morale that result. If our organisation has creative cuckoos nesting within it then creativity quickly becomes an endangered and protected species.

It is easy to see why people decide to protect their best ideas and compete to ensure that they get the credit for them. Sadly this is time and energy that could and should be directed back into the creative process, not into protectionism.

Tell Me More

This is the tactic of duplicitously resisting a valid suggestion or idea by demanding more research or data, in the hope that the other party will eventually be either distracted or exhausted and either drop the idea, or forget it. “Come back with a detailed proposal, with a clearly differentiated cost benefit matrix and we’ll look at it again.” And when they come back, more research is still required, and again, and again…

Of course it is appropriate that before new ideas are acted upon, that they should be researched and tested. It is prudent and appropriate for managers to place boundaries and reigns around the first flush of exhilaration that sweeps a new idea into awareness. Sadly though, this is also a convincing and apparently professional stance, which can often mask an inauthentic position and resistance.

Nit Picker

We were recently told the story of someone who once had a manager who so disliked their ideas that he would nit pick and find fault with everything they put forward. This resistance strategy hit new levels of absurdity one day when he had the temerity to ask if “the inverted commas are in the right font” for a new process idea they had put forward.

What lurked beneath his resistance was that he had a really clear vision of what he wanted and how he wanted to achieve it, and other people’s ideas frequently came into conflict with his. Unfortunately he chose to play a game of Nit Picker rather than communicate directly, fearing perhaps his people would not be able to handle his objections. Faced with this style of resistance perhaps unsurprisingly creativity was initially muffled and then disappeared.

Other political strategies for undermining creativity include…

Super Parent – They have seen it all and done it all before, and their experience is so vast and impressive that if they say it is a poor idea and won’t work, we are facing an uphill struggle. Their arrogance and ego demands complete acceptance and our capitulation, or else!

Techno-Babble – The idea is challenged on the scientific level and the resistance takes the form of long winded, confusing, jargon filled explanations which are presented as just being “helpful”. Again rather like the Super Parent, they have seen it all before (and have a legion of facts to prove it) and see no new reason to go down a road which has already proved fruitless.

Naysayer – It can’t be done, it’s impossible, and it won’t work. The Naysayer denies that the idea is achievable and they are so convincing that they have even hypnotised themselves into believing it. In 1899 Charles Duell the Director of the US Patents office suggested that the government close the office because everything that could be invented had been invented. Margaret Thatcher believed that a female Prime Minister was unlikely and certainly “not in my lifetime” The Naysayer is naturally resistant to new ideas and possibilities and wants to recruit us to their cause.

Get Naked - This game starts when the most powerful person present has an idea - which everyone immediately knows is terrible - but no one says so, indeed some might even go out of their way to congratulate the boss on their brilliant insight. It is the modern organisational equivalent of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. The upshot of this is that other ideas resident in people’s minds are much less likely to then be articulated because to do so might be interpreted as a challenge to the “Emperor”.


What If…

By now you will have got the message about how these games undermine the creative spirit in the organisation and if you want to learn more about combatting power and politics in the workplace then contact Politics At Work via their website http://www.politicsatwork.com/ . Imagine what we could achieve if we could change the culture and environment of the organisation to cut through these inappropriate behaviours into a more productive state.

For further details of using creativity and innovation as business tools visit the Creative Business Solutions website.

Breaking Mindsets

Often we think of having to change the mindsets of others, but what about our own? Shouldn’t we be challenging our own ideas as well as the ways of having ideas? The following list applies to both solo and group working:

• Develop a wide range of experiences and interests. The richer the experience the wider the range of possibilities. Why not take a different route home or try a different bus?
• Become aware of your own blind spots i.e. things that you do not think
  about consciously or sub-consciously.
• Step into the shoes of all your stakeholders, even those with extreme
  views.
• Try different techniques, mix up your ways of holding meetings, generating ideas etc. Keep the same ones and you will build up systematic blind spots
  or gaps in your thinking.
• Try different modes of thinking. If you are naturally intuitive then try to be rational. If you are working in groups then change the balance of the group.
  If you are familiar with NLP representational systems then work with a
  different one.
• Challenge of all of the ‘givens’. Many organisations do things because they have always been done like that. There are not always as many regulatory constraints as there might at first appear!

For more creative ideas on training or setting up innovation projects visit the Creative Business Solutions website.

Build up, don't knock down

This is sometimes described as learning to say 'Yes, and .. .' rather than 'Yes, but ... '. Any new idea will include lots of problematic elements, and the newer the idea, the more problematic it is likely to be. It is therefore very easy to kill ideas by highlighting their weaknesses. However, this will often 'throw the baby out with the bath water'. Even the silliest, weirdest or most impracticable of ideas will contain one or two per cent of potentially viable material or can be used as what de Bono referred to as an 'intermediate impossible' - a stepping-stone to other, more directly usable ideas.

'Building' techniques are extremely powerful, often very portable and can have very positive secondary effects:

• They allow you to take virtually any input - a random piece of news, a nonexpert's misunderstanding, a tedious discussion with the office bore or an accidental meeting - and get useful ideas from it.
• They can help you to remain attentive and interested longer and more often.
• The other people involved will also tend to feel encouraged by having their tentative ideas valued and being helped to build them into realistic and acceptable plans.
• This is the kind of experience that people want to try again, from which they learn a lot and which leaves them valuing you and the organization.

Suggestions for techniques to 'build' on an existing idea (sometimes called 'hitchhiking') are listed below.

• Give priority to the useful aspects ('Yes, that idea would let us .. .').
• Express problematic aspects in a form that allows them to be tackled ('That idea raises an interesting problem. I wonder how we could .. .').
• Combine the idea with other ideas.
• Transform the idea in various ways (e.g. bigger, smaller, reversed, changed roles).
• Treat the idea as an exemplar for other possibilities (what different categories it could belong to, and what other ideas are suggested by these categories).
• Express the idea in more abstract or concrete terms ('What is this idea an example of?' 'What examples are there of this idea?').
• Represent it in a different medium (draw it, role-play it, sculpt it, etc.).
• Reframe the idea (i.e. see it from someone else's viewpoint, from a different hierarchical level, in different contexts or on different time-scales).
• Abstract the idea to a few key terms and then look up equivalents in a thesaurus (this method is the basis of some computer packages).
• Find analogies to the idea and use these as stimuli for other ideas.
• Use the idea to start a train of thought (in which case many of the other building mechanisms may be at work in a more or less automatic way - the more practised you are, the more automatic they become).

If you would like to learn more about using creative techniques then you might be interested in the new 'YES you can' ebook series which has 48 techniques for you to try.