Good Life Project - Fear of Innovation: Why Good People Kill Great Ideas

Episode Date: November 18, 2015

We are wired to run from the unknown, to flee anything that leaves us in that raw, exposed place of uncertainty.When our ideas take us to this place, we feel it and many of us shut down. It stops our true genius from emerging and turning into breakthrough discoveries, products, experiences, brands, businesses and art.But there's another phenomenon that is even more alarming. And it happens when you take this idea and soul-crushing dynamic into larger organizations. Bosses, it turns out, have a hard time acknowledging other peoples' amazing, innovative ideas, too. The reason why and the implications are a bit scary, according to a recent study.If you keep offering great ideas to supervisors and getting knocked down, or if you're a boss who keeps asking for ideas and feeling like nobody's offering up good ones, you need to listen to this week's episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So it's 9 a.m. on a Monday morning, and you're gathered around the meeting table. Listen up, says your team leader. We need new ideas, fresh, creative approaches, things that push the envelope, maybe even bangs a fist on the table at this point. If we don't get them, I don't know what's going to happen.

You have until same time next week. I want to see a bare minimum of five raw ideas before this time next week. Go. Push the envelope, people. I've got pressure from above to make things happen. Hmm. So wondering if both your job and the future of your division lie in the balance. You go set to work. And the next morning, you email that boss a whole set of awesome ideas.

And they're rough. You know, highly creative. You've never heard anything like them. 15 minutes later, you get a reply. Nice effort, she says. But these just aren't quite right. Keep at it. Next day, you try again, submitting three new concepts, each one better than the first batch.

Minutes later, similar reply hits your inbox. Hey, I really appreciate your hard work, but these, they're just too different, too risky. And the dance goes on daily, not just for the week that you are supposed to come up with big new ideas, but for weeks and weeks, maybe months, not just with you, but between the boss and all of the members of your team, and you begin to wonder, how can a group of smart, innovative people brainstorm probably more than 100 ideas and have them all be rejected out of hand as being either too dull or more often too risky? Is the entire team really that incapable of creativity? Turns out the problem may not be the team's ideas at all,

but rather the leader's inability to validate them. So a study conducted not too long ago at the University of Pennsylvania revealed something that doesn't bode all that well for creativity and innovation within organizations. Team leaders, it turns out, often reject highly creative ideas, not because those ideas don't have potential, but rather because the leaders themselves aren't equipped to handle the fear, the uncertainty, the exposure, and anxiety that rides along with validating and then backing the idea that is innovative and also necessarily carries the potential risk of loss and exposure to judgment. It gets worse.

Most managers not only reject good, highly creative ideas on a regular basis, they've got no idea they're rejecting them because of their own lack of innovation, mindset, coping skills. In the study, the lead researcher, Jennifer Mueller, shared, and I'm quoting now, people often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal. People can hold a bias against creativity that's

not necessarily overt and which is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty. Furthermore, the bias against creativity interferes with the participant's ability to recognize a creative idea. These results reveal a concealed barrier that creative actors may face as they attempt to gain acceptance for their novel ideas. End of her quote. So it turns out many people in supervisory or leadership roles have become so afraid of having to act on edgy ideas and dance with uncertainty that they've unintentionally blinded themselves to the existence of the very thing they clamor for. So the question is, what do you do about that?

So here are a few thoughts. One, maybe try build intelligent uncertainty awareness and management training into the programs that all leaders and managers and executives go through. And that sounds kind of fancy, uncertainty awareness and management training. Just teach people how to recognize what's going on and then give them the skills and the practices

to be able to be in a place of uncertainty without freaking out. So maybe what organizations really need more of is not better people and ideas, but leaders who are equipped with, quote, uncertainty scaffolding, mindset skills, practices, and strategies that allow them to be comfortable with uncertainty, capable of opening them to first seeing and then acting upon the great ideas that are already being

laid at their feet. With most modern organizational training, as employees rise up the management food chain, they get all sorts of additional training in the content needed for their jobs, in leadership strategies, social dynamics, best practices, time management, productivity, yada, yada, yada. But the specific proven mindset practices, tools, and strategies needed to wrangle uncertainty are never trained, let alone explored. So this could be a reflection of a flawed assumption that you either have the ability to be in a place of uncertainty and to tolerate the unknown that comes along with super high levels of creativity and innovation, when in fact, it's a skill that's not only trainable, but mission critical to success on an individual and organizational level. So in a world where companies need to not only exist, but discover and execute on opportunities delivered, by an environment that's just persistently amplified uncertainty, the skill set is needed like never before. Second idea here, counter the management

negative creativity bias with an unbiased co-decision maker. What again, like what does that mean? So think about this. What would happen if you brought in a second manager who is neither vested in nor will be held responsible for the outcome of any ideas that are accepted and executed. So in theory, this would serve to counter the underlying negative creativity bias and allow truly creative ideas to surface and potentially then be considered seriously and maybe even allocated resources. But it's not likely to work well in practice for a few reasons. One, there's no such thing as a complete lack of bias. If you're human and alive, on some level you're biased.

It may not be against ideas, but it may be against people, entities, circumstances. You're always going to be judged for some reason. So there's always going to be bias involved there. There may even be underlying political reasons to want to see a colleague succeed or fail. And like the negative creativity bias, people are often unaware of the existence of our own biases, let alone the impact on our decision-making processes. Second reason that this might not work entirely well in real life is that this, you know, quote, unbiased proxy will not have the same level of intuition or specific experience or understanding of the abilities and limitations and history and approaches of all

those members on the other person's team. So that may make them more able to objectively identify and, you know, great ideas that are risky and counter that negative creativity bias, but also at the same time, it makes them less able to understand the social dynamics of a team and the history of it, and more inclined to validate ideas that might be viable in a vacuum but not executable in the real world. So in the end, we're all human. We are largely wired to run from decisions and actions that lead us further down a rabbit hole of the unknown, things that lead us to reject not only our own creative ideas, but the envelope-pushing ideas of those we lead and back. Because validating our team members quote unprovable ideas, and then allocating resources makes them

ours. If the idea goes down in flames, so do we. So the problem is in a world where what got us here ain't going to get us there, This phenomenon is death, not only to individual power and creativity, but to organizational innovation and progress. The answer, at least from my perspective, is to explore these three things. One, alert team leaders to the existence of the problem. Most managers have an innate creativity bias. So really step one is just stand up and become aware that this is a phenomenon. It's very real. That alone can make a really big difference because you start to recognize it in yourself and question yourself. And then you start to not just have an immediate knee-jerk reaction that says this is a bad idea, but you start to say, hmm, is it really a bad idea or is this fear of speaking?

Two, explain how this leads to an inability and an unwillingness to see and validate and back highly innovative ideas. So go beyond sort of sharing that this thing exists and actually explain in a deeper level to anyone who's in charge of receiving and validating or not validating ideas, like how this really works. And three, this is where it gets important,

equip leaders, those who are sort of, you know, like in charge of determining whether ideas are good or not, should be funded or not, equip those leaders with the mindset skills and abilities needed to embrace truly innovative ideas. And if you are that leader, then this is where you have to dive into it yourself. Easy task?

No, not so much. But is it necessary for evolution, innovation, and progress? It is mandatory. As always, I'm curious what you think. Have you been this person who's ended up unintentionally squashing other people's ideas, not realizing it was coming from a place of fear instead of actual valid analysis?

Have you had your ideas squashed by other people knowing that they were actually really good and that the person was just too scared to back them because they couldn't take on the level of risk or uncertainty that it would take to make them manifest? Share it around. Have conversations in social media, wherever you like to have conversations around the idea.

I think it's an important topic to explore. And as always, if you found this interesting, share it with friends. And I would love it if you would just give us a review or rating on iTunes. It helps us get the word out and helps make a bigger difference in more people's lives. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes the Apple Watch Series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations iPhone XS or later required charge time and actual results will vary