Blocking the door, by Ginny Brien

As the first item of business on our company retreat, we wrapped up the sales game we’d been playing for three weeks. Jane, who had come up with the idea for a game, asked Gary and me to design a session for evaluating it, acknowledging the participants, and announcing the winners.

Left to lead the conversation myself, the team would have experienced Boom, Boom, Boom – This is what we did. These are the results we produced. Here are things that X, Y, and Z did particularly well. The end.

Thank God I didn’t take the opportunity to bore everyone to death with my bias to action and my understanding of “completion” as “an assignment to handle as quickly and efficiently as possible.” There’s something to be said for speed, but not when the bigger goal is opening up new actions that could prove more effective than anything we’ve tried before.

I think of myself as someone who’s all about creativity and innovation, but am I?  I was charged with building on what we learned in our sales game, but I didn’t start the retreat with curiosity about what that might be. Not only was curiosity missing, I was oblivious to its being missing.  

Watching Gary lead the conversation was like watching a rose open; he guided the team through a meandering conversation that brought out ideas we hadn’t explored before.

As I reflected on what had opened up, I let myself wonder about this process of completion. If the point of completion is NOT to have a “point,” then what is it?

I can see how other people’s blind spots slow things down, but it’s hard to see the impact of my own. What if my bias toward action is actually a barrier to innovation? What if “knowing” is the booby prize?

We had a client who was having a hard time with her supervisor. She “knew” that he was stubborn and would never try anything new. In fact, she reported that when she’d told him about being in our Mastery Program, he sent back an email that clearly showed he was not interested in talking to her about what she had learned.  

Gary asked her to forward her supervisor’s response so they could look at the email together. When they read it together, she discovered that her supervisor had invited her to talk about what she was learning. Sarah could not register that part of the message until Gary had her slow down and consciously examine what her supervisor had actually said.

We sometimes use cultural assessments to discover group blind spots that are in the way of productivity or innovation. In one case, we had a client whose looms were operating with 17 percent downtime. At that time, there were clear lines of demarcation between factory workers. The engineers saw themselves as the problem solvers, and didn’t pay attention to the knitters. After all, every time a loom went down, they were the ones who were called in to fix it.

Our assessment turned up a refrain the knitters muttered under their breath time and again: “I could have told you that would happen.” “Why is that?” we asked. “It always makes a funny noise before it breaks down.”  Once the engineers and knitters learned to listen to each other differently, the looms’ downtime dropped to three percent and have stayed at that level for more than 20 years.

This business of unlocking innovation requires divergent perspectives, and that goes against the human brain’s orientation toward automating thought. To solve the challenges facing us, whether it’s the race to upgrade a computer system, gain market share, or confront infectious disease or colony collapse disorder, we need to be able to set aside what we “know” and listen for what we’ve never heard before.

Innovation depends on using curiosity, patience, courage and love to draw each other further and further into the unknown until something miraculous emerges.