I was recommended to watch Linda Hill’s TED Talk about innovative workplaces and teams.

She and her team determined successfully creative workplaces had an interplay of creative abrasion, agility, and resolution. Remember, creativity is the killer app – it is one of the few remaining human skillsets keeping at bay our robot overlords.

This has resonance for me. When I think about when I did my best work a) it was always with others who were seeking more or better; and b) there was always an interplay, a dance. It was never particularly easy, nor guaranteed that we would win the day.

I have long spoken about sponsoring creative tension in the workplace. This is a particular skill of mine, it is the glint in my eye. It is about poking and prodding around in the shadows of the organization, and also shining the bright light of external practices. Abrasion.

Challenging your organization is tough work for tough operators. It requires trust and confidence. But nothing happens without shaking up existing norms.

Creative agility is about the actions taken, through experiments, that get us to breakthrough. That overused innovation word ‘pivot’ springs to mind.

The last part is creative resolution, rounding out the edges, finding the way forward. It requires connectedness – seeing that these sets of experiments fit together in the whole. We map the bottom up work and stories of the front line workers, who best represent the brand, to the top down strategies and business drivers. 

I sometimes call it a Head-Heart-Hand approach: think of interesting, challenging, creative ideas; bring people together in a shared journey of adventure; and make things happen with agility, velocity, and a results-orientation.

Here comes the….KaBOOM!

How creative is your workplace?

This Much We Know.