Tag design and management

Entries 2 Total

Creativity, Organizations, and Identity

Dec 30, ’08 6:17 PM

Teresa M. Amabile & Mukti Khaire wrote an interesting article for October 2008′s HBR titled “Creativity and the Role of the Leader.”

To answer the question, “How can organizations foster a culture of creativity?” they propose 6 guidelines. One of them is open the organization to diverse perspectives. When they discuss enhancing diversity, they state three main points:

  1. Innovation is more likely when people with different backgrounds/disciplines participate.
  2. Open-source innovation is relevant today and may very well be the “future of innovation.”
  3. Diversity within an individual enhances creativity.

It’s the last point that I’m interested in. There has been a study of individuals and how their diverse identity can enhance creativity (Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks and Fiona Lee from Univ. of Michigan, and Chi-Ying Cheng of Columbia Univ.). Here is an excerpt from the HBR article:

Their reserach (Sanchez-Burks, Lee, Cheng’s) focuses on people who have multiple social identities, such as people who are both Asian and American, or who are both women and engineers. Social identities often have distinct knowledge associated with them, and to the extent an individual is comfortable integrating multiple identities, his or her knowledge sets can combine productively. Indeed, through two experiments, these researchers found that people with higher levels of “identity integration” display higher levels of creativity when problems require that they draw on their different realms of knowledge. (One experiment asked Asian Americans to invent new forms of Asian American fusion cuisine, and the other asked female engineers to imagine new features for a cell phone for women.) This research sparked a great deal of personal interest and has implications for management. If managers cause people to suppress parts of their identity, they limit potentially valuable sources of creativity. If managers can encourage identity integration – think of female engineers working in an environment where they don’t feel they have to dress like men – people may be more innovative.

It’s interesting to see that finding topics (topoi), or the places to find arguments, is not limited to things in this world as well as ideas in our minds. We can be topics, places of invention. The very nature of being an Asian and an American at the same time … or being an Asian American that can’t be broken down into more fundamental parts, is a place for finding new and interesting actions, feelings, and beliefs (For those who lack internal diversity, the article encourages seeking diverse life experiences).

Add to this a third layer, and what can that look like? For example, what would a car for Asian Americans look like? One part of my thesis deals with football + African + Korean + American (Hines Ward). Jackie Robinson is so powerful and interesting because he brought the concepts of baseball, African, and American together for the first time. Another example I can think of is R & B music which has its roots in a number of things. Even Elvis was an “innovation” or brought forth “innovation” because he was a fusion of Caucasian teen + Rock ‘n Roll.

As stated at the end of the quote above, there is a way to enhance creativity (and perhaps much more, such as culture) by simply understanding a subaltern culture – such as women engineers in an environment that understand them. A case I can think of where the people in charge took this to heart is found at the end of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, Blink. For years, many orchestras conducted open auditions which resulted in an overwhelming selection of male performers. But in the 1980s, orchestras, as Gladwell writes, “started putting up screens in audition rooms, so that the committee could no longer see the person auditioning. And immediately — immediately! — orchestras started hiring women.” As in this example, organizational change does not have to be a long and strenuous process.

I think I have to think a bit more about management’s role in developing creativity.
From personal experience, I do know that it can kill creativity. There must be a way for management to enhance it or design for it …

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Interpretive Management

Apr 12, ’08 9:41 PM

Learnings from Interpretive Management: What General Managers Can Learn From Design by Richard K. Lester, Michael J. Piore, and Kamal M. Male, from Harvard Business Review, March-April 1998:

TWO APPROACHES TO MANAGEMENT

Analytical

  • managing design
  • engineering challenge: a problem that must be solved
  • goal is to arrive at a fixed and final shape
  • like an engineer
  • customer knows what she wants and needs
  • ex: AT&T – moving cellular operations out of Bell Labs and moving away from their original interpretive management approach; they stopped questioning the nature of a cellular system
  • this view often times says, “These are our capabilities, and these are the products we will produce, and these are the processes we will use to produce them.”
  • about closure, wanting to end discovery process as company gets more complex; resorts to a structured, formal organization and process

Interpretive

  • designing management
  • design challenge: open-ended and creative process, not a specific problem to be solved
  • dynamic form: embraces ambiguity and uncertainty
  • like a leader of a jazz combo (improv): about guiding emerging series of interactions, or conversations
  • good to think of customer as having no preexisting needs at all
  • ex: fashion industry – “The sense of what is fashionable emerges from a series of conversations among fashion designers, clothing buyers, key customers, garment manufacturers, and fashion writers. The conversations have neither a beginning nor an end.”
  • constantly questions boundaries of company’s core competency, sometimes deliberately straying across those boundaries

The two approaches presented by Lester and Co. are strikingly similar to Richard J. Boland’s Decision Attitude and Design Attitude discussed in the book Managing as Designing. Both approaches/attitudes are needed in organizations, however, it still remains very difficult to talk about the interpretive approach/design attitude because there is no set vocabulary (as mentioned by both authors). Business schools and management theory has been discussing much of the analytic approach/decision attitude for over a century now, but how can we address the unpredictable and complex problems of the future? Both readings agree, not with the traditional approach/attitude.

Lester and Co. write,

… as radical uncertainty becomes a more pervasive feature of the business environment – as it has in the cellular business – the limitations of a strictly analytical model becomes progressively more debilitating. The most successful managers will understand both approaches, seeing them as complementary, not antagonistic, and they will be capable of striking a sensible balance between the two … just as modern physics instructs us to think about light as both particles and waves, so too can a business organization be looked at from either the analytical or the interpretive perspective … this back-and-forth process [between analytic and interpretive], essentially interpretive in nature [emphasis is mine], is almost always fruitful, revealing new possibilities … pp. 94-5

So, we are in search of a dialectic art/discipline that deals well with contradictions and moves towards conversations. Could this be design? Here is the simplified break-down of the two approaches provided by Dick Buchanan:

Analytic

  • grammar
  • logic

Interpretive

  • rhetoric
  • dialectic

Is there a dialectic art that seeks to balance these two approaches … this may very well be Design – as Buchanan calls, “fourth-order” design.
So, what is the nature of a conversation?

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