POSITIVE TURBULENCE IS KEY TO ORGANIZATIONAL RENEWAL
Use creativity to manage change and sustain healthy organizations

By: Stanley S. Gryskiewicz, Ph.D., Vice President and Senior Fellow, Creativity and Innovation at the Center for Creative Leadership

In the 1950s the typical business organization valued nothing so much as predictability and repeatability. In the name of efficiency, companies were system-designed to maintain order and reduce variability. In the environment of the time, this "keep it the same and everyone will be happy" approach made a certain kind of sense. Competition was nonexistent and customers were content to receive whatever the companies supplied.

Today's business climate is entirely different. Social change, foreign competition, deregulation, environmental issues, global economic forces, and mind-boggling technology have turned the stability of forty years ago on its head, leaving a new world that is unpredictable, and sometimes terrifying. Turbulence —that chaotic, bubbling, swirling, frenetic environment that threatens to drown us all — is the spawning ground for personal, team, and organizational renewal. Disruption, change, and chaos are inevitable facts of economic life, but within them there is valuable information. The challenge is to look turbulence in the eye and turn it into a positive force. By creating positive turbulence, organizations can promote renewal and not only survive change but prosper from it. What is needed instead is to see in new ways, come up with new approaches, and veer off into different directions.

Operating in a time of rapid and seemingly relentless change, today’s healthiest organizations have the ability to continuously renew themselves and thrive in a challenging environment. They are the ones that know how to harness the turbulence all organizations encounter and use it as a catalyst for creativity and innovation. They are the organizations that will succeed in the long term.

For the past 25 years, I have studied organizations that provide stimulating work climates. What I have found is that sometimes creativity and innovation are unplanned, even spontaneous, in their occurrence. However, sometimes creativity, and any resultant product or process innovation, is not random. Organizational structures can, in fact, be put in place that provide for a more predictable occurrence of innovation — the successful implementation of a creative idea, or an idea that is both novel and useful.

When employees are enveloped by a creative environment, they are free to puzzle over new information and creative ideas and implement successful and innovative solutions, plans and projects. Given the fast-changing world we live in today, companies need precisely this kind of supportive climate to adapt and thrive in the long term.

Underlying the concept of positive turbulence is the belief that creativity is stimulated by new information, fresh concepts and broad perspective. By looking beyond the status quo, the obvious data, and the current constraints, organizations and individuals “see” things differently and often discover new ideas or new applications.

"The way forward is paradoxically not to look ahead, but to look around," explains John Sealy Brown, the director of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for Xerox.

It is my experience, like that of Sealy Brown and others, that outside the mainstream, on the fringes of the industry, are the small blips which may be the introduction of a major trend that will grow and represent meaningful change over the next three to five years. These coming changes point to a possible future direction of the industry and in turn help the industry’s visionaries plan for that future.

The principle of “working the periphery” is a powerful one. It is on the periphery — activities outside the main work or focus of a team or organization — where one first comes in contact with the world outside the organization's boundary. Innovation is most rapid on the periphery of any system because that is where people have the opportunity to explore new possibilities. When time is spent on the periphery, one can distinguish the novel and exciting impulses from the worn banal of the familiar. Organizations that do not pay attention to the periphery can be slow to act and are overcome by demands of change.

The first requirement for acting on the periphery is a shift in thinking. Organizations that now consider any deviation from standard operating procedure to be irrelevant, excessive, or an unnecessary expense must begin to think of such variances as portals into the future. Companies that view a turbulent environment as an ominous whirlpool must learn to see it as a reservoir full of new ideas and insights into direction of the market place.

The second requirement is that, with wide eyes and an open mind, organizations and their leaders must actively and systematically extend the range of observation outward, beyond the comfort of the known.

Instituting structures for Positive Turbulence can be done on the individual level and on the organizational level and can involve either internal or external resources. Some structures which provide positive turbulence include:

· Encouraging employees to read outside their field of expertise.
One proven source of novelty is reading credible fringe periodicals such as Fast Company, Red Herring, Upside, Raygun, Wired and foreign journals. Remember, the mainstream publications of today were once on the fringe of respectability. Books, articles and websites from completely different fields . . . music, science, history, technology . . . can also contribute new ideas and offer new connections to your current work.

· Providing resources for employees to attend conferences which only tangentially relate to their field of expertise.
The concept of reading “on the fringe” also applies to attending conferences or professional meetings outside one’s area of expertise. We are all experts in our fields, but we need access to new impulses, new ideas which can be applied to that field. Each year, budget for employees to attend one conference that would offer a new perspective (in addition to the more standard professional conferences).

· Creating ad hoc task forces and cross-functional teams to resolve problems and stimulate new ideas.
Working cross functionally — with teams comprised of members from manufacturing, marketing, finance, human resources, design and so forth — is a natural source of positive turbulence which can improve company performance.

· Bringing in outside experts to present to staff.
Experts from the outside bring with them a perspective which is not often heard within the organization. By definition, these external experts are not shaped in their thinking by the climate or culture or school of thought of the internal organization. These experts may be within your field or from unrelated fields.

These, and other tactics, can be introduced and established in your organization, work group or team to foster new thinking and creative ideas that will help you steer safely through the turbulence of change.

Examples of Creative Organisations
For nearly three years, the senior management team of a telecommunications company’s Nortel Networks’ Broad Band line of business has been practicing the tenants of positive turbulence at their quarterly management meetings. Caroline Paoletti, vice president, human resources, reports that the team devotes 10-15 percent of each meeting to positive turbulence by importing a variety of presenters, readings, and video which provide the team with information from the periphery. For example, venture capitalist spending was tracked through the credible fringe periodical Red Herring and venture capitalists spoke to the group to provide the management team with an indication of where investments for the future were being made and who was making them.

The use of these acts of positive turbulence have caused the management team to be more reflective and has changed how the team looks at their organization. "Positive turbulence changed our culture, and our receptivity to novel and useful ideas,” says Ian Craig, President, Broad Band, Nortel Networks. “As an organization, we changed because the information from the periphery indicated that we needed to.”

Sweden’s $7 billion insurance giant Skandia has created a strategic planning unit which is staffed with people representing three distinct generations. Staff members range in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-sixties. Skandia refers to this as the “3G” (generation) planning team. These generation differences spark dialogue within the group which include discussions on medical realities such as dying, the slowing of the aging process, the end of disease, and the impact of these possibilities upon the younger generation.

All these trends have implications for actuarial decisions, future selling strategies, products, market-niche decisions and even qualification procedures for future customers. This dialogue provides the evidence for the importance of a generationally diverse group to address complex challenges.

Hallmark (greeting cards industry) brings into its corporate headquarters in Kansas City each year 50 or more speakers (Lyn Heward, Vice President of Creation, Cirque du Soleil; Guy Kawasaki, Apple Fellow; David Whyte, story teller and poet) who have novel ideas to communicate. The sole purpose is to provide stimulation to the world’s largest creative staff — more than 740 artists, designers, writers, editors, and photographers who generate more than 15,000 original designs for cards and related products yearly.

Similarly, Bell Labs (communications industry) brings in world experts to talk to their scientists about the particular expertise they represent. The experts must be renowned in their field, but, more significantly, these experts must be knowledgeable in a field not represented inside the Labs.

For example, several years ago, Bell Labs brought in Roger Payne, a world expert in whale communication with a Ph.D. in ornithology, to describe what he had discovered about these large mammals of the deep. His major finding was that whales sing to each other to communicate, but each year they change their language patterns. Payne noticed this phenomenon in contrast to birds, which keep the same pattern year after year. Half way through his presentation to the Labs, a scientist jumped up and ran out of the auditorium with an idea on how to improve communications between submarines. Again, the value of positive turbulence — creating a novel stimulus for people in order to make connections to problems or issues they are trying to resolve in other settings.

Creative Leaders Needed
Of course, the role of the creative leader is very important to the success of positive turbulence. The leader must be committed to putting the right structures in place, committing the time and funds to support them. Can you imagine what it must be like to defend a budget for bringing in speakers on topics unrelated to the company’s expertise? With commitment from leadership, the organization will believe in the value of such an approach.

The leader must also beware of the possible pitfalls. Too much turbulence without the right supportive structures in place — or a management which views creativity as an end in itself —can result in negative turbulence. In such an environment, wheels spin at the sight of every new opportunity and agreed upon strategy and goals are ignored.

In the examples above, organizations discard useful paradigms and lead with novelty alone. Such knee-jerk creativity is extremely hard on in-place systems such as marketing and manufacturing.

We are each experts in our disciplines, and we need the stimulation of positive turbulence to help us “break out” and see what is on the other side of the wall. The “velvet ruts” of routine and/or success inhibit our ability to see beyond to new and useful connections. The creative leader will assume responsibility for providing positive turbulence — both internal and external — within his or her organization.

Sources of Positive Turbulence

External	Individual	Organization
	• Conferences	• ventures
	• Travel	• alliances
	• reading outside your area of expertise	• listening posts
	• repotted careers	• professional networks
Internal	• foreign assignments	• diverse guest experts
	• ad hoc task forces	• sabbaticals
	• crises	• cross-functional teams
	• affinity groups	• corporate-wide trade shows
	• role changes

What is Your Creativity Capacity?

What is your organization's capacity for creativity, innovation and successful renewal? The answers to these questions may provide you with insight into your organization's capacity for innovation:

1. What is your organization's ability to absorb new information? High? Medium? Low?
2. What capacity does your organization have to learn, remember and process information? Is knowledge management practiced?
3. What motivation do your people have to engage in novel interpretations? To seek novelty and then make sense of it?
4. Is your organization balanced with both innovators and implementers of new ideas? Both are needed. One without the other results in either a house full of ideas never implemented or a perfected redundancy of the same ideas implemented continuously.

Stanley S. Gryskiewicz, Ph.D. is Vice President and Senior Fellow, Creativity and Innovation at the Center for Creative Leadership (CLC), a nonprofit educational organization based in Greensboro, North Carolina, USA and an IFTDO Member. The article is excerted from Dr. Gryskiewicz’s most recent book Positive Turbulence: Developing Climates for Creativity, Innovation, and Renewal, (CCL and Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999). For additional information, visit CCL’s web site at http://www.ccl.org under publications/new releases.