The What Goes Around Blog

Creative Leadership

How to use experimentation to become more creative and collaborative

Creative Leadership – From Joining the Dots to Creating a Masterpiece

Creativity, innovation, collaboration. Three essential ingredients for most businesses that have come to mean almost nothing. Buzzwords at best.

If you took everything written about creativity, innovation and collaboration and stacked it all up you could climb the pile of paper to the moon, maybe. Yet if you took all the real work, the real action around creativity, innovation and collaboration and stacked all that up, you could slide it under your average CEO’s office door, possibly.

A key challenge for modern organisations is this: we desire these attributes of creativity, innovation and collaboration to help us create new opportunities, solve problems, and deliver better service, yet we leapfrog most of the basic skills needed to accomplish these purposeful behaviours. Basic skills like conversation, experimentation, practice and persistence. In business we tend to punish mistakes and in so doing, we blunt our creative potential. We are reluctant to acknowledge that time is needed to develop the art of leadership, so we try and rush toward a finished product, and we miss so much as things blur past us.

So how do we get to a more creative, collaborative place? For years we have admired work produced by artists from all across the world. Whether it is your favourite grand masterpiece, an ancient cave painting, or that wonderfully impossible daubed finger painting your child just made for you. And what about the simple poetry of a powerful conversation? Some of the best work we do emanates from something as simple as the right conversation at the right time, with the right people. I think we are missing out on some simple and powerful methods that can help us achieve much better results at work.

You can gain huge value from practicing creative leadership, and What Goes Around launches a new service on February 28th designed to help you do just that. We’ll provide a safe environment for you to take risks, try new things, and make mistakes. It will be experimental, artistic, practical, conversational and powerful. Perhaps more importantly, it will be bold, fun and useful.

More to follow.

photo credit

When is a Conversation not a Conversation?

I had a really interesting, useful and fun afternoon at the second LnDConnect Learning and Development Unconference in London yesterday. Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen. Here are a few of my thoughts on the event, and unconferences in general, I hope they are useful to you.

The Venue Matters

The venue matters, but only in so far as it is clean, warm enough and accessible, and any tech needs you have are met. You can run a good event in a modest venue. Yesterday we were at Park Crescent Conference Centre which pretty much had it all, including decent break time coffee too. If I’m being really picky the Twitterfall was a bit hard to read as it was projected onto a screen quite high up on the wall, but yesterday was a good reminder that venue wise – good enough is perfectly good enough.

The People Matter More

It was lovely to catch up with some friends, and get to meet some people I’d only previously got to know on Twitter, and….drum roll please, meet some people who are not currently using social media to connect. I’m not sure how LnDConnect pulled it off – but kudos for attracting a diverse audience, more so than at your typical event.

The Technology is Becoming a Distraction

I think Twitter, blogs, and other tools are great ways to promote and market unconferences, and when the day of the event comes, I’m feeling more and more like I just want to immerse myself in the conversation and the learning possibilities. I find it too much of a distraction to engage in what other people are saying and tweet stuff at the same time. Sometimes what emerges on Twitter can be interesting and I’m hoping LnDConnect will share a Tweetreach report with the delegates. I wonder, if people are wiling, whether we need to ask folks to volunteer to curate a conversation? Sit at the edge of the chat and pick up on, and share the emerging threads.

When is a Conversation Not A Conversation?

In the wrap up before we hit the bar – opinions were sought about what worked well and what hadn’t been so good. Niall Gavin asked that in future, could we please do away with the tables. We were sat at round tables designed for about ten people – and on reflection it would have been easier to converse without these tables in the way. I think I would have preferred the intimacy over the slight inconvenience of having to rest on my knee to scribble those little insightful nuggets you want to capture. I’ll share a few of the ones I caught in a minute.

Beyond the table observation, it struck me that some of the tracks weren’t really conversational at all. Let me ask you a question – how many people does it take to make a conversation? I’d suggest between two….and maybe five at a push. Beyond that number what tends to happen is gobby gits like me, dominate the available air time and quieter folk tend to withdraw and….go quiet! I picked up on this in the bar afterwards when having a few conversations (heh heh) with people. Maybe in future – when a track gets really popular the facilitators might split it up a bit, to aid and maintain the conversation.

Nuggets

Here are a few things I heard that I’m enjoying reflecting on.

Stakeholders – the perception has evolved beyond just the purse string holders, to anyone who has an interest in your project/organisation/plan etc

Can we be more disruptive? Yes please!

Being bold – that came up a lot and it was fun listening to people define it. The dictionary says: Showing an ability to take risks, confident and courageous. Subtle and elegant were among the alternatives offered.

Be open to the possibilities – good learning is perhaps more about great connections that great content.

Pourable sunshine does exist. Whaddya know?!

It struck me that people aren’t big fans of happy sheets, who am I to disagree?

A lot of people said they were at the event for some ‘me time’. I’d like to see L&D pushing the case for more self determined learning in general. It’s powerful stuff.

Before the event I had wondered if together we could try and apply some theory and suggest things we might take away and experiment with. I’m not yet sure that we got there – and right now – I’m OK with that. Like I said, yesterday was interesting, useful and fun. That gets my vote.

Ballooning

I took this photo of Carole many years ago at the Hat Fair in Winchester. It reminds me of a lovely day out.

Today we are off to Littleheath Woods. Keira wants to go there, write a few words of love on a tag, tie it to a balloon and release it up into the sky.

Who am I to disagree with that?

Happy Sunday – whatever you are up to, I hope you enjoy it.