Category Archives: Work Culture

RESHAPING WORK SPACES

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Francis

Startup Stock Photos

Space affects moods.  A beautiful space can make people happy; a small cramped office can make them feel depressed.  But more important, space also affects behaviors and communication.  Open space offices allow an easier flow of communication among team members and can convey a strong feeling of belonging, but they also can make it harder to focus.  Separate offices allow for more privacy and concentration but can easily create silos that separate people and teams.  Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, you need to be ready to manage space not only from a budgetary standpoint but also from the perspective of what it is your creative teams actually need in order to be creative and to deliver the level of innovation your company needs.  To achieve this, some companies will have to literally give away space–that is, to sacrifice space for its positive impact on the environment, the company culture and ultimately the creative output.

Office space is an expensive commodity, especially in the world’s most competitive markets, and historically offices have been designed and furnished to maximize administrative efficiency and minimize facility costs (private offices only for senior executives, “cube farms” for lower-ranking personnel).  But today companies are looking at efficiency differently, and consequently they are looking at space differently.  They are looking for ways to maximize the creative output of their employees, and from that viewpoint the most efficient use of space is one that supports creative interactions.  For example, Pixar’s California headquarters–where bathrooms, mailboxes, and meeting rooms are clustered at the center of the building–are designed to ensure that employees from different divisions of the company are certain to run into each other throughout the day.  This facilitates informal and random conversations among diverse team members and allows creative ideas and collaborations to be born.  I once had a client who wanted to close off an open space in their New York City offices; I struggled hard to convince them otherwise.  The company needed more private meeting rooms.  Moving out of their existing facility was not an option, nor was renting another floor, so the president of the company wanted to build elegant glass walls to enclose what in his opinion was wasted space.

My observation was quite different.  The open space, which offered an inviting round table nestled by a large staircase, was the only place in the office where different members of the product development team would spontaneously sit to discuss their projects.  Account managers would stop there after coming back from client meetings to share the latest developments about those clients and their projects.  In other words, it was the perfect spot for informal communication and feedback loops.  In the end, the precious open space was saved in spite of financial pressures.

How can your workspace benefit by creating places for accidental encounters or informal meetings?

 

3 Tips for Creating a Workplace Environment to Enhance Creativity

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Francis

WLXPH20HUABecause creativity is such an important factor of success in business today, play should be part of every CEO’s mandate, and companies should be rated according to the level of playfulness in their culture in the same way as they are rated as a great place to work or as a socially responsible organization.  A number of practical steps can be followed to navigate this cultural shift towards play.

Think about what play looks like.  It is personal, engaging, and interactive.  It is often exuberant and messy.  It is filled with light, color, and sound.  When you think about play, you may instinctively think about a children’s playground or children’s toys.  Now, think about corporate offices, or, more specifically, corporate boardrooms.  There are lots of straight lines in boardrooms, (or perhaps an artistically, elegantly curved accent wall); there is typically an imposing table made from fine polished wood or sleek metal.  That table likely suggests a hierarchical seating arrangement that people intuitively understand: the boss will sit at the head of the table and the chief advisor will sit next to the boss or perhaps will anchor the other end.  The rest of the employees will fill in the sides of the table.  So, before the meeting even starts, everyone knows his or her relative importance.  And everyone knows that polite behavior is expected: sit up straight, papers stacked neatly in front of you, a pen at the ready, smartphone close by in case of an emergency.

These rigid boardrooms are where major strategic decisions are being made about  innovation and the future of our organizations.  They represent a very logical environment geared toward conscious conversations that will unfold in a very linear and efficient way.  They appeal to the 20 percent of our intelligence that lives in our conscious mind with its wealth of creative ideas, and the intelligence that we can reach through play.

Dr. Marian Cleeves Diamond, one of the world’s foremost neuro-anatomists, advocates the establishment of “playful environments.” I too believe that we need to create offices, boardrooms, and activities that engage our playful nature—a corporate sandbox or playground.  We are playful by nature and efficient by necessity.   So let’s embrace our nature, and less effort will be needed for the same, or better, results.  When we do this we can break through the mental barriers that are keeping us stuck. Certain corporations are already doing this.

 

Three key things that you can do to create a play-friendly atmosphere include:
-Allocating significant time in which employees are explicitly encouraged to play

-Creating, or giving employees access to, physical spaces that are conducive to play

-Giving employees implicit and explicit permission to “fail” or be “unproductive” in their pursuit of innovation.

 

Try these and notice how the implicit culture change affects your employees’ levels of creativity and innovation.

How to Evaluate Any Corporate Culture

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Bianca Le Mouël

corporate cultureFor those of you who missed our post last week, we used the Intuitive Compass® to create a Corporate Culture Questionnaire that is suitable for both CEOs trying to get a clearer understanding of how their company culture supports performance and for people in the process of looking for a new job who want to evaluate how well they would fit within the corporate culture of a particular company.  (For those of you that need a primer on the Intuitive Compass, please click here.)

As promised, below is the decoding section for the quiz.  You should have a score between 1 and 5 for each of the four quadrants of the Intuitive Compass: northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest.

Northeast

The northeast quadrant highlights the administrative function.  It shows how business is managed and organized.  This is obviously an important aspect of business:  how can an organization function well when processes are not well managed or are simply absent?  Typically, a financial institution or accounting firm would score high in the northeast quadrant, whereas a startup may not be focusing on how to manage a business that is still being shaped.  Therefore the important facts here are the nature and maturity of the business.  Businesses with analytical functions at their core tend to score high in the northeast quadrant simply because organizational skills are in their DNA.  Mature business tend to score high in the northeast quadrant because over time it becomes highly likely that systems and procedures have been put in place to ensure smooth operations that support continuation of the status quo.  If a business is still young (less than 2 years old) it is naturally more adaptable; its culture is affected by the nature of the activity but can be influenced more easily because day-to-day activities are less ingrained with habits built over time.  It is also important to evaluate the northeast in relationship to other quadrants; a low score in the northeast can sometimes be of lesser importance in a very high-performing culture (indicated by a high score in the southeast) or temporarily out of balance because the company is going through a major phase of reinvention of its business model, which brings more focus on the southwest and northwest.

Southeast

In the southeast quadrant, we have insights into the focus on performance and the measure of performance.  A high score would be typical at a sales organization like a network marketing company.  A low score would typically be found in a company focused on administration.  This quadrant gives you insight into the level of emphasis that is given to results.  If you are talented at working with metric objectives, regardless of your function in the company (marketing or sales), you will probably be inclined to seek a company with a high score in the southeast, like a sales oriented company.  Conversely, if metrics are not your strength of interest, a company with a predominantly southeast culture is unlikely to make you happy or leverage your most valuable talents.  In this case you may look for a company that is more about creation (southwest) and/ or administration (northeast).  Again, the relationship with the other quadrants is key, especially the northwest and southwest quadrants.  I know of highly profitable large consulting firms that have no sales objectives and no ongoing measure of their commercial performance: however, because they are very strong in the northwest (strategic planning), they deliver great ideas, and phone calls from new clients continue to come in.

Northwest

In the northwest quadrant we gather information on creative thinking and strategic planning.  A higher score is always better, because as we saw earlier, research shows that openness to new ideas is a factor of longevity. However, a business may be extremely successful a few years in a row simply due to a series of great deals (southeast) and bold moves (southwest), without much strategic thinking involved.  I’ve observed that a number of large companies tend to focus more on feeding the pipeline or following the “business as usual” routine strategy to meet sales objectives (southeast).  Often companies focus on market opportunities to boost sales, with little thought about sustainable value creation, which leads them to not adapt their business model to today’s new market constraints and their marketing strategies to a new type of consumer; a dangerous path in the long run.  So it is important to look closely at a northwest score and compare it with the score in the southeast.

Southwest

The southwest quadrant shows how much a company is dedicated to R&D and creation.  This quadrant is crucial in the new economy.  A high score in the southwest quadrant indicates a buoyant culture that can generate new ideas and creative initiatives and can support an entrepreneurial spirit.  What can be problematic, though is a high score in southwest and low scores in the other three quadrants, as it would indicate a company where leadership and management are not well rounded and business functions are not well integrated.  CEOs evaluating their own company should strive for a balance whereby creativity is supported from the perspective of both allowing and funding such activities as well as supporting the marketability of the innovations that are generated by developing strengths in the other three quadrants.  Individuals evaluating the possibility of joining a particular company should also look for evidence of this balance.

From these results a number of conclusions can be drawn.

If you’re looking for a job, it is important to review the relationship between the culture of the company you are considering joining and your own Intuitive Compass® to determine whether it is a compatible match.  For instance, if you are more of a southwest type of professional, you should really consider whether you’re being offered a position in a company that displays a northeast culture, and vice versa.  These results are also insightful if you’re simply evaluating whether or not you should stay in the company you work for.  I have a client, a C-level executive who realized that he would enjoy the southwest culture of a start-up much more than he did the very northeast/southeast culture of the multinational he had been working for since the beginning of his career.  He finally decided to leave his job to create his own start-up: a consulting firm with a built-in incubator to launch new digital companies in the new media industry.

If you’re the CEO of a company and would like to improve the culture of your organization, analyzing the Intuitive Compass in relation to the culture of your company will lead you to identify areas for improvement in every quadrant where a score is low.  You need to put the profile of your Intuitive Compass in perspective with your objectives and also your context at the time of the review:  industry, market situation, mission of the company, corporate strategy.  Each quadrant with a low score or any imbalance between the four quadrants represents an opportunity for growth.  In addition, the Intuitive Compass can help you clarify and articulate to your teams the reason behind the new goals you may set for them.

How to Build the Perfect Team and Scale It

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Francis

Last Sunday I saw an outstanding article published in the New York Times magazine called, “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team” written by the Pulitzer Prize winScreen Shot 2016-03-06 at 9.04.42 PMning reporter Charles Duhigg.  It tells the story of data giant Google’s multi-year “Project Aristotle” which tried to discern why some teams succeeded while others failed.

Google researchers had a really difficult time finding patterns for which teams failed and which succeeded.  People who performed well as individuals or people who were friends outside of work didn’t necessarily make the best teams. Conversely, the best teams did not necessarily have the best individual performers.  What researchers did notice was that teams either consistently succeeded or failed.  This led them to study the social norms, or culture, that prevailed in the group, which they found to be the deciding factor on the group’s performance.  The best teams had two consistent qualities:

  1.     Everyone in the group ended up with roughly the same amount of voice time at the end of the meeting.
  2.     People in the group had a high “average social sensitivity”, meaning that they were cued in to how the others were feeling.

These two “cultural” elements create a psychologically safe place and appeals to us on a deep instinctual level and to our survival-oriented reptilian brain.  When we “feel” safe, we’re more relaxed and have a sense that we can put ideas out there even if they’re not perfect.  There is unconscious recognition that each team member has a role to play and that their role matters.

Google’s findings clearly demonstrate three tenets of Intuitive Intelligence:  think holistically, think paradoxically and notice the unusual.

That the external qualifications and performance of individuals do not necessarily add up to the best performing teams is a great example of thinking holistically (the whole is more than the sum of the parts) and thinking paradoxically (the “best” parts do not necessarily make the best whole).  Noticing the unusual is exemplified in the high “average social sensitivity” of the better performing teams because they have an inherent awareness to the subtle facial and bodily cues of their team members.

Now for the real question.  How do you scale it?

Ironically through an approach that combines reason and instinct, or the rational and the nonlinear aspects of life.  Google had so much data showing that teams perform better when things got real and there was more space to be human, it gave people permission to let everything be a little more messy and fun.  The good news is that having a common language about “employee performance optimization” gives people a way to talk about this messiness that otherwise might feel very awkward.

Navigating the Shift to Play

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Bianca Le Mouël

Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 2.06.21 PMExcerpted from Francis Cholle’s The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-Bass

If innovation is key to corporate success, and if play is the door to innovation, then the next logical question (logic does have it place!) is how to create a corporate atmosphere be part of every CEO’s mandate, and companies should be rated according to the level of playfulness of their culture in the same way as they are rated as a great place to work or as a socially responsible organization.

A number of practical steps can be followed to navigate this cultural shift toward play, which then can become easier than it seems.

Think about what play look like.  It is personal, engaging, and interactive.  It is often exuberant and messy.  It is filled with light, color, and sound.  When you think about play, you may instinctively think about a children’s playground or children’s toys.  Now, think about corporate offices, or, more specifically, corporate boardrooms.  There are lots of straight lines in boardrooms, (or perhaps, artistically, an elegantly curved accent wall); there is typically an imposing table made from fine polished wood or sleek metal.  That table likely suggests a hierarchical seating arrangement that people intuitively understand: the boss will sit at the head of the table and the chief advisor will sit next to the boss or perhaps will anchor the other end.  The rest of the employees will fill in the sides of the table.  So, before the meeting even starts, everyone knows his or her relative importance.  And everyone knows that polite behavior is expected: sit up straight, papers stacked neatly in front of you, a pen at the ready, smartphone close by in case of an emergency.

These rigid boardrooms are where major strategic decisions are being made about innovation and the future of our organizations.  They represent a very logical environment geared toward conscious conversations that will unfold in a very linear and efficient way.  They appeal to the 20 percent of our intelligence that lives in our conscious mind with its wealth of creative ideas, and the intelligence that we can reach through play.

Dr. Marian Cleeves Diamond, one of the world’s foremost neuro-anatomists advocates the establishment of “playful environments.” I too believe that we need to create offices, boardrooms, and activities that engage our playful nature—a corporate sandbox or playground.  We are playful by nature and efficient by necessity.   So let’s embrace our nature, and less effort will be needed for the same, or better, results.  When we do this we can break through the mental barriers that are keeping us stuck. Certain corporations are already doing this. Some of the things that they do to create a play-friendly atmosphere include:

–    Allocating significant time in which employees are explicitly encouraged to play

–       Creating, or giving employees access to, physical spaces that are conducive to play

–       Giving employees implicit and explicit permission to “fail” or be “unproductive” in their pursuit of innovation.

How to Create a Work Culture that Maximizes Creativity and Agility

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Bianca Le Mouël

Excerpted from Francis Cholle’s The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-BassScreen Shot 2015-07-19 at 11.59.51 PM

To get the most out of employees in terms of creativity and agility, you need to create a work culture that enables them to explore new ideas freely and fail without fear of reprisal.  A work culture that is open to new ideas is key to success over the long term.  A work culture that honors autonomy generates unexpected–and often lucrative–new products.  A fluid, vibrant work culture resonates with and balances the complexity and unpredictability of today’s business landscape.  The following are some questions that can reveal the state of your work culture as it stands currently.

  • Is your work culture about anticipating your employees’ deeper need for meaning?
  • Is your work culture hierarchical only?  If not, do you have systems in place for informal gatherings, informal exchanges of information, informal participation?
  • Do you really care about people being happy, or do you just give it lip service?
  • Do you make it explicitly safe for people to try new things and to fail?
  • Do you encourage diversity in age, ethnicity, professional background, gender, and sociocultural styles?  If so, how?
  • Do you allow for and promote play?  If so, how?
  • How do you inspire employees’ creativity?
  • How do you create among employees a natural sense of belonging to your organization?

 Each question represents one key aspect of a work culture relevant to the new economic environment.  Answering these questions should help you understand your current work culture and see ways that you can improve it.

 

Why You Should Revisit Google’s Interior Design Strategy If You Want Your Employees to be More Creative

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Bianca Le Mouël

Screen Shot 2015-06-14 at 11.33.49 PMExcerpted from Francis Cholle’s The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-Bass

Thinking paradoxically is an exercise in setting linear and logical patterns aside for a while and opening ourselves up to the possibility that solutions and new ideas can come from places that challenge common sense.  To wit, Einstein once said:  “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.”  The question that follows, then, is this: what happens if a company departs from the traditional business approach, where executives focus on reason and results and where everything that count can and must be counted?  Could this company still be successful with a business approach that reaches beyond conventional logic?

The best example is a company that designed the most playful and instinctual work environment we’ve probably ever known.  This company is Google.

Google’s European headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, offers a slide to take employees to a gourmet company restaurant, swing chairs hanging from the ceiling in study rooms, bathtubs to lie in and relax in front of lit fish tanks in rooms with low light, massage tables and masseurs available for employees’ breaks, and igloo-shaped meeting rooms with penguins and snow as background  It looks like a kindergarten playground, not like the offices of a serious company.  Yet it probably has one of the most analytical and efficient work culture if judged by the number of patents it register every year and its exceptionally high profitability.  This is because Google fully embraces paradoxical business thinking.

First, let’s remember that research shows human productivity does not follow a linear continuum with time.  Specifically, according to Pareto’s principle, people produce 80 percent of what really matters in approximately 20 percent of the time they spend at work.  So when I hear clients complain about summer hours, coffee breaks, or employees’ short days, I always remind them of the result of the study. Timesheets for employees are a relic of the past.  They made sense in the industrial era when the scientific management of labor was implemented to organize work in assembly lines.  But in today’s global economy more and more companies rely on their employees’ creativity for their success.   Because creativity does not follow a linear relationship with time, time management for creative employees shouldn’t either.  For instance, great advertising copy can take weeks or even months to be worked and reworked to final edit, whereas, conversely, a brilliant slogan may come to mind in just a few seconds.  Time spent on copywriting is not a guarantee of success.  So when Google provides employees with space and resources for a break, relaxation, or a massage they actually are managing the 80/20 rule of human productivity very well.  They know that at some point in the day it inevitably becomes useless to require employees to sit at their desk.  Google embraces the paradox of creative time management.  In my work I regularly hear executives in creative firms stating along the lines of conventional wisdom that summer Fridays off are unnecessary and counterproductive and the employees sitting at their desk all day long is their ideal representation of productivity.  They do not recognize the paradoxical nature of creativity management and have a hard time thinking paradoxically when it comes to managing employees’ time.

And what about the slide to get to the restaurant?  What does it do to people? What would it do to you? Do you remember the last time you went down a slide? It’s a physical experience for many of us, it’s fun, but, for others, it may feel risky. In all cases, it involves our body and therefore engages us in our guts and puts us in play mode.  Simply put, it sends people to a place where they can best access their genius.

Similarly, the swing chairs get us literally off of our feet and off of the ground, and take us away from verticality, Language first developed in human beings when we moved from a horizontal position (resting on our hands and knees) to a vertical position (standing on our two feet).  So when we’re sitting back in a swing chair we’re away from the axis of language, which is the instrument of logic.  Therefore sitting in a swing chair takes us away from our rational mind and opens us to our imagination.  Here’s the paradox:  Google is extremely analytical and specific in the steps they take to engage their employees’ creativity and commitment in a playful and instinctive way.  Google is probably the greatest financial success in the history of capitalism.  It’s work reflecting on the face that Google handles the paradox of relying on hardcore brainpower and intellect very well while simultaneously offering headquarters that look more like a school playground than a studious and orderly library.  It obviously understands something that would very likely benefit many other companies seeking higher levels of innovation.  If you wish to have creative and agile employees you need to embrace paradoxical thinking, because creativity does not follow any predictable rule, but rather demands specific ingredients: flexible time management, proper play, physical engagement, and some element of random collaborations, among other things.  In the same fashion, if you wish to tap into more personal creativity you need to embrace paradoxical thinking, because new ideas will not come from common assumptions.

The Importance of Rituals in the Workplace

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Bianca Le Mouël

Screen Shot 2015-05-10 at 9.56.51 PMRituals are significant and powerful.  Symbols can have a great impact, as they communicate beyond words and convey meanings without explicit explanations. Rituals and symbols play an important role in the success of managing the creativity and innovation because they speak to our subconscious, comfort our unspoken fears, enable us to tap into solution that cannot be found in a linear fashion, and connect us emotionally to our friends and colleagues.

Ritual is a powerful way to harness the life force the lives deep down in every one of us.  The way rituals impact us is through rhythm (rituals occur at well-defined moments: Sunday mass, birthdays, the end of puberty, end of year graduation) regular repetition (Thanksgiving every year, morning ablutions, Sunday family lunch) and dramatic staging (Christmas tree, sculpted pumpkins, candles for a Valentine’s Day dinner).

Rituals imply a certain level of ceremony and require time, but they are profoundly efficient in both the short and the long term.  For example, think about how football players huddle before they go onto the field at the beginning of a big game.  It is a moment that may include a prayer or words of encouragement from their coach, but most important it is time that they set aside to reach beyond self-doubt and turn fear into audacity by connecting to their guts.  In Rugby Six Nations Tournaments, national anthems are played at the beginning of the game to invoke a sense of pride and responsibility for the success of the team.

Rituals are transformative because they help us deal constructively with the intangible dynamics within us and within groups.  They productively channel instinctual forces into creative powers.  Ritual is what allows us to gather the energy needed to achieve great things, often beyond what we could imagine ourselves capable of.  When managing the creative process, celebrating wins and awards is one effective way to reassure creative teams, whose members often question their own talent.  And one thing is certain:  not celebrating wins can cause a lot of damage to the spirit and motivation of your creative team.

Navigating creative and innovative processes is rarely easy; it often entails a lot of unknowns and a lot of erratic moments.  No matter how seasoned and brave you are, self-doubt and fear are simply unavoidable in the process of creation.  Rituals address fear of the unknown, self-sabotage, and procrastination, which can all happen during any creative process–hence the importance of rituals in southwest management.

There are many ways to spark creativity and establish an atmosphere that resonates with creative teams.  These are effective ways to improve creative output that you can apply to your business.  Consider how many of them you’ve thought about before and how many of them you actually implement in your management.  Leaving these out is not a valid option.

Excerpted from The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-Bass, 2011.

 

Giving up on Uniformity can Increase Creativity

Posted on May 3, 2015 by Bianca Le Mouël

Screen Shot 2015-05-03 at 12.10.30 PMGiving up on uniformity is really about acknowledging in tangible ways the fact that different people require different conditions in order to perform at their best. So rather than requiring everyone to follow the same rules within the workplace, you make allowances that enable all concerned to pursue their responsibilities in the way that best suits them.  Creative people have a tremendous capacity for teamwork, but they can also have a tremendous need to follow their own rhythms or work style.  It is very likely shortsighted to force creative talents to follow rules that inhibit their creativity without adding anything to your company’s goal of generating innovations. For examples, it may be important for everyone to show up to a weekly progress meeting, but is it really important for everyone to show up at 9 a.m. and stay until 5 p.m.?  They may be more productive working at different hours or not coming in at all on some days.  When you manage by exception you honor people’s individual requirements for freedom, and when you manage for inclusion you make sure that everyone feels a responsibility for the collective success (or failure) of the project.  When I was a publisher, my experience in working with authors was that each author was very different and required adaptation and careful attention to approach their creative talent in a unique way.  Over the many year I have worked in the fragrance industry,  I have observed the same thing with perfumers.  Creative talent is rarely separable from the individual’s personality, because it has a lot to do with imagination, sensitivity, and feelings. This is why seeking uniformity is rarely the way to go.  Management by exception will bring much more efficiency.

Excerpted from The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-Bass, 2011.

The Role of Constraints in Creativity

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Bianca Le Mouël

Screen Shot 2015-04-25 at 10.29.01 AMFostering an atmosphere of creativity and innovation doesn’t require business leaders to concede all control or throw all rules out of the window.  In fact, the judicious and clear application of constraints frames the challenges that employees are asked to address.  By setting a goal and laying out the constraints, business leaders can create excitement.  Most people like the experience of overcoming some obstacles; constraints are the obstacles that make the finding of the solution exhilarating.

“It is common knowledge that Cirque [du Soleil’s] designers don’t like budgets, deadlines, and limited resources,”says Lyn Heward, president of their Creative Content Division, but she adds, “Privately however, even they will admit that these ‘constraints’ force us to become more resourceful and more creative!  They require us to come up with solutions we’d never thought of before…and they actually become motivators for getting the job done.  In fact, some of our most inspired ideas arise from moderately Spartan situations.”  Cirque du Soleil enforces very strict budgets, and creative teams have to abide with nonnegotiable deadlines.

This is just one of the many paradoxes managing creativity.  As leaders and managers we we need to both establish constraints and free our employees from self-imposed boundaries.  In short, we need to find balance.  Along with budgets, time is of course one of the most obvious constraints.  Deadlines, as daunting as they may seem to creative people, are also their best ally and help them move through the fear of the white page and the unknown.  However, time pressure needs to be handled with a serious sense of balance.  A study by two Harvard Business School professors shows that to develop the creativity of team members it is better in the long run to be careful with excessive time pressure as it easily leads to high levels of stress and potential burnout.  In my experience with creativity, efforts to save time by accelerating the process can sometimes end up costing time.  Creativity often requires patience, because it follow its own rhythm and entails moments of what I call “active inactivity”–moments when creative teams need to lie fallow.  Creativity is quite often about problem solving, and problems by definition have some established factors.  Once the confining factors are clarified, the goal is identified, and balance can be more easily achieved, creative minds are more able to find inspiration to overcome challenges.  A paradox of time management applies:  time constraint is productive, but too much of it, repeatedly, leads to the risk of burnout.  This paradox cannot be resolved by following a fixed rule.  Managing the time of creative teams requires the ability to manage paradox and feel one’s way through it, depending on how your team members react individually and collectively, which talent(s) you are most heavily depending on, and how much leeway with constraints you have in any given situation.

Excerpted from The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-Bass, 2011.