Business school academics spend a lot of time doing statistics with the objective of trying to find the most important factors for making innovative work teams and businesses. This is hard because innovation is very rarely caused by one thing and sometimes what is causing innovation in one group will inhibit innovation in another. For example, workplace stress could be a motivator or barrier for innovation, depending on the specific context of the group.
Given this high level of variation, finding a team factor that correlates with innovation across multiple studies of different organizations and contexts is always going to be a challenge. However, there is one aspect of highly performing teams that has been long-recognized as having a close relationship with successful innovation outcomes.
The psychologists call this team process ‘reflexivity’. As Michael West from the Aston Business School explains, reflexivity is:
the extent to which team members collectively reflect upon the team’s objectives, strategies and processes as well as their wider organizations and environments, and adapt them accordingly
In other words, it is the capacity to stop, think and ask questions and then modify the next course of action.
I remember hearing West speaking about reflexivity at a conference many years ago and saying that no other factor such as team diversity, experience or cooperation was as good as predicting innovation success. You can listen to him explaining the concept and the evidence in a podcast from Aston Business School here. I like his example of the team handling product complaints because the intial focus on being very efficient made the team members work harder without actually solving the problem. Groups have a surprising capacity to keep doing the same thing and expect different results.
Given the amount of money that gets spent on collaboration technologies and team development to make groups more innovative, being disciplined about stopping and thinking might have the best ROI of anything you are likely to invest in.
The cartoon alludes to a potential problem with groups stopping and thinking, that is avoiding “groupthink”. Healthy debate and openness to ideas should be encouraged, avoiding the phenomenon you see wonderfully illustrated here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVygqjyS4CA
Thanks Kevin. The “I’m not” at the end of the clip always makes me laugh.
“ROI of thinking” is a very good point, John!
Though sounding quite common, it seems to be quite difficult to realize those breaks to think – mainly because workload increases and we feel we’re not permitted to pause.
I think it’s a challenging task for leadership to ensure periods for reflection and questioning the status quo in face of ever shorter time schedules.
Susan Cain makes a similar point in her recent TED talk – it’s really worth watching:
http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html
While there needs to be made time available for collective reflection, as emphasized in your post, people should also be given the possibility to retreat in order to work and reflect for themselves – particularly introverted ones – in order to tap their full potential.
Cheers, Ralph
Hi Ralph
I love the Susan Cain talk! It’s disturbing how many organizations and management consultants view introversion as a psychological disorder. Many of them role out the Myers-Briggs test and then seek to fix the ‘I’s. Conflating introversion with social anxiety is a common mistake.
“Stop the madness for constant group work” -what a fantastic quote.