What is wrong with us? Why do we keep looking for models, theories and methodologies to make sense of reality and go forward to co-create? Reality is fluid, not fixed; it changes all of the time. And our conscious mind can only process a glimpse of all the things that are happening. And when our conscious, analytical mind draws conclusions, it does so based on past experience within our personal frame of reference (we are the first machine learners!).

Our interpretation of reality, especially when reduced to a model or methodology, is always limited, part of a context, and temporary. A model and a methodology is a fixed perspective, which should inspire, yes, but become a dogma, no. Especially in a creative process, methodologies and tools are designed to inspire, not to direct or blindly apply.

I have been working with large organizations in the area of innovation for many years now. Every day, I am still surprised by how much effort is invested in implementing and shaping Design Thinking, Agile and Lean. As if applying these methodologies alone will radically change our way of working.

People are the essence of culture. Why don’t we invest more in personal growth, elevating consciousness to increase sensitivity, understanding states of compassion, the vagus nerve, our brains and biochemicals, and our nervous system? Do we really think we will influence an organizational system by rationally defining its construct and dynamics?

We can only understand and influence a system from a state of compassion and empathy. It is top-down and bottom-up thinking, analysis and emotion. Techniques, models and methodologies for systems thinking can be a good starting point, but we have to get past our rational minds to co-create new realities. We have to be able to break free from what we know while being connected with each other in a creative flow state. That requires more than merely a method.

I have seen Design Thinking cripple the ability to execute because of the lack of thought put into preparing testing and building teams to drive implementation from the start. And with building teams, I mean a group of people who share a purpose and are intrinsically motivated to solve something together, who are confident about making a change together.

I have also seen Agile operating models force rules of interaction to the point where people were becoming confused about what they were allowed - not allowed - to do, completely out of touch with their common sense. Inventing rules of interaction to become more agile in a fluid, fast-changing environment feels like a contradiction. Whenever I need to adapt in my personal life, I never follow any rules. First of all, I want to make sure I am in tune with my intuition and look for connections with people on a deeper level to reveal new possibilities and unlock blind spots.

Drop the labels and stop teaching rigid methods

Whenever I teach Design Thinking, in the first half hour, I invite the participants to forget about the term “Design Thinking” and let go of the expectation of finding a miracle process for creation. There is no miracle process.

“Trust the process” is one of the silliest expressions I have ever heard. Trusting your mind and heart and trusting the facilitator and the people you are working with makes much more sense to me. I would even say, “Never trust the process.” It is the last thing to trust.

Always question the process, rethink it, reshape it, and make it work, so it triggers the right conversations. And when you have a valuable conversation (note: people make these happen, not processes or methods), the magic comes from the level on which people connect with each other. This sounds obvious, but it is absolutely not obvious.

The level at which people connect with each other depends on their state. And their state is basically determined by their nervous system. The response in their nervous system to the situation depends on their programming, traumas, personality and past memories related to this co-creative situation. They can be driven by fear and concern from the start and have a tendency to stay in survival mode. Or they love this kind of work and open up easily. Everyone is different, every co-creative moment is different, and every reason to have a co-creative moment is different.

Methodologies and techniques have little effect on the state of participants. People affect each other’s states. Assessing whether a situation is safe to open up to and connect with others is a complicated mechanic involving the vagus nerve, which we might not even understand properly. But you can sense whether people feel safe, and you can follow your intuition as a facilitator to help people feel safe.

Expressions like “this is a safe space” only indicate that it probably isn’t; otherwise, you shouldn’t have to express it. Assuming there is a safe space because you were taught that psychological safety is part of a creative process does not mean there is one. Depending on a labelled process like Design Thinking to co-create new products or services, expecting the process to magically bring you there will probably lead to the same conventional thinking and output.

If we keep teaching methods as the magic bullet for all our difficulties when working together, we will only add more confusion and difficulties. It is necessary to debunk these methodologies, be clear about their pitfalls and teach only the thinking behind these models and methods. Only by showing why a methodology was created and what the essential thinking was behind it, together with all the pitfalls and shortcomings, do you allow people to take what they need from it and make it their own.

Facilitate people, not methodologies

A facilitator can bring a lot of value because of their capacity to understand a workshop’s very crux. This includes understanding the kinds of people participating, their stakes and expectations, the expectations of non-participating stakeholders, what everyone wants as a future outcome and the kind of immediate output needed to achieve that. A facilitator can also sense the blind spots the group might have and know the kind of activities that will trigger the right thought processes to help the group realize new insights and conclusions together. In short, a facilitator will grasp what these people at this moment need exactly to unlock new necessary possibilities for themselves - and have them own it.

Again, every situation, group of people, challenge, setting, etc., is different. Every day, we wake up in a new reality where yesterday’s thinking might not apply anymore. Blindly applying a methodology because the process was proven successful in the past is risky. Each time you facilitate, you have to go through a creative process yourself during your preparation, allowing for any new approach that fits best with the needs of the stakeholders. Creating off-the-shelf workshops, replicating what is done in the past to hopefully repeat success, makes you blind to the real needs of the stakeholders you serve. Each time, again and again, you have to look at your assignment with a beginner’s mind. This means never blindly replicating a program from a previous workshop or a prescripted methodology.

Rules are meant to be bent, broken and reinterpreted

Rick Rubin describes this beautifully in his masterpiece, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. He says every innovation risks becoming a rule, an end to itself.

“A rule is any guiding principle or creative criteria. Rules, by their nature, are limitations. They provide a goal or method for short- and long-term results. They are there to be tested. All kinds of assumptions masquerade as laws. Rules direct us to average behaviors. If we are aiming to create work that is exceptional, most rules don’t apply. Average is nothing to aspire to. Often the most innovative ideas come from people who master the rules to such a degree they can see past them or from those who never learned them at all.”

Original people behind methodologies were probably very innovative when they created the methodologies, which eventually were copied multiple times to end up as a methodology that then a lot of other people start teaching to the letter without having the initial genius insight that the original creators of the approach had. Whenever we innovate successfully, we obviously want to capture what was done right to replicate success. It hopefully becomes a formula for success. But then, it rarely replicates the success when the formula is applied blindly because everything changes constantly.

As Rick Rubin states in his book, it is best not to become religious about any method or model. Rules are meant to inspire, not to direct. When they are applied to direct, it is just an attempt to control behavior.

Control has never intrinsically motivated anyone. Control is not the key to realization or execution; it can even hamper it, cause confusion, disengagement and even the stagnation of a project.

Methodologies do not lead execution; people do

Design Thinking has been blamed for not delivering the expected impact. However, many organizations don’t struggle with applying Design Thinking to come up with new solutions; they rather struggle with turning ideas into reality, embedding them into the organization and/or market. Therefore change management and systems thinking have gained even more popularity, often turning these domains of expertise again into methods to apply and scale.

A methodology does not execute by itself. Execution depends heavily on the collaborative culture of an organization. Culture does not change because of methodologies; it changes because of people being inspired by various methodologies, rules, cases, and ways of thinking and reinterpreting them to serve or change the given culture.

Assume a creative process like Design Thinking produces an output with enough arguments and enough clarity on the potential value to start a testing and, eventually, implementation phase. This next step of testing will be about validating the desirability of the solution and assessing its viability and feasibility. This can become quite an intense phase of your creative process, with many different stakeholders having to agree on investments, setting priorities, assigning resources and realigning collaboration across disciplines while maintaining a belief in the potential value and even evolving the understanding of the value the solution might bring. It could shake the way things are done today and require a new balance in the organizational system. Whether an organization is able to successfully go through this phase of execution depends completely on its culture, which is often heavily influenced by higher management who carry the pressure of the short-, long- and longer-term existential goals of the organization. No methodology can fix that. No thinking from past successes, replicated rules or success cases can solve the complexity of this phase. They can inspire but need to be completely reinterpreted when being applied to drive execution in a given cultural reality.

The organizations that succeed in moving elegantly through the execution of their innovations succeed because of the people that build the culture every day, not because of applying a rigid set of rules. You can study them for inspiration, but there is no point in mimicking them without reinterpreting them into your organizational reality.

In sum …

You don’t build organizational culture for innovation by imposing rules, methodologies, methods or models on people. You build culture by fostering personal growth so that you empower the people in the organization to connect on a deeper level, understand their culture on a deeper level and reinterpret rules and methods to match their unique constellation as a collective.

Facilitation can build intrinsic motivation during co-creative moments if you prepare with a beginner’s mind, aiming to serve the real needs at the moment with this group of people. But this intrinsic motivation built during co-creating will easily fade once the participants return to the organizational reality. Having a lot of great facilitators delivering co-creative moments at scale with a lot of intrinsic motivation and ownership among the participants will definitely kickstart a co-creative culture. If higher management would, in parallel, decide to foster personal growth, play and experimentation instead of imposing rigid methodologies from past thinking, culture will start shifting to allow for great innovation.

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Happy Captaineering,

Alwin

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