2. Who is Robert I. Sutton?
Professor of Organizational Behaviour in the
Graduate School of Business, and Professor of
Management Science and Engineering in the
School of Engineering, Stanford University. He is
the author of Weird Ideas That Work: 11 and ½
Practices for Promoting, Managing, and
Sustaining Innovation (The Free Press, 2002), on
which this article is based.
3. His idea
If it's not if you win but how you play the game
then
playing - or working - with humour and an
upbeat, positive attitude is surely the right way
to play
Besides, these are the teams that usually
win
4. A growing body of research suggests that
conflict over ideas is good, especially for
groups and organizations that do creative
work. Constant argument can mean that there
is a competition to develop and test as many
good ideas as possible, that there is wide
variation in knowledge and perspectives.
5. What happens when everyone agrees
When everyone in a group always agrees, it may
mean they don't have many ideas, or it may
mean that avoiding conflict is more important
to them than generating and evaluating new
ideas. It may even mean that people who
express new ideas are ridiculed, ostracized
and driven out of the group.
6. What they say ?
• As Robert F. Kennedy said, "It is not enough to
allow dissent. We must demand it." This is
sound advice for any leader who wants a
constant supply of new ideas. Or to
paraphrase chewing-gum magnate
• William Wrigley Jr., "When two people in
business always agree, one of them is
unnecessary."
7. What conflict says ?
Conflict is a sign that there is a contest for ideas in
the organization, that people are developing
and assessing many possibilities. Even at this
stage, however, not all conflict is constructive.
8. What argument says ?
Arguments are crucial to creativity, but people
need to learn how and when to fight. In the
very earliest stages of idea generation, conflict
(and the criticism it entails) is damaging when
it causes ideas to be rejected before they can
be developed well enough to be evaluated.
9. When Conflict is bad?
Worse, when conflict rages, fear of ridicule or
humiliation causes people to censor
themselves before proposing silly or
strange, but possibly useful, ideas.
What is the Way out
Idea generation techniques, like
brainstorming, require participants to
"withhold judgment" or "avoid criticism."
10. What they say?
Peter Skillman is a product designer and master
brainstorming leader who works for
Handspring, the maker of personal digital
assistants. Skillman trains people not to attack
others' ideas in brainstorming groups: "If
somebody says that an idea sucks, when
somebody says something nasty, I ring a little
bell. I make a joke out of it, but it stops them
from ripping apart ideas we need to build on
and think about more."
11. Conflict is also destructive once the creative process
has run its course, and it is time to implement an idea.
Agreement is important once an idea has been
developed, tested and the right path has been chosen;
agreement helps assure that everyone will use the same
methods, in the same way, and are working toward the
same ends. If you were having a simple and proven
operation like an appendectomy, you wouldn't want an
argument in the operating room about how it should be
done
12. • Research on group effectiveness distinguishes between
• two types of conflict: destructive and constructive. The
• destructive kind is "emotional," "interpersonal" or
• "relationship-based"-participants are not fighting over
• which ideas are best, but because they dislike each
other
• or feel threatened by one another. Destructive conflict
• upsets and demoralizes people, and groups that fight
• this way are less effective in both creative and routine
13. • Constructive conflict-also referred to as "task,"
or
• "intellectual" conflict- happens when people
argue over
• ideas rather than personality or relationship
issues.
14. • Some of the most creative groups and
organizations in
• history were made up of people who
respected each
• other, but fought mightily over ideas.
15. • Conflict is a sign that there is a contest for
ideas in the organization, that people are
developing and assessing many possibilities
16. • Intel, the leading semiconductor company, takes this
• idea more seriously that any company I know. All
fulltime
• employees are required to take a home-grown, halfday
• class on "constructive confrontation," where people
• learn about and practise how to fight about ideas in an
• atmosphere of mutual respect.
17. • Regardless of how you make your company a happy
• place, there is a huge amount of literature on the
• advantages of positive emotion, especially for creative
• tasks. These studies have examined the differences
• between happy and unhappy, optimistic and
pessimistic
• people; people who have a positive effect versus a
• negative one; happiness versus sadness, and so on. No
• matter what you call it, there is strong evidence that
• travelling through life in a good mood is a good thing,
• especially if you want to be creative.
18. • People in good moods are
• "more cognitively flexible-more able to make
• associations, to see dimensions, and to see
potential
• relationships among stimuli-than are persons in a
neutral
• state." In other words, they generate more varied
ideas
• and combinations of those ideas, which are
crucial
19. • Humour, joking and laughter are among the
main tools that effective
• groups use to keep people focused on
facts, rather than have the
• situation degenerate into personal conflict
20. Case Study
• Innovative companies generate many unsuccessful
• ideas. Consider the example of Skyline, a group of toy
• designers at IDEO Product Development in Palo Alto,
• California. Skyline keeps close tabs on its ideas because
• it sells and licenses concepts for toys that are made and
• marketed by big companies like Mattel. Brendan Boyle,
• founder and head of Skyline, said that in 1998, the group
• (which had fewer than 10 employees) generated about
• 4,000 ideas for new toys. Of these 4,000 ideas, 230
• were thought to be promising enough to develop into a
• nice drawing or working prototype. Of these 230, 12
21. • were ultimately sold. This "yield" rate is only about
• one-third of one per cent of total ideas, and five per
• cent of ideas that were thought to have potential. As
• Boyle says, "You can't get any good new ideas without
• having a lot of dumb, lousy and crazy ones. Nobody in
• my business is very good at guessing which are a waste
• of time and which will be the next Furby."
22. • You might hire a few grumpy people
• because there is evidence that they are less likely to
• take risks than upbeat people, and better at finding
things
• wrong with ideas. One study -- a simulated decision
• about whether or not to race a car given a substantial
• risk that the engine would fail -- found that MBAs and
• engineers with less upbeat personalities were better at
• unearthing negative information and took fewer risks.
23. Using Happy Warriors to Spark
Innovation
• Avoid conflict of any kind during the earliest stages of
the creative process, but encourage people to fight
over ideas in the intermediate stages.
• Encourage-and teach-people to use tasteful jokes to
release tension when arguments over ideas start
becoming too tense and personal.
• Teach people how to recognize the differences
between interpersonal conflict and intellectual conflict.
Use classes and mentoring, and your own actions, to
teach them the right (and wrong) way to fight.
24. • Find examples of how fighting the right way
led to more innovation in your company, and
tell stories about these successes.
• Senior managers need to set the right
example, by openly arguing about ideas and
avoiding nasty interpersonal conflict
25. • If people, including senior managers, continue
to engage in nasty personal conflict despite
efforts to teach them not to, punish them. If
all else fails, fire them.
• Hire upbeat people and do everything
possible to keep them that way. Emotions are
contagious, so make sure upbeat people
interact a lot with others in the company.
26. • Teach people-through classes, mentoring and setting a
good example-to build resistance to rejection and
failure.
• Hire a few grumpy people, but keep them away from
other people in the company most of the time because
emotions are so contagious. When you need their
expertise, bring them out briefly and then send them
back into isolation.
• If people are upbeat and optimistic, but can't learn
how to fight over ideas, they might be better off doing
routine rather than creative work.
