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The Most Important Element For Being A Good Listener

Being a good listener is essential to communication and active listening is increasingly considered to be a vital leadership skill. A quick internet search on how to be a good listener serves up countless articles with similar advice – giving your full attention to the speaker, repeating back what the speaker says or asking lots of questions. While these tips are useful to some extent, they don’t really address the most crucial aspect of listening. They place more importance on how to look like a good listener as opposed to being one, and miss the essence of listening. 

Real listening is a cognitive skill.

A Model Based Approach To Listening

To understand why listening has a strong cognitive component, let’s consider a scenario that can make or break your image as a good listener – when people disagree with you. This kind of situation plays out quite frequently in the workplace. One person thinks that feature A (or task A) is more important to address while their colleague thinks that feature B (task B) is more important. 

Most people approach a disagreement with the mindset that they need to “win” the debate and focus on vigorously defending their idea. But this is the wrong attitude to start with and a better approach is to think in terms of mental models. 

Assuming that there are no strong biases at play, one reason two rational people might disagree is that they have two different mental models of how the (small slice of) world works. Different mental models are a reflection of the fact that different people bring different knowledge and experiences with them that has shaped their thinking.  

Viewed from that lens, active listening is a problem solving exercise in reconciling the different mental models. There are only two possible outcomes – one person has a better model which leads to the other updating their mental model, or both people have an incomplete picture which leads them to co-creating a better, more holistic model. For successful listening to take place, at least one mental model has to be updated. 

How To Listen Thoughtfully

The key to better listening is to focus on the cognitive aspect of listening as your main goal. Here are three things to keep in mind as you engage in active listening:

  • Start With A Problem Solving Mindset: If someone comes to you with a viewpoint that is different from yours, start with the assumption that their viewpoint is valid based on their knowledge or prior experience. In most cases, we jump into the dialogue in a critiquing mode, trying to find holes in the other person’s thought process in order to “win” the point. Instead, reframe the discussion as a puzzle where multiple perspectives need to be rationalized and synthesized into a more complete model.
  • Explore Mental Models: Ask questions to understand each other’s mental models and explore their boundaries. Are there specific scenarios where one model is a better representative? As a leader, it’s tempting to feel that you have a better understanding of the problem and thereby miss questioning your own assumptions. While this might be true for simpler issues, for more complex problems you can safely assume that both people have an incomplete picture. 
  • Don’t Rush To Finish: Synthesizing different perspectives is a cognitively demanding task and for complex problems the right solution may not emerge in one discussion. Some of the most creative ideas come when you take a break after thinking intensely about a problem. So become more comfortable with deferring the decision to allow for more bake time. 

One Simple Question To Ask Yourself

If you have been diligently following rules of thumb for good listening and wondering why your team still doesn’t think of you as a good listener, it’s time to recognize that performative listening doesn’t work. Blindly following “listening rules” make interactions seem contrived and fast tracks you to losing trust with your team. 

Instead, focus on the cognitive aspect of listening and allow other behaviors to flow naturally from that. When people are genuinely trying to understand, they ask more relevant questions that can reconcile different viewpoints and increase collective intelligence. They come across as authentic because they are not asking (any) questions just to appear interested. Similarly, understanding different perspectives and integrating them into your mental models is a cognitively demanding process. As a result, good listeners tend to talk less because they are doing more complex information processing internally, not because they are following a rule in order to appear interested. 

If you are not sure whether a discussion went well or not when it comes to active listening, ask yourself one question – did your mental model change? 

For a productive conversation, at least one person’s mental model needs to change and in the ideal scenario, both parties get an “aha” moment that adds to their understanding. With the model based approach, listening and learning become indistinguishable. 

Nothing makes someone feel like they were heard more than having their idea be a clear part of the solution. But achieving that is not easy in the workplace due to poor listening habits. The main problem with the prevalent guidance on listening is that it focuses on how good listening looks on the outside, and not on what is happening inside where the real work gets done. It misleads people into believing that simply following these rules of thumb will make them a better listener. By adopting a more problem solving mindset where you actively try to understand and integrate each other’s mental models is a more constructive and effective approach to listening. 

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Harnessing Group Intelligence For Innovation Productivity

Edward DeBono argued three decades ago that creativity is the most important human resource of all, and it’s truer now than ever. Without a strong culture of innovation that harnesses employee creativity effectively, organizations are much more likely to fail in the modern economy.  

But capturing employee creativity towards organizational innovation is challenging. Our current management practices evolved from Fordist (and Taylor’s scientific management even earlier) approaches to measuring productivity that served well for linear, predictable systems. For example, if a production line produces X widgets/week, you could be sure that by adding another production line you can get 2X widgets/week. Unfortunately, applying these approaches to innovation doesn’t work for two reasons:

  • Creativity is fundamentally non-linear. During brainstorming two people with individually weak ideas might discover key insights that lead to a billion dollar one. Or, an individual could be wrestling with a challenging problem for several days with very little to show for it and then suddenly find an interesting solution in a day. 
  • Complex problems often require a group to collaborate in order to find efficient solutions. But simply bringing people is not enough. Depending on the group and how individuals interact, you could get collective intelligence or collective stupidity. Most incentives are aligned with individual performance and backfire when work is highly dependent on group performance. 

So instead of focusing on linear metrics like bugs fixed per week or number of features shipped, we need better mechanisms that allow for collective intelligence to flourish. 

Swarm Intelligence

Some of the most fascinating examples of complex problem solving in groups come from nature. Groups of ants, bees, birds and other creatures can solve surprisingly complex problems easily even though each individual in the swarm is only following simple rules. Intelligent behavior emerges from these simple interactions. For example, army ants can travel for long distances without traffic jams in dense three lane highways by following simple rules like outgoing ants turn aside when they encounter incoming ants. 

Collective intelligence works surprisingly well in many kinds of problems like estimation or prediction. One of the most well known examples comes from Francis Galton, a pioneering statistician and half-cousin of Charles Darwin, who asked people to guess the weight of an ox at a fair in 1906. While individual responses varied from 1,074 to 1,293 lbs, the mean came to 1,197 lbs closest to the true value of 1,198 lbs! 

Group intelligence also outperforms individual intelligence in much more complex situations like hiring the right candidate for a role. Google at one point had a fairly complex hiring process where candidates could face up to 25 interviews. After analyzing data on interview performance and subsequent job performance, they were able to simplify the process down to 4 interviews which gave them an 86% confidence level. The interesting thing that came out of their analysis was that none of their managers – regardless of the years of experience under their belt –  were individually good at predicting who would make a good employee. The wisdom of the group of four always outperformed individual prediction! 

Research from several domains shows that for groups to work intelligently, few key conditions need to be met:

  • Individual members must be well-informed about their area to have a better than 50-50 chance of getting the right answer.
  • Cognitive diversity of the group is important. 
  • Individual members have to think independently and influence each other’s opinions. 
  • Individual members should be unbiased.

Most organizations spend incredible amounts of time trying to find the most qualified candidate with the right set of domain skills during hiring, so the first criteria is often not an issue. The remaining three criteria often get underestimated (or ignored) which limits the amount of innovation companies produce.

Cognitive Diversity

The kind of diversity important in complex problem solving is cognitive diversity which includes knowledge (people skilled in different domains), perspectives (different ways of viewing a problem) and problem solving approaches (different heuristics or ways of generating solutions to the problem).

Cognitive diversity is correlated with diversity based on common factors like gender, race or ethnicity. Companies that prioritize increasing diversity have a better chance of being innovative and real-world results back that up. More diverse and inclusive companies are 1.7 times more likely to be innovation leaders in their industry. Scott Page, complexity scientist and author of The Difference, captured this perfectly when he said, “being different is as important as being good.”

Independent Thinking

Perhaps the most important criteria for harnessing group intelligence is for individuals in a group to think independently and not be swayed by others opinions. Unfortunately, this is also one criteria that most groups don’t pay attention to. When groups get together without adequate preparation, a few people might dominate discussions or people might be overly influenced by their leaders’ opinions. In such situations, decisions quickly fall prey to groupthink. 

To mitigate this, individual members need to think about the problem at hand and commit to their ideas and reasoning before they share with the group. This makes a huge difference in the quality of decision making. Despite the popularity of traditional brainstorming, groups that engage in nominal brainstorming (where people brainstorm individually before sharing with the group) come up with twice as many ideas overall and more original ones. 

Unbiased Thinking

Groups also suffer from biases which include both stereotypical (like gender) or cognitive biases. Hiring a more diverse workforce can mitigate the effects of stereotypical biases but cognitive biases can still remain. Two common cognitive biases are myside and one-sided thinking. 

Myside bias results from people’s inclination to favor arguments that support their opinion while ignoring or minimizing contradictory viewpoints. Organizational cultures where “defending your idea” is deemed an important leadership trait accentuate this bias.

One-sided thinking is our preference for arguments that are one-sided rather than those that offer multiple perspectives. A one-sided solution appears simpler and cleaner, and because it causes less cognitive strain, it’s more persuasive. As a result, leaders are easily swayed by a person who presents a simple argument compared to another who presents a more nuanced view. 

Useful Strategies

Groups can be smart or dumb. It’s easier now to see why groups end up with harmful outcomes in the age of social media where most, if not all, of the conditions get violated. Organizations can avoid some of these pitfalls and create a more innovative culture by implementing the right norms and incentives. Here are a few strategies to consider:

  • Hiring a diverse workforce is necessary but it’s not sufficient. Without implementing good systems where diverse viewpoints are included in decision making, one can’t reap the benefits of diversity. Despite the focus on DEI, inclusion from the perspective of innovation is still an issue among many companies. 
  • Creating the right norms for decision making are important when it comes to ensuring independent and unbiased thinking. The Build, Teardown and Rebuild (BTR) method is one such example that removes biases from decision making in groups and can be implemented relatively easily. 
  • Ensure that your incentives and metrics don’t create the wrong kind motivations when it comes to contributing to groups. Complex problem solving is an emergent property when groups follow certain conditions. It requires individuals to behave in prosocial ways that are often at odds with incentives which encourage individual performance at the expense of group benefit. 

Complex and creative problem solving is a highly social problem. What gets created in any company – code or product or service – is heavily dependent on the people that come together to solve the problem. In such an environment, social engineering is as important (if not more) because how intelligent a group behaves depends on how the group interacts and problem solves. Creating the right processes and incentives can improve a company’s innovation throughput and set them on a competitive path.

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Creativity Hack: Reframe A Challenge

Reframing a problem is an effective way to come up with new ways to solve the problem. However, many times people end up rewording the problem instead of reframing it in a broader context. At a cognitive level, reframing is related to abstract thinking which underlies creative and complex problem solving. Abstract thinking allows one to get to the essence of a problem. 

About The Hack 

To reframe, find the higher level of abstraction of a problem or an activity. A higher order abstraction typically fits the pattern “[description] by [activity]” while a lower level of abstraction fits the pattern “[activity] by [description]”. For instance, if the activity is ‘reading a book’, a high-level description could be ‘relaxing’ (“I [relax] by [reading a book]”) while a low-level description could be ‘flipping pages’ (“I [read a book] by [flipping pages]”).

As a real word example, what if your challenge was to improve the coffee experience? Without trying to reframe the problem one might be tempted to focus on the quality of the coffee beans or new blends that might appeal better to customers. And in fact, this was the direction Starbucks was taking till Howard Schultz, who later became the CEO, went to Milan on a buying trip for the company. 

In Milan, Schultz got deeply inspired by the vibrant coffee culture. Espresso bars with trained baristas making cappuccino and other drinks from high quality arabica beans were everywhere. People met at these local espresso bars to connect with their friends or to discuss various issues. The social experience and the sense of community was so entwined with coffee as a drink. Schultz’s determination to bring that vibe and culture to the US led to the explosive growth of Starbucks. While Schlutz didn’t deliberately use reframing, the fortuitous trip became a catalyst for him to take the broader view and realize that people “socialize by drinking coffee”.  

While a higher level of abstraction can open up new avenues of thinking and more transformational ideas, lower levels of abstraction are also useful. They can help identify incremental improvements that might also be useful to implement.

Summary

Finally, here is a quick summary of the creativity hack and how to use it.

DescriptionReframing challenges can open up new possibilities and lead to more transformational ideas. Reframing isn’t about rearticulating the problem. Instead it involves moving to a higher (more general) level of abstraction. To reframe the problem, cast it in the form “[description] by [activity]”.
ExampleSuppose your challenge is to improve libraries and encourage people to read more. A higher level of abstraction could be “I get intellectual stimulation by reading ”. By focusing on intellectual stimulation, you might get a different set of ideas — book clubs, puzzle nights — which can be used to attract more people to the library.
Tips – A higher level abstraction corresponds to “why” while a lower level abstraction corresponds to “how”
– A common mistake is to change the goal and/or the subject while reframing. For example, deciding what product to build for the customer might start with what the customer is trying to achieve but end with “to make money for my company” which is an incorrect reframing.
ExtensionsThis technique can be used in reverse to find lower levels of abstraction, by casting it in the form “[activity] by [description]”. That typically leads to incremental or improvement ideas which are also beneficial.
Creativity Hack: Reframe A Challenge
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Creativity Hack: Build, Tear Down, Rebuild

When it comes to brainstorming, most groups fall prey to cognitive biases that reduce overall group creativity. People get so invested in their own ideas that they might overlook obvious downsides. Or they might get swayed by others’ opinions especially when the others have some kind of authority. Two common cognitive biases in group decision making are myside and one-sided thinking. Myside bias occurs because people are more inclined to reason in ways that support their opinion or idea while ignoring or minimizing contradictory viewpoints. One-sided thinking is our preference for arguments that are one-sided rather than those that offer multiple perspectives. 

It’s easy to see why these biases occur frequently and why they lead to flawed decisions. Due to myside bias, people tend to only offer arguments that support their idea in any discussion. Due to one-sided thinking bias, people are more easily swayed by a person who presents one-sided arguments than someone who presents a more nuanced view that considers multiple perspectives. A one-sided solution appears simpler and cleaner, and because it causes less cognitive strain, it becomes more persuasive. These biases are not correlated with measures of cognitive ability like IQ – intelligent people are just as prone to them as others. 

About The Build, Tear Down, Rebuild (BTR) Hack To Reduce Groupthink

A structured approach to brainstorming and group discussions can eliminate the effect of these biases. Using the Build, Tear down, Rebuild (BTR, pronounced better) technique described below, teams can arrive at more unbiased and intelligent decisions. Here is one way to run a BTR session:

  • Prior to the  group session, ask team members to send their ideas to you privately (nominal brainstorming), which helps build independence of thought.
  • At the start of the group meeting set expectations that the goal of the exercise is to make each idea the best version of itself. This shifts the tone in the group from competitive to collaborative. 
  • Take one idea at a time and have the group discuss the following aspects (use a whiteboard to capture all information in a table format). By asking the following questions, you first build up an idea (pros), then tear it down (cons) and then rebuild (mitigations) it again to arrive at a superior version of the initial idea. 
    • Pros: What are the advantages of this idea?
    • Cons: What are some drawbacks of the idea?
    • Mitigations: Are there some ways to mitigate the cons by changing something about the idea? 
  • After all ideas have been thoroughly discussed, have the group look at all ideas together to see if different ideas can be combined to give a better solution overall. This step tends to happen organically as the discussion progresses, so leaders may not need to ask explicitly.
  • After the meeting, send the information captured to meeting attendees and ask them to reflect some more. This step gives an additional incubation time for new insights to emerge. 

The building up phase (finding pros) helps to expand the potential of the idea. The original proposer may have missed some aspects that others identify. The tear down phase (identifying cons) helps identify current limitations or boundaries where the idea will work and not work, and starts to shrink the potential of the idea. Finally, the third phase (finding mitigations) tweaks the idea so that some of the limitations are overcome. It re-expands the idea and places it in a more realistic zone.

Summary

Finally, here is a quick summary of the creativity hack and how to use it.

DescriptionDuring brainstorming, ensure that all ideas are thoroughly discussed to avoid any biases. For each idea, first identify the pros of the idea, then follow up with current cons and finally ask the group to think of ways to mitigate the cons. This allows any idea to arrive at its best, yet practical, version.
ExampleHere is a simple example (from an elementary aged student) whose idea was to improve a toothbrush by adding a 2-minute song as a timer. The obvious advantage is that it helps kids keep track of the right amount of time to brush their teeth. One con is that listening to the same song every time could become boring quickly. So a mitigation could be to have multiple songs that rotate at random. Another solution is to have the songs in a different language so kids can learn a new language at the same time.
Tips – To increase idea output, ask team members to think of their ideas beforehand. 
– To further reduce groupthink, collect all the ideas before the start of the meeting and discuss each idea anonymously (without sharing who suggested the idea)
ExtensionsThis technique can be used not just in brainstorming but also in any kind of group decision making, where there are several possible solutions each with their own advantages, disadvantages and constraints.
Creativity Hack: Build, Tear down, Rebuild
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How Gender Bias Limits Innovation In Companies

One of the most touted reasons for increasing diversity in organizations is the benefit it brings to innovation. Diverse teams bring different perspectives and ideas, leading to more novel solutions. But are diverse teams really that innovative in practice?

We recently conducted a study to evaluate the impact of gender bias on innovative work in the technology industry. Creating a culture of innovation, which can give companies a sustainable competitive advantage, is a key priority for technology companies. Companies, therefore, invest heavily in DEI efforts in order to create healthy and diverse workforces. 

However, our study showed that current DEI efforts are falling short from the perspective of innovation. Women, especially those working in technical roles, have to work hard to drive their ideas within their teams, and those ideas are often minimized or dismissed. This is especially important for senior women. Leaders are associated with bold, innovative ideas but when women’s ideas are ignored they can’t create impact and their potential to progress to leadership roles is reduced. 

The impact of gender bias isn’t limited to just women, organizations pay a high cost — Gender Innovation Tax — in terms of lost revenue and increased overheads as well. Organizations grossly underestimate this cost, in part because they don’t track these issues. 

We interviewed women working in the technology industry to understand the challenges they face. We identified four cognitive and psychological mechanisms at play:

  • Evaluation Apprehension: Women face a higher anxiety for how their ideas will be perceived and as a result, they hold back from contributing to the group. Current DEI efforts have raised awareness of mechanisms, like getting interrupted, that prevent women from sharing their ideas. Unfortunately, they don’t address strategies that go beyond simply getting a chance to speak. Once women are able to speak, they may still choose to hold back if they fear looking naive or incompetent. Leaders need to be aware of this and find ways to lower evaluation apprehension. 
  • Groupthink is the tendency of groups to get swayed by a few voices and reach faulty decisions by not considering all alternatives thoroughly. Women often find that their ideas don’t get the same level of discussion as men’s even when they bring additional data or research to back up their ideas. As a result, less optimal decisions get implemented. 
  • Cognitive dissonance is the state of having inconsistent thoughts due to ingrained beliefs on one hand, and evidence on the other. For example, a belief that women are not as technically competent as men can clash with seeing high quality work from women leading to cognitive dissonance. In such situations, people might downplay women’s work, attribute their performance to luck, and attribute promotions to affirmative action and not to personal ability.  
  • Tokenism refers to the negative experiences a minority group faces as a result of being in a majority group. It also refers to the hiring or promotion of minority candidates as a signal that the group does not discriminate against them. It unfortunately creates a perception that the minority candidate is not actually deserving of that role. Women tend to face snide comments like “You had the perfect minority card to get the promotion” or “If I was a woman, I would have become a Partner”.

We then identified several leadership strategies that can mitigate the impact of these mechanisms. One key takeaway is to create structured norms around how ideas are discussed and debated, and the BTR technique (in the Appendix section of the report) outlines how leaders can run a group brainstorming session. Most of the strategies offered are gender agnostic — the idea is to remove biases in general from decision making so companies can become smarter and more efficient. 

To get the rest of the strategies download the full report here. 

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How Gender Stereotypes Hurt Creativity

While working with students, I often encounter children who struggle to think beyond gender-stereotypical ideas during brainstorming. When deciding on a novel idea for a project, many boys will want to make an app but can’t come up with a novel idea for the app. They get so hung up on using technology to look cool, that they lose sight of the challenge itself and end up with sub-par ideas (an example is an “app that does all the homework” is way too common to hear).  The same problem happens, in equal measure, with girls too. Girls often pick ideas to highlight their nurturing or relationship-building aspects, and leave the better ones aside. 

Multiple research studies have tried to evaluate whether any particular gender has an advantage when it comes to creative thinking, and the meta results have been inconclusive. Some studies found that girls performed better on divergent thinking while others found boys to be better, or found no differences. It’s now well accepted in the research community that no one gender is better than the other when it comes to creative thinking. In other words, from a purely biological perspective both boys and girls are equally capable of coming up with novel and useful ideas. 

However, the problem starts when gender stereotypes start sneaking in and limiting the ways people think, which can happen at a very early age. Psychologist Sandra Bem who developed the Gender Schema Theory, argued that society does not encourage the development of both masculine and feminine traits in the same person. From a very young age, children develop theories of what it means to belong to a specific gender, and use that to categorize information, problem solve and regulate behavior. As a result, they are left with fewer tools and strategies to use for navigating situations in life. 

On the other hand, children who grow up to be more gender-aschematic and identify with both  masculine and feminine characteristics, show a range of beneficial outcomes. They think and act in more inclusive ways, have higher self esteem and are better communicators. This psychological androgyny (which has nothing to do with physical sexual orientation) is also important from a creativity perspective.

In one study, researchers evaluated several creativity measures for different gender role classifications: androgynous (high masculinity and high femininity); stereotypic (characteristics in line with one’s traditional gender role); undifferentiated (low masculinity and low femininity); retrotypic (characteristics opposite of one’s traditional gender role); and midmost (middle range for both masculinity and femininity). They found that the androgynous group was the most creative of all, closely followed by the retrotypic group while the stereotypic group was the least creative of all. One possible explanation for these results is that both the androgynous and the retrotypic groups are able to overcome gender boundaries and this expanded cognitive flexibility gives them access to additional ideas and perspectives. As the researchers note,  “Possibly the contrast between biological gender with a traditional role-assignment and psychological orientation with an untraditional role-assignment (i.e. a feminine man or a masculine woman) was sufficient to induce conditions facilitatory to the release of creativity. It is arguable whether or not retrotypic men and women possess similar penchants to their androgynic counterparts to cross the boundaries of traditional gender-roles thereby accumulating experiential material with elevated flexibility and creativity as a consequence.”

Encouraging more androgynous behaviours is not just benefical socially, it is also a sign of higher creativity and intelligence. So how can one build these skills from an early age? Here are three strategies that can foster psychological androgyny:

Independent Thinking: There is an inherent safety in sticking to socially acceptable and stereotypical ideas. One of the most important things educators and parents can do is to build independent thinking in their students. By proposing ideas that are different from their peers, students start to build confidence in their own ability to think critically and creativity. This same confidence then helps them jump across gender boundaries at a later point. 
Encourage Perspective Taking: When a child suggests an idea or a solution, have them explore the idea from multiple different perspectives. How would this idea be received by the opposite gender or more broadly by other groups? Would this be as useful for them as for you? Why or why not? By approaching an idea from different perspectives, you not only improve cognitive flexibility but also shift focus on broader values that affect everyone. 
Appreciate Gender-boundary Crossing: Parents and educators should pay attention when a child engages in activity typically associated with the opposite gender, like a boy wanting to bake cookies or a girl interested in climbing trees. These moments reflect a child’s confidence in going beyond gender stereotypes and when appreciated it motivates them to continue down this path. 

People who are able to transcend gender boundaries don’t feel boxed in by cultural and social constraints. They are able to find more inclusive as well as more creative solutions. By encouraging skills like independent thinking and perspective taking from an early age, educators can help students become more creative, more confident and more inclusive. 

This article first appeared on edCircuit.

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Creativity Hack: Subtract a Feature

When people are asked to think of ways to improve a product, most come up with additional features to increase the product’s functionality. But removing a feature can often lead to more interesting ideas. 

About The Hack

For most people the natural way of thinking when it comes to finding product improvements is to add more features. For example, adding a grinder to a coffee machine to make fresher tasting coffee. But sometimes you can get surprising ideas by going the opposite route – eliminating features. The key to making this hack work well is to subtract a key feature so you are forced to break your mental set. 

An illustrative example of this technique is the design of the hook-on high chair — a portable chair for toddlers that can be attached to any table thereby converting it into an on-the-go high chair. The design team who came up with this idea were tasked to create a new, revolutionary idea for a chair. The team challenged themselves by asking what would happen if they were to remove legs from a chair? In what kind of scenarios would such a chair be useful? Once they had removed a critical part of a typical chair, the designers were able to overcome their functional fixedness and identified a scenario where this would be beneficial. 

Another example of this hack comes from a challenge that I posed to a group of middle schoolers. In the context of jugaad or frugal innovation, I asked them to design a washing machine without using electricity. Students came up with several ideas on how to rotate the washing machine barrel manually from using stationary bikes to employing the salad spinner mechanism. Each of those ideas resulted in interesting concepts for washers that could also be used as exercise machines. 

Another benefit of this technique is that it helps you identify new markets for your product. The designers of the hook-on high chair had not designed chairs for the baby market before. Similarly, subtractions that lead to frugal innovations open up the developing market for cost-effective versions of the product.

Summary

Finally, here is a quick summary of the creativity hack and how to use it with students.

DescriptionTo find a creative idea for product improvement, ask students to remove one or more key features and find scenarios where the removal would be beneficial. 
ExampleAn example of using subtraction is removing legs from a chair. A chair without legs could be useful in different scenarios. For example, it could be used as a portable toddler high chair by attaching it to a table surface. Or it could be folded and used as a portable stadium or bleacher chair. 

By finding new scenarios, students can find new applications or new markets for their product.
Tips – To get bold ideas, ask students to pick features that are typically considered essential to the product. 
ExtensionsThis technique can be used to explore frugal innovation where you design products under extreme constraints that make them amenable for the developing world. 
Creativity Hack: Subtract a Feature
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How Creativity Can Transform Your Organizational Culture

Dr. Pronita Mehrotra and Dr. Sandeep Krishnamurthy

As we head deeper into the 21st century with increasing use of AI and automation taking away routine work, it’s no surprise that creativity is becoming a highly valued skill in the modern workforce. 

In most places, employees have to do both creative and routine work. They have to create new products or services which require creativity, but they also have to do work within structured processes which is more routine in nature. To be successful, organizations have to create a healthy balance between creative and routine work. 

But what happens when creativity is insufficiently or incorrectly used in an organization? 

When creativity is misapplied, it can lead to poorer work cultures. The kinds of tasks people engage in their day to day work plays a role in how they perceive the work culture. We can classify organizational cultures based on the relative emphasis on routine and non-routine productivity (see figure above). While no organization of a reasonable size lies completely in a single quadrant, this framework can be a helpful tool for business leaders to identify where their organization or team lies.

Punching The Clock Culture

If a single emotion were to describe employees in this quadrant, it would be ‘boredom’. Much like the culture satirized in the hit series, The Office, work doesn’t require any creative input, is not intellectually stimulating and doesn’t provide skill growth. 

Job design here is so constricted by process that there is almost no autonomy for the individual. When employees don’t have a reasonable say in designing their work or opportunities for their creative ideas to be included, they are no longer intrinsically motivated and don’t feel invested in their work. Since the culture supports simple routine work, automation can outperform the individual work here. Such companies are bound to become obsolete in a short period of time, as automation accelerates.

Unfortunately, this kind of culture is not uncommon. When work is primarily routine, like in Call Centers, leaders have to find ways to empower their employees and keep them motivated. Zappos tried (at that time) a radical approach to inspire its customer service employees. Employees were empowered to use their imagination instead of following a script to delight their customers. By explicitly adding creativity into the equation, Zappos was able to convert dull and unpleasant tasks into something fun and delightful, and dramatically reduced employee turnover.  

Pipe Dream Culture 

If your company routinely creates product roadmaps that take twice as long to ship with half the features, there is a good chance that you lie in this quadrant. It’s an indication that your organization misunderstands creativity and places a higher value on being visionaries as opposed to being innovators. Creativity is imagination tied with practicality – it requires hard work to research, analyze and prototype to prove that an idea would be both novel and useful. 

Lily Robotics, a camera drone company, launched in 2015 with a breathtaking promotional video of its self-driving drone that could automatically follow you and take videos. The concept garnered a lot of attention and the company raised close to $50 million in pre-orders and institutional money. But, a year and a half later, the company shut down. It turned out that there were significant technical challenges in building all of the features the video promised. This, and countless other similar examples, show how a misunderstanding of creativity can lead to failure. If the founders and investors had spent more time analyzing whether the idea is workable or not, they would have saved everyone time and money. 

Paradoxically, organizations built around a pipe dream culture suffer from enough critical flaws that they are doomed to failure even without the impact of AI and automation. 

To avoid a pipe dream culture, leaders have to strive for a healthy balance between optimism and skepticism, between keeping an open mind to new ideas and spending time to evaluate those ideas. In fact, the more original an idea, the more time leaders need to spend in ensuring that the novel aspects are indeed workable. 

Hamster Wheel Culture 

If your employees are working long and hard to meet never-ending deadlines, they are likely in the third quadrant where productivity goals overwhelm them. While their work might offer opportunities to be creative, the constant pressure leaves them with no time to sit back, reflect and think of new approaches. They live in the here and now. 

When Covid hit and organizations started moving to remote work, leaders defaulted to enhancing routine productivity instead of incentivizing innovation and inadvertently pushed their organizations deeper into the Hamster Wheel culture. Research on global companies found that during the pandemic employees worked longer, spent more time in virtual meetings and sent more chat messages and emails. However, this came at a cost — most employees felt overworked and exhausted. 

To get out of the Hamster Wheel culture, leaders need to provide time and autonomy for employees to exercise their creativity. They need to track creative work differently from routine work, and they need to ensure that all employees regardless of their role or place in hierarchy contribute to the creative capital.  

Renaissance Culture

This is the ideal Goldilocks zone – where both creativity and productivity are balanced optimally. Employees in this quadrant are aligned with the company vision and can clearly see their own contributions towards it. Being intrinsically motivated, they make discretionary effort to see ideas come to fruition. The organization has an optimal blend of routine and non-routine work – enough focus on the routine to sustain current operations combined with the right proportion of non-routine work to build for the future.  

While the routine/non-routine balance is one aspect of the organization’s culture, it is an important yet overlooked dimension. By evaluating where their current culture lies, leaders can devise strategies to shift their cultures towards the ideal Renaissance culture. By infusing more creativity and autonomy correctly, leaders can tap into employees’ intrinsic motivation and thereby improve employee experience. 

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Three Strategies To Help Your Child Build A Creativity Mindset

As a child, Alexander Graham Bell, the prolific inventor best known for inventing the telephone, was intensely curious about the world. He built his first real invention – a simple dehusking machine – at the young age of twelve! While Bell was no doubt a smart and inquisitive child in his own right, his upbringing also played a big part in his success. His father was an inventor of sorts himself and he actively encouraged Alexander to make a speaking automaton. These early experiences paved the way for his future accomplishments. In other words, he grew up in an environment that valued creativity and problem solving. 

Creativity, as a cognitive skill, is becoming increasingly important in our world as routine jobs get automated. To be successful children now need more than literacy and numeracy skills – they also need to be confident creative problem solvers. The first step towards this is building a creativity mindset. 

So, how can parents help orient their child towards creativity? Here are three broad strategies you can use as a parent to start shifting your child’s mindset towards creative problem solving.

Make Creativity A Part Of Your Vocabulary

Most parents take a deliberate approach to help their child learn from an early age. They might casually introduce a new word during conversation or bring in numbers to build their child’s budding reading and math skills. This not only improves the child’s skills in the 3Rs but it also orients them towards those skills in the real world – they might notice new words more often or see mathematical connections in everyday situations. 

In a similar way, talking about creativity and everyday inventions can open their minds towards creative problem solving. One activity we do when we start our invention classes is to have a discussion about creativity by analyzing everyday creations around us. What makes something both novel and useful (the core definition of creativity)?  As students start discussing and analyzing things around them, they start to realize that everything around them is an invention – created by someone, or more accurately by many people over time, in order to make our lives more efficient. Parents can do the same exercise at home. As an example, a conversation between a parent and their child about a painting on the wall might go like this:

P: Is that painting on the wall an invention?

C: It’s original because I haven’t seen this painting anywhere else and it’s useful because it makes people feel good. 

P: That’s a good point about art making people feel good. Humans have been making art for a long time – even before they made language.

C: Like cave paintings.

P: Yes, like cave paintings! How are paintings now better than cave paintings? 

C: Cave paintings were fixed to the cave wall. But today, you can move them around – you can take your paintings with you if you move houses. So that’s another way it’s an invention. 

In our experience, children find this to be an eye-opening exercise and it opens their minds to creative problem solving. They start to look at things in their world a little differently. A few days after I did this exercise with my son, who would have been a 1st or 2nd grader at the time, he suddenly had an epiphany while we were driving. He excitedly shared an idea that could avoid holiday lights from getting tangled up. What if the lights were sewn onto a net that could be draped over a tree when in use, and then folded up neatly when done? Not a bad idea for such a common problem! 

Don’t Teach, Co-create

Even when parents understand the importance of creativity, they often try to “teach” it to their children. A more effective method is to co-create something with them – like making a new story, a fun game or a cool gadget together.

Children, and even adults, learn implicitly from others as much, if not more, than by being explicitly taught. Our brains are wired to detect patterns and connections around us and use them to update our models of the world. By continually updating and refining our internal models as we integrate new ideas, we improve our understanding of the world. Learning is more efficient when we deduce the pattern ourselves instead of when the pattern is taught to us. When you co-create with your child, they start picking up ideas and automatically integrating them in ways that are compatible with their current knowledge. As almost all parents have experienced, you might be focusing on one idea but your child might pick up on a different one. In effect, co-creation leads to a fully personalized learning – one that fits perfectly with your child’s current mental models. 

There are two additional advantages to co-creation. One, traditional teaching approaches can be perceived by the child as evaluatory and controlling, which raises their defenses. They are much more likely to engage in activities that are collaborative and low pressure in nature. The second advantage is the emotional aspect. Emotions bind the learning much more strongly, and positive emotions are better than negative. So if an activity is viewed as a fun family experience with lots of laughter and love, then not only is the child willing to engage in it more frequently, but what she learns from the experience is deeper.

The advantages of engaging in co-creation take some time to become evident. For example, if you start a dinner time routine of making silly stories, you might notice that your child doesn’t offer that many ideas or plays safe by reusing your ideas in the beginning. Don’t let that discourage you. Over time, you will see that the complexity and the novelty of their ideas start to increase as your child gets more comfortable, both cognitively and emotionally, with the activity. 

Do More Arts At Home

High quality art programs, including visual arts and music, have been shown to benefit creativity and related skills. In the case of Alexander Graham Bell, his mother encouraged his interest in art, poetry and music. Despite any formal training in music, he mastered the piano and became the “family pianist.”

Arts provide children with a canvas to try new things and take more risks, skills that can transfer more broadly to other domains as they grow older. A research study found that incorporating arts increased both children’s self-efficacy and original thinking. As the authors noted, “Self-efficacious children believe they can be agents in creating their own futures and are more optimistic about what the world has in store for them.”

Another benefit of doing arts is that it provides an easy avenue to experience flow – where one is fully immersed in the task that action and awareness seem to merge. Experiencing flow not only helps improve mental health, it also builds a more intrinsic orientation towards learning which is beneficial in the long run. 

A creative mindset developed at an early age can have a tremendous impact on a child’s long-term success allowing them to make meaningful contributions to society. Parents play a crucial role in this. By helping their child understand creativity and by engaging in creative activities with them, they can equip their child with the right mindset and confidence. 

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Why A Growth Mindset for Creativity is Essential

During our enrichment programs we often run into students who get stumped with creativity exercises. In one session, I gave a group of 4th and 5th graders a simple divergent thinking exercise. As the students started writing down their ideas, I noticed one girl who seemed uncomfortable with the exercise. When it was time for students to share their ideas, she refused to participate. Later, during a different activity, I stopped by her desk and gently asked if she wanted to share her ideas with me. She crumpled up her sheet of paper and tearfully said that she doesn’t really have any good ones. 

This isn’t an isolated case. Many students, including those in gifted programs, find creative thinking challenging. One reason lies with our education system which heavily emphasizes analytical thinking at the expense of creative thinking. Students are so used to the “one right answer” approach in education that they don’t know how to approach open-ended problems with several potential solutions. The gifted student who can confidently say the answer to a math problem because she can double check her answer, doesn’t have the same level of confidence for ambiguous problems with multiple solutions. 

This is harmful for students in the long run. As we transition from the “knowledge” to the ”creative” economy, students are increasingly ill-prepared to contribute meaningfully to the workforce. As work expectations shift toward higher creativity, it’s leading to a creativity gap – the disparity between valuing creative performance in adults and not fostering creativity in students. 

So, how do we better prepare our students to become confident creators? The answer starts with building a growth mindset towards creativity, what researchers call the “creative mindset.”

Carol Dweck pioneered the theory of growth mindset that improved educational outcomes for many students and revolutionized the way we approach learning. Dweck found that, when faced with challenges, some students give up too easily while others doubled down on learning. She realized that students who gave up easily had a fixed mindset, where they believed that intelligence is innate and therefore extra effort would not yield better results. The other students displayed a growth mindset – a belief that intelligence and skills are malleable. More interestingly, Dweck found that educators could shift students to a growth mindset and help them become better learners. Her growth mindset intervention workshops helped numerous students improve their math and science scores. 

Growth mindset has now become ubiquitous in both education and the workforce. However, most people view a growth mindset as applicable only to learning new skills (“I can learn new things”). They don’t realize that mindsets are equally important to creativity (“I can create new things”). 

By leveraging a growth mindset for creativity, we can help students build the ability and the confidence to be creators and innovators. Below are three ways to build a creativity fostering environment in your classroom. 

Emphasize Creative Mindset: Much like learning new skills, our brain also grows when it tries to create new things. Creativity often requires making connections between unrelated things or looking at the problem with different perspectives. When students practice these skills their brains adapt accordingly in order to make them better at  creative thinking. Similar to the growth mindset, educators can emphasize that our brains are like a muscle that grows stronger the more we practice creative thinking. If students find creativity hard, it’s a sign that their brains are stretching and learning to get better at it. 

Appreciate Non-conformity: Creativity by definition depends on non-conformity. To foster creativity, educators need to provide opportunities for students to think independently to come up with original ideas and perspectives. By exploring ideas outside of mainstream norms, students build creative confidence. Educators are often worried that by allowing students to voice non-conforming ideas will lead to chaos. It doesn’t have to. Educators can create explicit times or projects where students get to be creative, and a respectful environment for ideas to be shared with each other. 

Model Creativity: Nothing inspires students more than seeing their teachers embody the skills they are learning. By sharing their own creative pursuits, educators set the expectation that creativity is valued in their classroom. When teachers share their failures and how they overcame them, students learn to approach setbacks with a problem solving mindset. This builds perseverance towards challenging problems, which further boosts growth mindset.  

Bloom’s taxonomy places “creating” as the top skill for education. Without the ability to convert their knowledge into new solutions, students miss out on learning how to be valuable contributors. Unfortunately, most teacher training programs don’t emphasize creativity and typical school curriculums don’t integrate creative thinking. However, creative thinking skills are not that hard to cultivate. By deliberately building mindsets, modeling creativity themselves and providing adequate opportunity, educators can foster creativity in their students. 

This article first appeared on edCircuit.