Pols Consulting

I was reading Willem van den Ende’s blog and came across a reference to “The 6 Myths of Creativity” by Bill Breen on the Fast Company web site. It is one of those papers that triggers the “well, that is obvious” reaction when you read it. In fact it is so obvious most companies do not do it.

This paper provides an overview of Teresa Amabile’s research at the Harvard Business School into organisational creativity and innovation. She has been collecting daily journals from 238 people. She simply asked them to tell her about their work and their work environment as they experienced it that day. It is  interesting that the feedback from these diaries matches my pleasurable experience of working with highly creative teams.

The fact is, almost all of the research in this field shows that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some degree of creative work. Creativity depends on a number of things: experience, including knowledge and technical skills; talent; an ability to think in new ways; and the capacity to push through uncreative dry spells. Intrinsic motivation — people who are turned on by their work often work creatively — is especially critical.

A good agile team should be able to harness the creativity of the team. I just love working in creative teams where everyone comes up with interesting solutions all the time. We have conversations with the users and say “Why do you want that?”, “Wouldn’t blah be simpler?” Likewise users say “If you could add this, it would be really cool because we could now filter our sales revenue by different regions… and that would save us loads of time”.

While agile does not guarantee creativity, an up front waterfall process kills this type of conversation.

Here is a nice technique to remember!

Think of everyone having just two neurons, one of which triggers when you talk to them. These are:

1. You are an idiot neuron.
2. I am brilliant neuron.

So if you say, “this system will help you do your job better“, the idiot neuron will fire and they will disregard what you say. How could you possibly know when you have never talked to me before? Clearly you do not know what you are talking about.

If, on the other hand, you say something along the lines of “How could we build this to help you do an even better job?“, the brilliant neuron will fire and they will listen to what you have to say.

I like to think of the neurons I am triggering when I talk to people. It really helps me.

Chris Matts (the other half of the Agile Business Coach has just published a new paper on the joys of negative feedback: Encouraging the “Right Stuff” (PDF format)

A nice quote from the Civic Forum in Banja Luka (this is in Republica Srpska, the Serbian enclave in Bosnia).

Change happens when people who don’t normally have a say talk to people who don’t normally listen.

I am currently helping a client with developer recruitment and stumbled across Johanna Rothman’s superb Hiring Technical People blog. Now added into my blog reader!