Jack Anderson
If you look up like on Wikipedia or wherever you want to look, under “Basic practices for brainstorming,” or “Sharing ideas,” or “Collaboration,” they’d always give you these ground rules like, “Don’t judge,” “Be open to new ideas.” And, by the way, don’t these sound like lovely sentiments?
But how do you make them happen in a real culture?
By modeling. At various different groups I work with, we’ll try a lot of different techniques.
One group used the book called Failing Forward. How can you learn from what might be called a failure out there? Failure. I plan to go in my project from step A through B through C to D, but our project, by the time we got to B, ends up at X. It’s a good learning! But in some cultures, if you don’t predict that, if you’re not perfect, you’re given a budget to get to D. So it could be looked at as a failure rather than a learning. Or, if you get to B and you realize it’s not the right thing to do, stop. Have the courage to stop. So, anyway, this reward system was failing forward. There was a whole book written about that, but how can you change it so that your managers, your leaders, the peers of other people, are looking for the learning rather than the success? And then, if something changes from how you predicted it might go, celebrate that for its learning.