Keepers of the Culture

“Culture-keepers tend to be in the underground.”

That was the comment of a senior scientist in the biotech industry as we concluded an interview with him this afternoon. We are in the midst of our first round of interviews with senior leaders in R&D concerning the relationship of culture, high performance, and leadership practices. What especially caught my attention today was this leader’s unsolicited use of the phrase “underground”. And that those who compromise the underground are the “culture-keepers”.

“Culture-keepers” may engender thoughts of preservation, conservation, and stasis. Or they might be understood as the reservoir of largely untapped resources, buried beneath layers of bureaucracy and a myriad of processes - sort of like the connective tissue that keeps everything intact despite stress and strains. Either way, culture keepers are the bearers of implicit knowledge that is transferred from generation to generation.

One of the core premises of the Politics of Creativity is that there is indeed an underground of relationships, practices, and even scientific knowledge that generally fails to hit the screen of management. One of the reasons this happens, as the leader we interviewed today added, is that senior managers are rotated through the R&D function every few years. While management may initiate structural changes or launch other initiatives to optimize innovation and productivity, the culture is seldom affected, unless there is an intentional, trustworthy attempt to engage this “underground”.

This is not about gimmicky programs or subversive tactics but rather about more authentic engagement with people who matter because they are the guts of the R&D lab. Valuable political skills can be honed which acknowledge the reality of the power structure(s) of the business while honoring the wisdom buried in the organization. But before even thinking about engaging the "underground" one needs to acknowledge that it exists. What prevents or encourages management from doing so? That's the question I didn't explore in the interview today. Next time!

Improvisation and Relationships

Last week I had the opportunity to hear Rob Cross deliver the results of a social network analysis to the top 100 R&D leaders in a client organization. He highlighted, among other things, the importance of managing overload points as well as leveraging the periphery of the informal networks revealed by the mapping. This prompted me to juxtapose our work with relationship capital.

We define relationship capital as the sum total of interfaces, interactions, and interventions among and between people. It includes the tacit, often unrecognized behaviors and patterns of interaction that define and differentiate an organization’s performance. The practice of the Politics of Creativity helps leaders more effectively invest in relationship capital.

An essay in the McKinsey Quarterly entitled "Competitive Advantage from Better Interactions" helpfully describes how tacit interactions more and more define how employees must relate to one another. (The authors’ research was based on a study of some 8,000 companies.) One of their conclusions: "Tacit interactions reduce the importance of structure and elevate the importance of people and collaboration. …Tacit work is improvisational and difficult to define in advance, for it follows the problem being solved and the nature of the opportunity at hand."

I actually spent a day not too long ago at an improvisational workshop with Stevie Rae. While it may seem like a big stretch from an improv routine to a research lab, there were many aspects of the workshop that informed our work with "relationship capital". For example, Stevie Rae reminded us again and again, "At the end of the day, the audience won't remember your words but whether they liked playing with you." '

When, if ever, have you last asked yourself the question "What feeling or emotion do I want others to leave this conversation or presentation with, not simply what information?" This is a specific way for one to invest more in relationship capital. Too simplistic? Too soft? Pay attention and see what happens.

There is mounting evidence that such tacit dimensions differentiate those who successfully generate trust and establish an environment where creativity and innovation flourish. All the information and data in the world is no substitute for some of the most rudimentary principles of building relationships that are more than connections on a network map.

An Underground of Missed Opportunity

Last Friday I spoke at Medtronic's Global Technology Forum on the “Politics of Creativity”. I began by commenting how just beneath the surface of organizational “business as usual” there lies an “underground” of missed opportunity. I asked the audience, "Where does one go to find out what’s really happening?" The practice of the Politics of Creativity is about looking at the inhibitors to creativity and innovation that lie just beneath the surface of most organizations.

Chris Argyris of Harvard Business School documents extensively in his book, Overcoming Organizational Defenses how “underground dynamics” arise. What I was not anticipating on Friday was a question from the audience asking, “What advice do you have for us if we are the underground?” The audience was heavily populated with young, robust thinkers, scientists and engineers as well as business liasons, asking great questions about sometimes elusive matters (e.g. "How DO I sustain the creativity I had when I came to the company two years ago?")

Underground dynamics are more about unspoken and often unrecognized maneuvers and manipulations to gain advantage than about a specific group of people. As Argyris points out, there are underground dynamics even in the Board Room. So perhaps I confused the audience by asking "where do you go to find out what's really happening"?

In any case, I responded to the question by sharing my conviction that a small group with vision and passion can indeed make a tremendous difference in where a large organization is moving. Over lunch I cited how in the mid 90s a small group in the Finance Dept at Nestle USA was largely responsible for what became a company-wide initiative called "Leadership over the Top," a program for leadership growth and renewal which was sustained for more than five years. I remain in contact with some of those individuals to this day.

In yesterday's New York Times Noam Cohen writes a featured article entitled, "The Wiki-Way to the Nomination". He describes how Barack Obama's victory as the Democratic nominee is very much a result of "Facebook politics" and compares his success to a "classic internet startup". He then quotes Obama: "We just had some incredibly creative young people who got involved and what I think we did was give them a lot of latitude to experiment and try new things and put some serious resources into it." New strategies and accompanying tactics for political influence are very evident in this year's political contests

I encourage you to read Cohen's article. He concludes by citing the paradox that one person can make all the difference in leveraging the "wisdom of crowds". Industry changing behavior is happening! Who would have imagined Radiohead or now Nine Inch Nails giving away their new hits on the Internet?

Gamesmanship in Process Implementation

Remember the childhood game, "Chutes and Ladders"? We've actually used the elements of this game with a group of 200 scientists and engineers to capture how they are using one and the same process in different sites and functions globally. Yes, "Chutes and Ladders"!

The task is not to discuss changing or improving the processes. The challenge is simply to identify and describe the ways in which technical leaders and their business partners around the world use different tactics or behaviors to operationalize one and the same process. This is more difficult that it may seem - simply describing actions and behaviors; the tendency again and again is to suggest what's wrong with the process or a particular protocol.

For example, the need for coordinated in-country strategies that interface well with the respective cultural as well as market realities of a particular region is one such "process". Working in break-out groups, each group documents the "ladders" which represent ways in which one could accelerate or "cut a few corners" as well as "chutes" which represent traps, pitfalls, or other liabilities which result in going backwards.

The outcome is not playing a game; rather a graphic representation is made visible of how leaders actually work one and the same process.

Knowing there are "chutes" and "ladders" in every organizational system reflects an understanding of "gamesmanship" that also exists, for better or worse. Knowing when it is O.K. to "break the rules" and when one ought to "follow the leader" is a kind of political skill. It can be cultivated if acknowledged. Both are necessary if innovation is to thrive.