Work environments are as complex and chaotic as natural environments. By embracing that fact and learning to control and account for the elements of your office’s ecosystem, companies can create the conditions that allow true innovation to emerge.
When managing a company or nonprofit from a sustainability perspective, one quickly realizes that no task or initiative is truly independent of our ecosystem’s rules and processes—ones that are based on complex, intricate relationships and non-linear logic. While business has traditionally not been comfortable with these approaches, our natural world—a successful, self-reliant system—provides a powerful model for how business can organize itself.
If we can find a way to embrace the unpredictable, complex evolution of ideas that occur between people, then just as living systems organize out of chaos, we have an opportunity to access exceptional levels of human creativity and innovation, which help us address the challenges facing business and the world today.
As someone who cares about the intersection of sustainability and business, you might consider how you can manage the work environment to help your staff or colleagues become comfortable with such complex processes. Or in other words, how do you manage for innovation?
Many people, such as Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley, have written about developing more dynamic organizations through understanding how natural systems work. However, you needn’t wait until you are running a company to apply these ideas. You can start to create an environment conducive to innovation at any scale. As Confucius said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
First, look at what systems you do have control over, however small, and start with one of them. It could be internal communications, knowledge management, or a strategic development process.
Within that system choose an element to start with, perhaps in your area of expertise or what you think will have a maximum effect on the team. They would be elements such as:
* Organization and use of physical space
* Team dynamics
* Use and control of time
* Communication tools
Any one of these areas can be constructed to empower knowledge sharing and strengthen the unexpected connections that cause true innovation to emerge. For instance, if you are developing a new product and want knowledge to flow smoothly and openly through your group, with divergence eventually merging into agreement, you want to be aware of how different communication tools support or hinder different types of knowledge transfers. Consider your objectives for the communication and the strengths and weaknesses of different forms, then match your tool to your task.
If you have people with different schedules, or team members who are exchanging detailed information, email may be your best choice. It allows team members to handle the communication on their timetable and consider the information at their own pace. While email can be a brainstorming tool for an established team with knowledge of each other’s styles and processes, its task-oriented and fragmenting characteristics better suit it for follow-up or review-oriented procedures. For people to be comfortable brainstorming and disagreeing with each other while generating original ideas, they need to know and trust each other. That in turn gives them the willingness to allow for the seeming chaos of information to evolve into new possibilities—just as the neural network of our brain seems to randomly connect information and yet still organizes into complex thoughts and functions.
To lay the foundation for a trusting team you need to start with face-to-face meetings. More then fifty-five percent of communication is non-verbal; you can miss out on many complex, synergistic solutions if your team doesn’t have enough visual time together. Face time builds trust, knowledge, and understanding and allows your team to risk sharing random or unexpected ideas and react to each other in a nonlinear fashion. At that point you have a team creating and working in the conditions from which creativity and innovation are most likely to spring—just like in the natural world.
