Innovation
Client need: creating an innovative culture.
A large manufacturing company was at a crossroads. In the face of changing technical standards in a competitive industry, they needed to be flexible, creative and innovative in order to survive and thrive. Top management wanted to address the problem head-on: employees needed to take a hard look at the business impact of a silo mentality and the missed opportunities inherent in the "because we've always done it that way" model. They had to lead with bold decision-making and innovation in their day-to-day work lives. But how?
The company planned a one-day off-site with a diverse cross-section of personnel — from the top of the house to the factory floor. We were asked to design and deliver a session to help participants explore the behaviors required to break through the institutional obstructions that stifle innovative ideas and limit business growth.
The overriding objective for our session was to stimulate a candid dialogue around three key questions: Where in this diverse company do innovative ideas come from? What typically happens to stifle them? And what can be done to encourage diversity of thought? Everyone would need to be brought into the conversation without feeling attacked or singled out. And the client wanted the experience to be fun and engaging.
Our method: interactive improvisational vignette.
Through interviews, we had come to understand the organizational and interpersonal dynamics that impacted on the lifecycle of ideas at the company, and embedded those dynamics in an allegorical story about a company 20 years in the future. Our story included a "great idea" that would save the fictional company from an uncertain fate if only it could be nurtured.
In the opening moments of the vignette, the participants saw the idea emerge from low in the company's hierarchy. In subsequent scenes, participants watched all the characters make choices and take actions that led to the idea being ignored.
A facilitator stopped the action, and asked the audience if they could help. Participants immediately wanted to get under the skin of the characters, to understand why they did what they did. They interviewed our characters, and found out what made them tick. Several people commented that they had never had this kind of discussion; never considered the reasons people (particularly people from a different area or different level of the organization) acted as they did.
Then the audience was asked for ideas that could improve the outcome of the story. They made creative suggestions, which we incorporated in newly improvised moments and scenes, with stops and starts at the story's twists and turns. Sometimes, debates broke out about the right thing to do, and we were able to test the options onstage in real time.
Throughout the three-hour process, the roughly 75 participants remained deeply engaged. While audience directions began as suggestions to the actors, the issues involved were very familiar, and participants began more and more to draw on their experience inside the company to inform their input. And in the final debrief, when the conversation turned from the fictional future to the challenge of the present day, they talked in candid and creative (and as they reported later unprecedented) ways about how to move their real organization boldly into the future.
