Nonlinear management: creative thinking

It’s times like these that should make people realize the importance of adaptability. But as I experience the stubbornness in keeping a dissipated conservative view on problems by most managers, I’m hoping to share some more light on what the vanguard of management is.

Firs topic, creative thinking. This concept has been around for a while, but has yet to be adopted on large scale. One could start wondering why is that? - why would people not see that getting the knowledge on how to come up with great ideas is equally, if not more important than building a business around them? Creative thinking is a bit of an abstract term. In business in general, in management in particular, it refers to the set of skills required to gain a holistic view of a problem. To do that, one must train his mind on several levels. Each level is hierarchically more important and as you reach the top, you are able to see at 360 degrees. But unlike in a forest, where you have to get to the top of the highest tree to get an overview of your situation, creative thinking is more of a pyramid, in which as you construct towards the top, you gain height and more overview based on what you’ve constructed underneath.

Let’s start with level number 1, which is knowing how to ask the right questions. This is very important because what you’re trying to do is gather a list of requirements. For that, you need to have an objective. I know it sounds silly, but actually stating a clear objective is harder than you’d think. Let’s take a moment and digress on this. It is obvious now that treating a problem mechanically does not lead to the best results. That is where non linear management comes in, with it’s agile view on the situation. However, it might seem that it’s a small contradiction in starting off with a clear objective and keeping it and at the same time being agile, using small deliverables, small increments, always shifting, etc. In reality, having a clear objective is the number one requirement for agile to work. For instance, as a manager, you can only have one objective, like building the best news site in 10 months with less than 500k. That is a clear, precise objective. But what about the team building it, isn’t that supposed to have some objectives attached, like making the people you conduct the happiest most productive in the city? The answer is no and this will never change. You can only have one objective. But that’s what creative thinking is all about. How you can enter a swirl of inputs and generate a clear, productive output. How you can reach your objective by enabling as much positive action on everything surrounding the objective.
So, now that you have the objective set, you need to start asking questions. There are always the technical questions, like who are the stakeholders, who are the builders, who is doing qa, how much of the budget should be dedicated to.. etc. And then, there are other types of questions, in fields of creativity, morality, or just about anything. A typical question would be: should we put tabloid stories in the newspaper or not? An event better question would be, how can we minimize the impact of tabloid stories, how can we make them so that some of the viewers don’t get offended? If we extrapolate to management, what would be the questions then? Well, should I hire a musician to entertain the programmers? - if I do that, will they do a better job? Should I give each person in the team the freedom to use any tools he/she feels comfortable with? Should I use agile? Should I insert the idea of competition in the team? If the dopamine levels in monkeys increase highest in a 25% case reward, would that apply to rewarding the team? etc. It is very easy to step on the known path, to follow on other’s footsteps, to do the right thing.. but are those the best decisions you could make? aren’t you missing out on a lot of opportunities by doing so? It is so often seen that when one stops asking questions, it stops progressing. The idea here is that everything is connected and you cannot look at a sum of pieces to define the whole object. That is why there is no such thing as a bad question, but more of a am I asking enough questions.

The whole point of achieving level 1 is not only to open up and start asking questions, but to make the people you lead do the same. To teach them that it’s right to ask questions, not only in their job, but also in their personal life. This way, you don’t break the chain, you strengthen it. As a critical thinker, you must always establish a path between the cause and the effect, you must ask “why” and “how” all the time. And of course, you must keep a pragmatic view at all times, by asking “what will be the negative effects of my decisions”. So, as you see, a critical thinker is not and should not be viewed as a know-it-all guy who starts taking the wildest decisions without a care for the future.

In conclusion, level 1 is about asking questions. You ask questions because you need to learn how things work, how things affect other things, you always ask questions because you need to learn how to think. I’ll end the article by giving a short example of why asking questions is so important for a manager. In company x, a new manager is hired to re-inspire, re-create and ultimately start making money out of product y. So the new manager comes in, packed with what he had learned in school, experiences from past companies, etc. He already has plans, ideas and is confident on what needs to be done. The first few days he comes in, he starts implementing his wishes in a more open way, just so that the team can get used to them. But he never bothered to ask what the other team members feel about his decisions, and even worse, he deeply offended some of the senior, key employees in the team by simply not knowing, or not caring about their importance to the product. For him, the fact that he has been summoned for taking over product x, means that everything connected to it was bad and that’s why his ideas are the only one that matter. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Some of the senior’s left, while others moved to other teams. The new product was a fiasco and everybody lost.

The idea of writing this series of articles was also catalyzed by a really good article on the Harvard Business Review Blog, How Leaders Should Think Critically.

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