Throughout our formal and informal education, from pre-school to postdoc, we’re taught how to read, how to write, how to speak. But we don’t get any instruction about how to listen. Even though it’s how we take in information and get clues about what’s happening around us, even though listening is essential to problem solving and to collaborating with others, it’s rare that listening skills are part of a curriculum. We don’t learn how to listen.

As a result, we may think we’re listening to someone who’s talking to us, when what we’re really doing is thinking about how to talk back. There’s a constant background chatter: Do I agree or not? Have I ever encountered this before? How is this relevant? We instantly filter information and map it against our own experience and opinions.

You may have heard the term active listening. It’s used often in the fields of communication training and conflict management. The idea is to listen with the objective of achieving full understanding. It’s not about coming back with an answer, or even a smart follow-up question. It’s about opening your ears and your mind to fully hear what a speaker is saying.

People who listen actively often wait before responding to give the person who’s talking time to fully finish their thought. Instead of providing an answer or a “me, too” remark, they’ll re-state what they heard, to be sure they got it. Or if they ask a clarifying question, it’s one that will truly help them understand the speaker. There’s lots of eye contact, and they’ve probably set their smart phone down to give full attention.

Needless to say, it’s a much more satisfying experience to converse with someone who listens this generously. And if you’re self-possessed enough to listen to people this way, it’s amazing to see the reaction from others when they feel like you’ve really heard them. There’s research that shows the expression on your face when you listen can alter what information a speaker decides to share.

Listening and the Creative Process

We urge the groups we work with to clarify a challenge before trying to solve it. Too often people start hunting for solutions right away, and part of our creative process is to make sure we’re addressing the real or a root problem, first. This means listening closely to what problem owners say about the current situation, or how they describe barriers to the ideal outcome. It means listening for stakeholder needs and trying to fully understand all the problems that might be addressed.

Then there’s the issue of throw-away data. This is the information we think isn’t important, for instance, the disclaimer before what start to talk about what we believe is the meat of the problem. It’s full of context: “Well, we haven’t been given all the data yet but here’s what we know…” Usually it’s our assumptions about the context that end up limiting us when we’re trying to be creative. If you can listen closely for the throw-away comments that leak that information, and clarify them, you can get to what might be the heart of the problem.

Later in the process, when we generate ideas, listening is just as valuable. One of the key guidelines for group brainstorming is to build on the ideas of others. Refuting an idea midstream only stops down the flow. If we can listen, generously, to understand the premise of an idea and build on its potential, rather than falling into a debate about its faults, we’re more likely to get to better and bolder ideas.

The Humility of Creativity

If we genuinely want to be innovative, we need to accept that sometimes being wrong is part of that process. Many of our ideas – especially the riskier ones – might seem foolish, or might not be work. The reason driving the need to innovate might be because what we’ve been doing something wrong. There might be moments when we’re not sure how things are going to turn out. As we develop potential ideas, we may need to accept the input of others, in order to make them feasible and workable. This requires listening without need to be right, which means listening openly and genuinely, for understanding.

Listening is not passive. It requires real attention and purpose, and takes a lot of energy. Occasionally I catch myself half-listening or focusing more on how I want to respond, and then I know I’m not really listening. I try to correct it right away, because when I listen to my colleagues generously, it establishes a rapport that leads to more authentic problem solving and more meaningful creative output.

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Know Further:

How well do you listen? Take this Listening Skills Test. Read McKinsey’s executive guide to better listening, or the ten commandments of good listening. There’s an international journal of listening. Some interesting research about how listeners and speakers have brain waves in the same part of the brain. Drummer Bill Bruford on listening and creativity, and a phenomenal TED talk by deaf drummer Evelyn Glennie about how to listen.

KI tries to stay in touch with the scientists and academics who’ve come through our events, to track the progress of their projects, monitor the impact of the Sandpit (a.k.a. Ideas Lab) and how it accelerates scientific innovation and also just to hear from participants, with some time to reflect, about their experience at our workshops. Here’s another Sandpit tale, following up on two projects that we’ve had the privilege of midwifing in the last few years.
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What happens when you put a bunch of biologists at tables with Play-doh.

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During the creative problem solving process, there’s a stage when we encourage people to capture all the information about the problem we’re trying to solve. There are lots of ways to do this, but often we’ll collect people at a table with the goal of gathering data and we’ll ask them to write down all the information about the challenge that might be pertinent. At this point, the client – or stakeholder, or problem owner – will describe their situation. The explanation usually begins with a preamble.

“Well, we tried to propose this research a couple of times before, and I’ve lost some energy because my department head is not supporting me, but here’s what I think we could…”

Then they go on to describe the situation, which is when people start taking notes. Rarely does anyone write down the throwaway data: Keep reading »

Scarcity has become a major driver for innovation. The bleaker economy of the last few years has thrust companies, organizations, universities – and entire countries – into an austerity mode. Innovation is more critical than ever, yet many established organizations, especially the ones that institutionalized their innovation process, don’t have the agility to respond. The things they’re used to, money and time, are no longer abundant.

In the context of this changed economy when it seems everything has to be faster, better and cheaper, there’s a type of innovator who’s thriving: the jugaad innovator. Jugaad (pronounced “Joo-gaard”) is a Hindi word that translates not only to a noun – it’s a fix, a work-around, an innovative solution – but it also encompasses an entire spirit of resourcefulness and resilience. Keep reading »

They filed into the room cautiously, surveying the plastic on the floors and the tables stocked with rainbow-colored rows of acrylic paint tubes, palettes, brushes, and huge blank canvasses. Several people looked back toward the door, longingly, wondering if there was a way that they could escape before the activity started. But a little group dynamic was working in our favor, making it just as embarrassing to leave as it might be to stay.

The participants, a collection of scientists from diverse disciplines and universities, had come together for a Sandpit (a.k.a Ideas Lab) and expected to hear from a few experts, talk with their informed peers, and look for literature on-line to support or condemn ideas that might emerge. They didn’t expect to be holding paint brushes or palette knives and to be thinking about how to mix colors and which brush to use. Some were curious, excited about the prospect. Others were groaning, if not audibly, at least with their facial expressions. Keep reading »

Knowinnovation has been facilitating Sandpits and Ideas Labs for a number of years, and this has has given us the opportunity to witness the emergence of some fascinating science. In many ways, KI is like a midwife, creating an open environment for different perspectives to collide, which leads to new questions that ultimately provoke new ideas for innovative research. We get to see all these ideas come to life, but then what? Lately we’ve been trying to find out.

In December of 2008, KI facilitated the Digital Economy Sandpit, a 5-day event sponsored by the EPSRC and the TSB. An unusual point about that Sandpit merits mention: every proposal was strong enough to be funded and all the participants left with at least one role in a funded project. Keep reading »

You walk into the conference room to find a long string of tables, laid out in a U-shaped formation. Or maybe there are rows of narrow tables, at each chair, a place-setting of paper and a hotel pen, a small doily rests under each designated water glass. The fluorescent overhead lights buzz, the dark, dirt-hiding carpet ties the room together in a blandly professional way.

It’s going to be one of those meetings, you think, already dreading the next few hours or days that you’ll be sequestered in this room, suffering death by talking head or Powerpoint – or both. Keep reading »

My daughter’s teacher asked me to help out with a school project, one of the objectives of which is to expose the students to the basic elements of deliberate creativity (before they unlearn everything they know naturally). We started with an exercise about failing. The students were given an easy task but with time pressure. Each time someone failed, we applauded wildly. By the end of the activity, everyone had failed and they all thought it was funny. The bad taste of failure was stripped away, so we could look at it in a new way.

We talked about how in school – often for good reason – failure is something to be avoided. We don’t want to fail our tests; we want to do our best. But that in other situations, failure might not be such an awful outcome, it could even be a positive thing. The consequences of failing could be useful, at the very least we can learn from it. Keep reading »

It happens once or twice a year. An innovation theorist, organizational consultant, or accredited author/blogger writes an article blasting some aspect of the collective creative process. There’s a flurry of responses and rebuttals, and a digging-in of the heels in each camp, those for or against, each with their own case for the best way to induce creative thinking.

The most recent example of this: a New York Times piece The Rise of New Groupthink, in which Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, laments the prevalence of group brainstorming and creative teamwork. While she doesn’t entirely disavow the value of creative collaboration, her premise is that team methodology is counterproductive for introverts, to whom she attributes most creative advances. Keep reading »