The Curiosity Thread: Creating Innovative & Inclusive Company Cultures
A diverse range of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences benefits everyone. For example, companies that are both diverse and inclusive are more profitable. Why? Because organizations with diverse leadership and teams (where individuals also feel a strong sense of inclusion, belonging, and psychological safety) are more innovative than organizations that lack a strong culture of diversity and inclusion.
A study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) examined the connection between innovation and inclusion. They studied 1,700 different companies in 8 different countries (Austria, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Switzerland, and the United States) with varying industries and company sizes:
The biggest takeaway we found is a strong and statistically significant correlation between the diversity of management teams and overall innovation. Companies that reported above-average diversity on their management teams also reported innovation revenue that was 19% higher than that of companies with below-average leadership diversity—45% of total revenue versus just 26%. (See Exhibit 1 below.)
Image: BCG
When diversity and inclusion is not prioritized, companies not only have lower rates of innovation and profitability, but they can also face problems and PR disasters that could have been easily prevented, had their teams been more diverse.
For instance, the traditionally male-dominated automotive industry is coming under fire for putting female drivers at risk due to bias in crash testing. A number of fashion brands, including Gucci and Prada, hurried to pull products off of shelves last year after being accused of racist imagery. When the teams that design, test, and market products are more diverse, they are more likely to notice potentially problematic issues before they backfire and damage a company’s brand reputation and bottom line.
Having teams comprised of people from different genders, races, religions, cultural backgrounds, and cognitive styles offers more perspectives when it comes to problem solving and innovation. In the BCG study, they looked at diversity within companies across 6 dimensions:
gender
age
nation of origin (meaning employees born in a country other than the one in which the company is headquartered)
career path
industry background
education (meaning employees’ focus of study in college or graduate school)
My own non-traditional career path and mix of industry backgrounds as both an entrepreneur and intrapreneur highlights one way in which diverse perspectives can drive innovation:
What intrapreneurship has meant for me.
In 2017, I presented a session at New Orleans Entrepreneur Week titled Capturing the Unicorn: Find, Nurture, and Retain Creative Intrapreneurs in Your Organization. I explored my own experiences of bringing an entrepreneurial mindset into organizations I'd worked in, and I offered advice for companies who wanted to foster innovation internally.
My education and career background is pretty diverse - some might even say it’s all over the place. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and small business owners, and I pursued theatre and ballroom dance throughout middle school and high school. I dropped out of high school halfway through my junior year, and started college with the intention of pursuing a theatre degree, but graduated with a degree in History instead. After college, I balanced a mix of full-time and part-time jobs, while juggling my own entrepreneurial endeavors on the side. I spent more than a decade in the handmade art world, selling at craft shows and online. During part of this time, I also worked in the curatorial department of the Louisiana State Museum.
At the same time I was working as Database Manager at the Louisiana State Museum, I was also running MissMalaprop.com, a blog I started in 2006. As a blogger, I'd learned about social media marketing from the ground up, as channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram were coming into existence. Even though I wasn't in the marketing department at the Louisiana State Museum, I saw some potential opportunities that people who were trained in traditional marketing might not have noticed. For example, around 2008-2009 I noticed that a lot of museums around the world were starting to use Flickr to share their collections digitally and Twitter to engage their visitors. I approached my boss about the ideas I had, and I was able to work cross-departmentally with the marketing team to brainstorm new ways that we could use these emerging digital marketing tools. My experiences as an artist and creative entrepreneur had given me a different way of seeing these possibilities.
When I made the transition to a full-time day job in digital marketing, I was 30 years old and had no formal training in marketing. However, as an entrepreneur, I had uniquely positioned myself to get a new job in the digital marketing field.
Everything I knew when I started working at marketing agency FSC Interactive in 2014 was based on what I'd taught myself about social media, search engine optimization, and digital marketing. Because I was primarily self-taught, I had a different approach than some of my team members who had already been working in the marketing field for many years. I was pulled in to train some of our clients on the basics of social media and SEO, a task which I excelled at. The fact that I was a self-taught marketer was exactly why I was so good at teaching other entrepreneurs about how to market themselves.
I continued to pursue my own entrepreneurial endeavors on the side while I was working at FSC Interactive. I saw how many of the solopreneurs and creative entrepreneurs that I was friends with online were using tools like Facebook Groups to find clients and engage with their customers. These entrepreneurs were nimble, early adopters who were quick to test out live-streaming tools like Periscope or Facebook Live. I saw how they used webinars and email funnels to grow their revenue. By constantly seeking out different perspectives, I could see how one tool could be used in a variety of different ways for different industries and customer demographics.
Curiosity: the connecting thread between innovation and inclusion.
I've always been a highly creative person. I remember when I used to sell at craft shows, I would have people come up to my booth and say things like, "Oh gosh, I wish I was creative."
It always broke my heart to hear people say that because we are all creative beings, but some of us lean more naturally into aspects of creativity like “divergent thinking”.
A few years ago, I got really interested in learning more about the science of creativity. Why are some people more creative than others? How can we train ourselves to be more creative?
One of my first steps into this world was the book Wired to Create: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman. (The book was originally inspired by this article: 18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently.) With my winding career path and diverse set of passions and interests, it was reassuring to read:
“…one of the most well-known findings in the history of creativity research: Creative people have messy minds.”
You mean my tendency towards ADHD behavior and trying to juggle a million ideas and projects at once is actually my competitive advantage?!? Huzzah!
For some of us, creativity comes more naturally, but there are many tools and ways to practice deliberate creativity and to spur innovation within your organization.
My introduction to design thinking and human-centered design came through Tulane University's Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking. They produce a number of events that are open to the community, including The FAST 48, a weekend boot camp that teaches the basics of human-centered design for social impact. I attended my first FAST 48 in April 2017, and I've participated a few times since then as a volunteer.
One of the things I love about Tulane's FAST 48 is how they partner with the local non-profit PlayBuild NOLA to solve real-world problems for that organization. Located in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans, PlayBuild has been transforming under-utilized urban spaces into kid-friendly environments for play and learning since 2012.
The FAST 48 takes place over the course of a weekend, and Saturday morning is typically spent walking around Central City and asking questions of the business owners and residents of that neighborhood. Starting from a mindset of curiosity and asking the people that actually live in the neighborhood questions about their experiences helped to give us more insights for when we went back to the classroom and started brainstorming and ideating on possible solutions to the challenge at hand.
A mindset of curiosity and questioning is at the heart of driving innovation forward.
Later that same year, in June 2017, I attended my first Creative Problem Solving Institute (also known as CPSI Conference). In 2019, I had the honor of being the emcee of this event, which is the world’s longest-running creativity conference.
CPSI is produced by the Creative Education Foundation (CEF), a nonprofit organization founded in 1954 that mobilizes leaders in the field of creative theory and practice.
CPSI and CEF focus on teaching the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) process which was originally developed by Alex Osborn (who coined the term "brainstorming") and Sid Parnes in the 1940s and 50s.
The creative problem solving process is made up of 4 basic parts: Clarify, Ideate, Develop, and Implement. Each step uses both divergent thinking and convergent thinking.
Image: Creative Problem Solving Model, via Creative Education Foundation
Brainstorming is probably the most well-known aspect of divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is all about deferring judgment and asking questions. Divergent questions are framed in a way that helps people to generate clear insights while allowing for idea generation that is plentiful and far-reaching.
One aspect of divergent thinking that really struck a cord with me when I learned about it was invitational language stems. It means framing those questions or statements in a way that helps to stimulate deeper, more open thinking when coming up with or choosing ideas. Here are some examples:
How to...?
How might I...?
In what ways might we...?
It would be great if…
What I see us doing is…
Join me at IABC World Conference this summer!
This summer at IABC World Conference, I'll be sharing insights about how to bring more curiosity into your organization and how to apply the basics of design thinking and the creative problem solving process.
This summer the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) will celebrate 50 years of driving the communication profession forward. I will be speaking about creating innovative and inclusive company cultures during IABC World Conference on June 15, 2020 in Chicago.
Join me, as we build a kinder, more inclusive (and more innovative!) world together.