Practices to help create more innovative environments and greater collaboration at work.
We know that continuously innovating is critical to our success. Still, for many companies, innovation remains a core challenge.
Erik Roth, McKinsey Global Leader shares, “80 or 90 percent of executives tell us that innovation is a top priority, but only 6 percent are satisfied with their performance.”
Over the last five years, our team has developed practices to help cultivate an environment of continuous innovation—it’s what we call a both/and mindset.
We’ve experienced the incredible results that occur when we move out of binary thinking and into a both/and mindset. It’s led us to healthier ways of relating as a team, deeper collaboration, and surprising creative breakthroughs.
From a both/and perspective, innovative ideas are the result of engaging with paradox in a world where more than one thing can be true at once. Changing the way we relate to paradox becomes a starting point for our most profound insights. Working on our ability to relate to opposing ideas in tension, or even differing worldviews altogether, can reveal the perfect setup for breakthrough innovations.
Interested in experimenting with a both/and mindset on your team? The practices below can help us create more innovative environments and greater collaboration in our work.
Start with a Higher Purpose and Shared Agreements
Working with a higher vision helps keep us moving forward. When tension arises, we can point to something that transcends our differences, reorienting together to our “why,” instead of holding on to our individual expectations. Setting up shared agreements from the start reduces friction down the road.
Create an Environment of Empathy
An environment of empathy means that everyone is encouraged to participate, regardless of their position or the hierarchy in the organization. To experience a both/and mindset, we must transcend states of “fight or flight”—creating psychological safety and full engagement. Reinforce that all voices matter, and encourage authentic sharing, leaving nothing unsaid.
Engage in Active Listening
Invite your team to listen deeply to what is being communicated in the room. Often, instead of fully listening, we are filtering information and formulating a response to what is being said. Challenge yourself and your team to listen with the intention of truly understanding vs. responding. Make an agreement to take in content and substance over speaking style, responding to ideas vs. delivery.
Stay in Potential by Suspending Conclusions
Make a commitment amongst the team to explore, build, and discuss ideas before labeling them. When we’re in hierarchical thinking, we often have an impulse to immediately categorize ideas as good/bad, right/wrong, possible/impossible. This impedes the creative process. Agree to work together in an open space of potential and to stay open to what comes into the process until it’s time to come to narrow in on next steps.
Question Your Assumptions
We all have biases and assumptions in our thinking based on our past conditioning and experiences. Often these biases are subconsciously running our thinking. Commit to identifying your assumptions and practice questioning them. For example, if you don’t think an idea is possible, inquire further. Where did this limitation come from? Is it really true?
Release Expectations and Idealizations
In order to develop innovative ideas, we need to move beyond our preconceptions and into the unknown. To do this, we strive for a process orientation rather than an outcome orientation, which means we’re focused on how we’re relating in the moment more than we are focused on our own expectations of the result. Can we truly let go of our attachment to what we think the solution needs to look like during the creative process to let spontaneity, synchronicity, and unexpected magic happen?
Identify Paradoxes
Creative tensions often hold the greatest potential for breakthrough ideas. Identify the paradoxes and polarities inherent to the challenge you are solving. If you didn’t hold these polarities in opposition, what would a solution look like that integrated both?
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When you engage in these practices as a team, you will feel it when it is “on.” When there is spontaneity, authentic sharing, insight, and innovation—that is a both/and mindset in action.
Interested in learning more about developing a both/and mindset?
