Wednesday, January 25, 2017

A520.3.3.RB - Constraints on Creative Problem Solving


The Creativity of the Phoenix

Pablo Picasso said “every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction. The mythical Phoenix comes to mind when I first hear that statement. The Phoenix lives for a time, then the old bird is destroyed in a fiery display, and a new, young Phoenix arises from the ashes to take the old bird’s place and begin the cycle again. Nature, or Creation, is replete with similar examples. After a forest fire kills or destroys all of the trees, plants, and even animals over a wide swath, soon there are new, green shoots sprouting from the blackened ground. In time, the charred land is filled with young trees and vegetation; animals return to live in a place that was once beautiful and teaming with life, then dead, and once more full of beauty and life. Or witness the familiar caterpillar that undergoes a complete metamorphosis to emerge as moth or butterfly from its cocoon. Likewise, anyone who has lived, or spent time, on a farm is indeed familiar with the cycle of planting, cultivating, harvesting, turning the earth and destroying the remnants of the previous crop (thereby enriching the soil), and replanting again in the spring. After the leaves change color and fall from the trees, there ensues a dormant season where all is seemingly dead, only to witness re-birth and renewal once the snow melts and the warmth returns.

But each of these re-birth or regeneration processes and cycles may be arrested. A warm spring where trees begin to bud, followed by an unexpected harsh freeze can kill young fruit, new leaves, or even the entire tree. Mudslides or bulldozers after a forest fire can prevent new life from arising and the return of the animals. New crops may likewise experience a killing frost if planted too soon. Like the interruption of creation or rebirth in nature, we too can arrest or kill off our creativity, personally or in the workplace. We either constrain our own creativity through self-doubt or fear, or find it constrained by organizational bureaucracy that won’t tolerate one who does not conform. It would follow from Picasso’s statement that to be creative, we must first destroy that which prevents us from performing creatively and allow something new to be created within us.

To become creative, we may find it necessary to destroy or supplant our existing management and leadership techniques, processes, or understanding to replace these with the creation of new and different leadership and management skills. In her TED talk, “How to Manage for Collective Creativity” Linda Hill (2014), stated that, “If we want to build organizations that can innovate, we must unlearn conventional notions of leadership”. In other words, we must first tear down or destroy what we think we know (or have learned) about great leadership to enable ourselves and the organizations which we lead to become creative.

One thing that we need to destroy is the idea that no one can argue, even constructively, with the boss. Creativity requires the airing of different, even contradictory ideas; healthy, even heated, debate is essential for creativity and innovation. Another thing that we must discard is the notion that the boss tells the subordinates what to do and the subordinates do what they are told. Creativity and innovation are instead about working with the unique talents and perspectives of everyone in the work group. Experimentation is required, even if it means going down some blind alleys. A third construct that we must unlearn for the creative organization to flourish is that it is the leader who sets the vision for everyone else to follow. In a creative organization, the vision is something that is collectively developed by all members. As Linda says, leading innovation is not about creating a vision and inspiring others to execute it. Instead, leaders of innovation bring together people with great diversity and passion, to create a “public square” type of interaction where all of the “disruptors” and “minority voices can speak up and be heard.

If the common precepts of leadership must be effectively destroyed for organizations to be creative and innovative, it would follow that each of us as individuals must also destroy the manner in which we are accustomed to functioning within the typical organization and replace our own habits and self-imposed constraints with new ways of thinking, contributing, and interacting within the workplace. We must rid ourselves of the fear of speaking up and out for our ideas. We must discard the notion that we cannot have ideas, opinions, or perspectives that differ from the boss and from other members of the organization. Probably most importantly, we must train ourselves to think and solve problems creatively. Whetten and Cameron (2017) discuss this need to learn how to solve problems creatively, citing four “conceptual blocks that inhibit creative problem solving”. Those blocks are: 1) Constancy, or the tendency to define a problem in one way without considering all of the alternatives; 2) Commitment, which is the tendency to define new problems as mere variations of problems that we have already encountered and are used to seeing; 3) Compression, or not filtering out irrelevant information and; 4) Complacency, which is failure to be inquisitive and ask questions – in short, the failure to actively think about the problem. These then are some of our personal tendencies or traits that we must destroy if we are to become creative and innovative.

Many times, I have missed essential information about a new problem because I have defined it using the familiar terms and patterns that I learned from years of experience. Such experience is not an inherently bad thing, provided it doesn’t blind you to new information. Right here, in the second week of this course, I approached an assignment with the thought pattern that I have used repeatedly in my schoolwork and in so doing, I read right past one key requirement: to pose “intriguing questions” about the topic in my presentation. When I read the assignment, I said to myself “Got it; I need to build a Prezi presentation about the topic”. And that is what I did, completely overlooking the last piece of instruction; the part of the assignment that required some creativity at that. Lesson learned. I fell victim to constancy and commitment (and perhaps a bit of complacency). In the future, I will read (as I’m doing now) and re-read the assignment and ensure that I have covered each, individual requirement therein. I crashed and burned on one assignment because I thought I had done everything that I was supposed to do, without carefully examining and double-checking each requirement.

Each time the Phoenix arises from its ashes, it is faced with the opportunity to begin anew, to experience life differently than it did in its prior incarnation. Its destruction enables the possibility of a fresh perspective, of different ways of accomplishing tasks than it may have learned in past lives. Like that Phoenix, if we are to become innovative and creative when called upon to do so, we must first destroy our old selves (figuratively, of course) and become new in our habits, thoughts, and interactions within our organizations.

Saturday, January 21, 2017



10 Minutes a Day
The topic today is about remaining or living in the present, moment to moment, and the value of spending ten minutes a day doing nothing in pursuit of that objective. Another way to refer to this practice may be “mindfulness” or even “meditation”. Whatever term you wish to ascribe to the practice of spending ten minutes every day doing nothing, making an effort to remain focused on the present, and quieting your mind, the aim is to reduce stress and enhance well-being by removing yourself from the daily busy-ness and noise that occupy our mind and keep us distracted from living in the present. In Andy Puddicombe’s TED Talk (2012), he discusses both the problem of our daily distractions that prevent us from being present in the moment and suggests a few strategies for taking ten minutes each day to do nothing. Andy makes the excellent point that even though our minds are probably the most important determinant of our overall physiological health, we spend almost no time taking care of our minds; instead, we spend time taking care of our cars, our homes, and perhaps even our physical bodies and yet we neglect our minds. He says that we are so distracted by our thoughts that we are no longer present in the world in which we live. The result is stress and perhaps even clinical depression or anxiety.
We were assigned to practice spending ten minutes a day doing nothing for at least three days in a row and report back on the value of this practice, what we learned through this practice, whether or not this is something we will continue and even encourage others to practice, and how remaining in the moment can provide stress reduction. I have long been intrigued by meditation and its advertised benefits; I have read a few articles and books on the subject, and yet I have yet to become a successful practitioner of the kind of thing that Andy talks about. I desire the benefits, but I have found that meditation, for me, is extremely difficult.
In her book “The Type A’s Guide to Mindfulness: Meditation for Busy Minds and Busy People”, Melissa Eisler mentions a long-used term called the “monkey brain” to describe the common condition of people’s minds and thoughts on any given day, where the mind jumps around from thought to thought like a monkey swings from tree to tree. (Eisler, 2015). She says that in any given day, people have approximately 50,000 thoughts go through their mind and that this noise is something from which we need to learn to detach. We cannot expect to shut these thoughts off, nor should we try (our stress will only increase if we do so), but that we should learn to disconnect ourselves from these thoughts, become a dispassionate observer, and recognize that this massive jumble of thoughts is not really at all who we are; those thousands of thoughts need not define us and keep us from being present in each moment.
I have long been fascinated by the concept of time, and the passage of time as we understand it. The idea of time travel I find especially intriguing; not the theoretical basis for it so much as the possibilities that might open up if we could travel back and forth through time. And the older that I get, the faster that time seems to be passing by. As I think about these things, I wonder what the duration of a “moment” in time is. What does it truly mean to live, or be present in the moment? Again, as Eisler says, there is a continual conversation going on inside our minds all the time; disjointed and jumbled though it may be. For these reasons, and a host of others, I find any form of meditative practice extremely challenging. Here is a moment, am I truly present in it? Oops, there it went, and here is another one. But wait, I was just thinking about the last moment, so I just missed living in this one. I have not yet learned how to successfully disconnect from these kinds of thoughts, and as a result, I have not yet learned to be truly mindful and enjoy the benefits of quieting the mind to be present in the moment.
I once read an article about eastern philosophy that dealt with the martial arts and meditation. I don’t have a reference to cite here, but I remember that this article discussed the analogy of our being like water as a martial artist and in our meditative practice. Water flows effortlessly around obstacles and is persistent in its action. Likewise, as this article stated, we were to let our thoughts simply flow like water, never attempting to grab hold of any one thought and possess it, but to instead let all thoughts pass by as we observed without emotion. To me, that is one of the better analogies that helps me to understand what I am supposed to do when I spend ten minutes (or whatever duration of time) doing nothing. As Eisler says, we are to simply watch the thoughts come and go as we allow our mind to relax. As a psychologist might say, we need to stop “playing the tapes” in our mind and instead to simply be aware of what is.
Practicing mindfulness is indeed something that I intend to pursue and would recommend to anyone seeking to reduce their stress levels and improve their mental and physical health. I say “practicing” because I believe it to be a lifelong endeavor. Becoming “good” at meditation requires practice and effort. As Andy Puddicombe says, our mind is lost in thought (on average) 47% of the time. It is drawing our attention away from living in the present and thereby robbing us of living our lives. This leads to unhappiness as we begin to feel and understand that we are missing out on our life; time passes quickly and we often have no idea where it went as we allow ourselves to be distracted by the thoughts in our own head. Through practicing mindfulness, we can change the way that we experience life, enriching each moment of each day. Obviously, we cannot detach from our thoughts all the time. Writing this blog, for instance, required focusing my thoughts and listening to the conversation in my mind about the topic. But taking ten minutes, or twenty, or even more out of our day to meditate can do wonders for peace of mind, just like taking time to recover from a stressful workout can do wonders for our bodies and is indeed essential for healing, recovery, and increased capacity for exertion in the future.
Failure to practice mindfulness regularly results in stress, unhappiness, and a feeling of missing out on your life as it unfolds. Our monkey brain is a common condition that can cause us to worry. If you dwell on the past, you may end up depressed, guilty, angry, or regretful about things that you cannot change; this leads to a perpetual cycle of “if only I had done this….”. If you try to live in, or figure out the future, you may end up worrying about things that may (or may not) happen and conjure up situations or scenarios that will almost always prove inaccurate as the future becomes the present. Luke, Chapter 12, verses 25-26 say, “Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your lifespan? If even the smallest things are beyond your control, why are you anxious about the rest?” We would all do well to think on these things as we contemplate our individual need to practice doing nothing for ten minutes every day to improve our mental, physical, and spiritual health.

Saturday, January 14, 2017

A520.1.3.RB - Self-Awareness


Self-Awareness So Far…

Whetten & Cameron define five core aspects of Self-Awareness (Whetten & Cameron, 2016) that, to me, at this relatively early stage of my studies in Embry Riddle Aeronautical University’s Master of Science in Leadership degree (MSLD), are only just beginning to come into focus. This is my third class in the degree program, which will constitute a cumulative of nine credit hours toward the 36 credit hours required for graduation. What I believe has occurred thus far for me is a growing awareness of at least some of the five core aspects of Self-Awareness: emotional intelligence, values, cognitive style, attitude toward change, and core self-evaluation. I’d like to address each of these five in reverse order in this short blog.

Self-evaluation is like a tape that is always running just beneath the surface on a personal level. Although I have only been exposed to a single, formal self-evaluation tool (the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory), I have taken that assessment multiple times throughout my career. My results have shown that I started as an INTJ (introverted) and over the years have drifted into the ENTJ (extroverted) realm. I think that this change has occurred over the years due to the necessity of having to learn how to better work with people and, as I got practice with business and other, social type relationships, some fundamental changes took place in my personality. But beyond the MBTI assessment, in my line of work there are always “lessons learned” endeavors or “hot-washes” after every major undertaking, briefing, or meeting with senior leadership that seek to understand and analyze what took place and how we could have done things better. In those respects, self-evaluation is a routine part of my professional life. In the courses that I have taken so far in this Master’s program, critical thinking (e.g., walking around “the circle”) and a class that dealt with leadership styles have both caused me to do some soul-searching personally and professionally into what kind of leader I am (or aspire to be) and how I think about critical or important questions in all areas of my life. In that sense, my attention to self-evaluation has been awakened.

My attitude toward change is probably still my biggest challenge among the five core aspects. Certainly, my classes thus far have awakened my senses in this area, but I have a way to go yet before I will be as comfortable with change as I am with routine. When we looked at leadership styles, there was a section on leading change; the leadership style was called “Adaptive Leadership” (Northouse, 2016). The material in this section really opened my eyes to the challenges of leading a team, or an organization (or even myself or family) through difficult change or adaptation. The chapter on Adaptive Leadership caused me to think in detail about how I would face change or adaptation, particularly if I did not agree with changes in attitudes or beliefs required to accept the change. In thinking through these issues, and relating them to the kinds of change we see in society and the workplace in modern times, I was likewise awakened to the necessity of analyzing or re-evaluating my own, long-held beliefs on various societal issues of the time. I don’t want to make this blog into a socio-political treatise, so I won’t go into the issues. But suffice it to say that as a result of that course, I definitely came to a greater awareness of self and the necessity of my perhaps changing the way that I view and approach changes in society, at work and at home as my wife and I continue to adapt to being empty-nesters.

My cognitive style was challenged in the coursework that I did in our first course that dealt with critical thinking. I had considered myself a fairly logical, clear thinker up until I was exposed to the excellent and challenging material in the book “Learning To Think Things Through” (Nosich, 2012). Suddenly, critical thinking became a lot more involved than I had heretofore thought. But the concepts introduced and the thoroughness of the process of critical thinking suddenly opened my eyes to much more structure, and logical methods of addressing questions or problems than I had ever before seen. Wrapped up in critical thinking is the concept of intellectual perseverance, which is something else that opened my eyes regarding not only how to do a better job of critical thinking, but also about an entire field of study about the intellectual obligation we have as critical thinkers to wrestle with difficult topics and work tirelessly to get at the truth or facts of a given question or situation. Becoming more aware of how we think (and need to think) engenders the realization of where we need to improve. This, in turn, increases self-awareness.

Values is (or are) closely related to attitude toward change and cognitive style. When we confront change, or leading change, our values can be tested as can our reasoning or critical thinking skills. Wrapped up in adaptability is the concept and need for embracing diversity, whether cultural or personal. This course has re-opened my eyes to the many components of our values and, when combined with critical thinking, provides a sound basis for evaluating those same values. And with the process of examining values, we gain maturity in our values. I discovered in my reading that my values are probably residing mostly at the conventional level, which is to say I am a conformist. Not surprising, given my long history with the military and in working within that same environment as a defense support contractor. Where I aspire to be is at the post-conventional or principled stage, moving beyond conformity to a state where my values are both well-reasoned and wholly my own. This realization has opened up yet another aspect of self-awareness for me.

Finally, we come to emotional intelligence which is probably my weakest area. Even after years of dealing with other people in a wide variety of situations, I find that I really have to work (and have much work yet to do) on my ability to “diagnose, understand, and manage emotional cues”. (Whetten & Cameron, 2016) In the first place, I dislike conflict and intensely emotional situations. I am not comfortable in those settings. I also am a work in progress with respect to self-control. I don’t blow up much anymore, but I can get intensely angry and stew about something for long periods of time even when I give the outward appearance of being calm and collected. I do not yet have the emotional intelligence to deal effectively with all cases of conflict, anger, and the negative emotions. The entire discipline of emotional intelligence I find both fascinating and elusive. Clearly, the manner in which we handle our emotions, and recognize and respond to the emotions of others is a large component of our own self-awareness. This course and others that follow I’m sure will continue to shed light on, and challenge, my abilities in this aspect of both my skills and my knowledge. Developing emotional intelligence, I believe, is a lifelong pursuit. There is always room for improvement. I welcome the opportunity to continue acquiring knowledge and practice in emotional intelligence. Becoming aware of our own predilections where emotional intelligence is concerned seems to me to be at the core of our development of self-awareness. And the application of critical thinking about emotions should bear much fruit.

Becoming a truly great manager and leader is largely a journey of self-discovery and self-awareness. Technical acumen is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good leadership and management. As leaders and managers, we are (or should be) all about dealing effectively, fairly, and ethically with people who truly are the heart of enterprise. It would follow, therefore, that a MS in Leadership should focus heavily on the development of the self to become an effective leader and manager. The inaugural chapter of our text “Developing Management Skills” was on developing self-awareness, which is foundational for all that follows. The work that I have done so far in the MSLD program has aided in my enlightenment when it comes to how I think, how I assess and reason, how I deal with people, and what areas I need to work on. Such is key to increasing self-awareness.