Abstract

The current federal workforce is now down to the size it was during the Kennedy Administration. At that time, 1.7 million civilian federal employees served 200 million taxpayers. Today, that approximate number of civilian federal employees is serving 264 million taxpayers. Think about the number of cabinet departments that have sprung up since the sixties, with dramatic increases in federal services in the areas of the environment, housing, education, emergency response, health and science, and transportation. Customers are more demanding than ever. Expectations are high.

How do we jump through hoops to keep up with customer requirements in a time of severe budget and personnel cutbacks? Creativity is the answer. We cannot possibly meet today’s customers' demands by doing what we’ve always done. As Kenichi Ohmae, director of McKinsey in Japan, puts it, "Every organization needs one core competence: innovation."

The Creative Culture

Creativity must be supported, guided, and enabled. How does the leader – on a day-to-day basis – create the challenge? The heart of a creative culture is communication. Michael Geoghegan of DuPont says, "The key competitive advantage of a company is who is allowed to have what conversations about what topics with whom and when." It is up to federal leaders to organize better conversations.

"We’ve Tried That Before"; "Don’t Rock The Boat"; " Put It In Writing", And Other Killer Phrases That Stop Us In Our Tracks.

Peter Schwartz, chairman of the Global Business Network, describes the art of ‘strategic conversation’ -– "bringing together people from a variety of perspectives to converse about the culture, much as players come together in a jazz orchestra to jam new themes. This is why Global Business Network includes members drawn from fields as diverse as physics, computer design, neurobiology, poetry, and rock music."

How do we create a culture where we can have these ‘better conversations?" First, we should subscribe to some basic groundrules that set a tone of cooperation and participation. The first rule should be No Judgments. We’ve all worked in cultures where ideas are judged before they are completely explained. Judgmental comments, body language, or, worse yet, complete disinterest, block our creativity. As leaders, we need to create a work environment where all ideas are heard and considered; where everyone is treated with respect and courtesy; and where participation is encouraged. Workers need to know that they are unconditionally supported in their efforts to meet challenges. Otherwise, expect to get what we’ve always gotten. In our current world of reduced budgets and smaller staffs, we can’t afford to overlook even one good idea.

We have to have time to think. We are far too busy today doing things that really don’t matter to the customer. We should be spending time thinking creatively, reading, analyzing problems.

We have been taught since kindergarten that there’s only one right answer – it’s in the back of the book. If we colored outside the lines, we were encouraged to ‘do a better job’ by coloring inside the lines. Times have changed. Today, the same solution won’t work for every problem. We need to explore options to find the best solution for each individual case. And to do that, we need to prod, provoke, and inspire new levels of innovation and creativity. We need to ignite breakthroughs.

In a creative culture, leaders recognize and explore the tension between the established and the new. The tension between the security of the familiar and the anxiety of the new shows itself in many ways. Leaders have to be ready to make the transition exciting and rewarding, balancing the "soft issues", i.e. people’s mindset and attitudes, with the "hard issues", the systems, processes and structures.

It’s not just about becoming a motivating leader. It’s about removing the demotivators from our workplace cultures. How challenged, involved, and committed are your employees? How free are they to decide how to do their jobs? Is it a truly empowering environment? Do people feel safe speaking their minds and offering different points of view?

The U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, Eastern Region, in Milwaukee, changed its culture to one of shared leadership, empowerment, teamwork, and quality. The program was led by Karl Mettke, and is called Project Spirit. He credits the program with saving more than $3 million annually. In the four years since the program began, more than 12,000 ideas have come from employees, which helped streamline work, increase the region’s effectiveness and efficiency, cut red tape, improve customer service, and save taxpayers’ money. He says "people who thrive on ambiguity, freedom, and a loose operating style, along with making things happen, are going to have an exciting time."

Do your employees have time to think things through before acting, or are they always putting out fires? Do people feel safe speaking their minds and offering different points of view? Is it OK to have fun?

It takes a tremendous amount of courage to escape the pull of a culture. The biggest obstacles to a creative culture are power and ego. When you think about the Internet culture, it is very much like the ideal creativity culture: non-hierarchical, profoundly democratic and egalitarian. Cyberspace is a creativity club for ideas, open all day and all night, with the universe for walls.

Is it OK to fail in your workplace? To what degree do people engage in lively debates about issues? Are there resources to give new ideas a try?

At the Levi Strauss company, employees are actually required to share their mistakes. Everyone who calls a meeting is required to start off the meeting by telling a mistake story. They learn from each other’s mistakes, and have made it part of their culture. There are 70,000 Strauss employees, and they all put their mistakes for everybody to read on the computer, every day.

The greatest level of learning comes from experimentation – trying new things. Traditional organizations punish mistakes. A creative culture rewards not only successes, but also those ‘nice tries.’ We have to move from a prohibitive culture to an inquisitive culture. We need to get away from the formal meetings, and encourage more informal hallway gatherings. As leaders, we need to use our reward and recognition tools to reinforce behaviors that question tradition. In experimentation, the learning that comes, stays.

Every person has their own biorhythm – the times of the day when they have the most and the least energy. Are you able to recognize the best time of the day for yourself and for your employees?

At the U. S. Department of Energy, the Graphics Division held a trade show at the Department’s Forrestal Headquarters Building in Washington, to demonstrate their capabilities to the thousands of Energy employees located in that building. In addition to showing that they are as capable as any Beltway contractor, they benefited from the cross-pollination of ideas that Energy employees from other parts of the organization brought to their attention. How often do we share information with other parts of our organizations, parts that share our mission, but often do not know what we are doing? Cross-pollination brings new ideas, new perspectives.

Art Fry, a chemical engineer at 3M, and a choir singer, became frustrated with his bookmarks in his hymnal and invented what eventually became the Post-It note. In my office, we’ve gotten along just fine using the yellow Post-It notes in a couple of sizes. Incredibly, they are now available in 27 sizes, 18 colors, 56 shapes, and even come in fragrances that smell like pizza, pickles, and chocolate. Would you as a federal leader have encouraged your employees to come up with Post-It notes in all these shapes and sizes, once they had reached great success with the yellow ones? 3M is obviously tied very closely to their customers. Do you, or your workers, have the time to explore new products and designs?

Stop Playing Whack-A-Mole

Instead, they applied some creative thinking, and decided that instead of closing one sweatshop at a time, they would take an action that would, in effect, close them all down. They decided to pursue a new high-profile two-part top-down approach that hinges on cooperation and publicity. First, division investigators began working with the manufacturers and retailers who buy from sewing contractors and subcontractors, to make them aware of the conditions under which some of their clothes were being sewn, even preventing shipments under the federal ‘hot goods’ law, to force accountability.

Second, the Department of Labor decided to publish lists of manufacturers and retailers who insist on legal and ethical practices among their contractors and subcontractors – and those that do not.

The tactic was effective. The vast majority of Americans don’t mind paying a little more for clothes sewn under proper working conditions. Since the publicity, many retailers and manufacturers have agreed to monitor conditions in garment factories. The perfect partnership! Also, Wage & Hour collected more than $8.4 million in back wages for more than 29,000 garment workers over three years.

As leaders, it is our responsibility to ask key questions: How might management practices limit the potential of the people in our organizations? In what ways do we use all of the creative potential of our people? In what ways can we foster the creativity of our people?

"I’ll Be In The Creativity Playpen If You Need Me."

Hallmark Greeting Cards thinks nothing of sending their people to museums, galleries, and concerts all across the country to get their creative juices flowing. Taxpayers wouldn’t take kindly to civil servants spending federal funds to do that. It’s not very likely that our agencies will allow us to do that. Instead, we have to get the creative juices flowing by designing workplaces that foster creativity.

We need to rethink our basic concept of space. Some companies use the ‘playpen’ style of a creativity pit, which has quiet, private space to retreat to, but a central place for everyone to learn about each other’s work, and to contribute ideas and solutions to that work.

To quote a DuPont team leader, "To me, a company is nothing more than the sum total of the permissible conversations. We have to create a place where conversations can take place, people can eavesdrop, teams can form."

In addition to open spaces where people can swap and build on each other’s ideas, there should be hiding spaces, where people can go off and make fools of themselves in a safe place. Remember that we’re all creative, but we express it in different ways. Before you call the General Services Administration to ask them to outfit your creativity pit with beanbag chairs, think about the various creativity styles demonstrated by the people in your organization. Think about shared spaces and private spaces. Think about spaces that are casual, stimulating, free from distractions, not too open, and not too closed. In other words, be flexible. Allow for fun, even toys, in the office. And what about music? Rock? Symphony? Whatever it takes! Each organization has to find the right solution for its own personality.

There could very well be a creative, winning person in your organization, but without the right place or space, you may never know it.

Tools, Tools, Tools.

The Presenter

Prior to his consulting work, he held a variety of leadership positions throughout the government. He served as Director of Public Affairs at the Federal Housing Finance Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Urban Mass Transportation Administration. He was Associate Administrator for Public Affairs at the General Services Administration. He holds a master's degree in Public Relations from The American University. He has participated in programs for executives at the Federal Executive Institute and the Creative Problem Solving Institute, and is certified as a Creative Process Facilitator. A native Washingtonian, he lives in Alexandria, Virginia.