How Constructive Agility Promotes Creativity

In a brilliant 2018 PhD thesis, Key Elements that Enable Leaders to Foster Creativity in Virtual Work, Finnish doctoral student Iris Humala concluded that leaders can promote creativity through,

“a coaching and distributed leadership culture to help leaders inspire creativity in a virtual workforce. This culture means coaching people to flourish, supporting their professional growth, adopting distributed leadership by example, and encouraging collective creation.”

Her paper was about leadership, but it inevitably addressed culture: a culture of “coaching people to flourish”.

Culture and leadership style are inseparable, because leadership styles such as transformational leadership cannot survive in a culture that is internally competitive or one that prefers the status quo. Those are not growth cultures: they are characterized by zero-sum thinking and minimizing risk no matter the opportunity.

Positive Leadership Styles

Agile 2 and Constructive Agility advocate for strong leadership, but leadership that is empowering, inquisitive, participative, adaptive, and supportive. We also make the point that few people can be all those things, and so there often need to be many leaders: as Peter Drucker said, you need “an outside person, and inside person, and a person of action”.

The way that those leaders become leaders is a separate issue. It is the job of whoever sets up an organization or a team to ensure that the organization or team has the needed leaders in place. How that happens is up to them, but in Constructive Agility we provide advice on how to do this.

Focus on Creating a Constructive Culture

As we explained, good leaders will not emerge or survive in an organization unless the culture favors those leadership styles—those behaviors and attitudes. It is therefore essential to establish a culture that supports not only the desired leadership styles, but that also supports the growth and creativity of all members of the organization. We provide some advice on how to do that.

Low Overhead for Changes

One of the biggest impediments to creativity is the inability to try things. If one can easily try out ideas to see how well they work, one is freer to try more ideas. That is inherently a more creative process.

That is why Agile 2 and Constructive Agility advocate for supporting thoughtful experimentation. This requires that the overhead of an “experiment”—an attemp to try an approach—be low. In the context of engineering, changes typically require change requests, which might go through a lengthy approval and qualification workflow. But imagine if the engineers working on the affected parts of the system could just get together, physically or virtually, and collaborate about the change, and then decide to just try it on a test stand? And if it works—if the tests pass—then that becomes the new design.

That’s what SpaceX does. They don’t shortcut safety testing or quality testing, but they eagerly try out alternative designs early on, and when changes are needed, the affected individuals reach out, talk it through, and decide. They call that a “hardware rich” approach because they end up going through lots of early versions of the system. It is highly creative: changes to the design are frequent, even far-reaching changes.

Everything Is an Experiment

Another important element of the above approach is that the bar for when an idea is mature enough to try is very low. At SpaceX, if they are 51% certain that an idea will work, they feel that the idea is ready to try. There is no pressure to be certain about something before trying it. They explicitly recognize that judgment might be based only on intuition and experience, rather than detailed calculations. They do detailed calculations, but no model has the fidelity of a real world test, and so they don’t try to perfect their models before trying things on the test stand.

Everyone Understands the Whole Flow

Another way that Constructive Agility promotes creativity is that we ensure that everyone who participates in a value stream understands the entire flow: that is, they have a working understanding of every part of the value stream.

That’s important because without that, it is impossible to have holistic discussions about issues. If people only understand their part of the flow, then they will be narrowly focused on that, and will be advocates for their step, instead of advocates for the entire product. Creativity is often about synthesizing many disparate factors: for example, ideas for how to both change features and change how something is built, resulting in a radically new capability.

That happened with the iPhone: Steve Jobs was dissatisfied with how voicemail worked. The protocols provided by telco providers did not permit the iPhone to have a visual voicemail interface. So he spoke to the telco executives and explained that he wanted the protocols changed,, and why. The result was both a technical innovation and a design innovation that complemented each other. It was only possible because they were able to have a conversation that involved both the design issues and the technical issues at the same time.

Great creative moments often arise from understanding multiple aspects of a product—not just the aspects that you work on.

Strategies are Explicit

We often hear that executives need to set a direction, and then empower people to figure out innovative ways to go in that direction. But what does “direction” mean?

Often it is not just a goal, but something about how to achieve the goal. For example, what good is it to succeed in a market if your approach alienates customers long term? Very often the way that you do something is as important as what you do. We often talk about these “ways” as “guardrails”, but that metaphor is a little too simplistic, because a guardrail is very concrete, but the “ways” that are needed are often very subtle and requite judgment to apply them.

Strategies are about how we are going to achieve our goals. The Constructive Agility process guides you through beginning and progressively refining a set of strategies. Those strategies provide the “guardrails”. They are the “how” that informs us on whether we are all heading in the same direction, but also the same way. That is not meant to constrain our creativity: it is meant to align us. Often a constraint unleashes creativity.

Empowering Both Thinkers and Doers

The Agile community is well known for its dogma, so much so that a 2012 “retrospective” by the British Computer Society on the state of Agile concluded that “Scrumdamentalism” was a major problem. By that, they were referring to the extreme insistence by adherents of the Scrum process on the necessity to follow that process. The same dogmatic insistence was also present among adherents of eXtreme Programming (XP), another process that claims to be agile.

But these processes are a set of practices that work well for some people and some teams but not for others. The reality is that people are cognitively diverse, and while some people work best in a group, others work best individually with occasional collaboration. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, falls into the latter category: are we ready to say that people like him are not welcome?

Agile 2 is very insistent on one thing: don’t insist that everyone work the same way. Teams need to decide on certain things, but individuals need to have agency about how they work. It is important to value both individual agency and team collaboration. We need to allow people to focus just as we need to allow them to collaborate. And allow them to decide which way they want to spend most of their time. Don’t build a bias into their environment that benefits some people at the expense of others. That way, everyone’s creativity will be unleashed—not just some people’s.

Real Product Design

The Constructive Agility process will make sure that you set up the right design processes for your initiative or product. The Agile movement disenfranchised product design. People have tried to add it back by throwing UX people into teams, but that is a band aid.

What is usually needed is a well-conceived product design or capability design effort or team that works collaboratively and continuously with the technical development teams. That collaborative approach unleashes synergistic creativity between product design and technical design; and it turns out that if developers are involved in conceiving product features, they begin to understand the product’s actual usage, and they often become a wellspring of creative ideas for how to make the best use of the technology.

Every situation is different, and that is why Constructive Agility does not prescribe how that should be arranged, but the Constructive Agility guides you through defining the approach that is best for you.

Actionable Data

The Agile movement also disenfranchised data architecture. The result that we see today is that Agile teams create services that send data to data lakes, and the data is unusable by machine learning teams. The practices that were used by data architects at the start of the Agile movement were too slow to keep up with Agile teams, but instead of figuring out how to do data architecture in an agile manner, it got chopped out.

Instead, we need Agile data architects who are embedded in teams, working in an agile manner, and maintaining enterprise domain models on the fly. That way the machine learning teams will be able to use the data in the data lake, unleashing the creative power of unexpected connections within your data. Constructive Agility will guide you through setting that up.