Stephen Billing’s Blog

In the previous post I pointed out the significance, for generating new ideas, of conversations with diverse people – people with different backgrounds, ways of looking at things, and professional affiliations, for example.

Any leader in an organisation, or entrepreneur has to engage in interactions with others in order to get a business going or keep it running. The entrepreneur or leader may have clear goals in mind, or may be in the process of shaping up his or her intentions, exploring different options and potential paths. Either way, it is through interactions with others that these plans take shape and are brought to fruition. The others that the entrepreneur is interacting with have their own intentions, goals and plans. The entrepreneur has to respond to these different goals and intentions, as they emerge in the course of these interactions with others.

Some of these interactions will take place during meetings that might be quite formal and have agendas that are known in advance, written down and followed quite closely during the meeting. Other important interactions will take place much more informally – sometimes in response to an unexpected opportunity, a chance meeting or as a result of a casual conversation over coffee. It is important for leaders and entrepreneurs to be looking for such opportunities and paying attention to what is going on.

A colleague (Diana Jones) told me the other day that there is quite a lot of interest in so-called agendaless meetings. Rightly so, in my opinion, because most interaction does take place in agendaless meetings, in more informal settings, and through casual conversation during which no formal agenda is ever put together.

But it would be for many people working in organisations, quite risky to get together a group of senior people to meet without having a formal agenda. At the same time, many would find this idea appealing, recognising the opportunity for generating ideas, relatively free flow of information and learning what people really think.

In such meetings, the traditional chairing skills and formal meeting procedure would not be very useful. What is important in such meetings is facilitation, such as making sure everyone has the opportunity to speak, handling conflict productively when it arises, listening to others, expressing your point of view, noticing the patterning of the conversation especially when something new happens, finding ways to take advantage of unexpected opportunities that arise.

Such informal "agendaless" meetings are given far less prominence in the leadership literature compared to the weight placed on presenting and chairing at meetings. This is somewhat strange given that, although leaders and entrepreneurs will have to chair formal meetings with agendas and follow meeting procedure, the bulk of their interactions take place outside such formal settings. And the formality of such settings can reduce the range of acceptable contributions that people make to the meeting.

If you are trying to generate new ideas, innovation or creativity, you actually want to stimulate a range of diverse input, rather than reducing the kinds of contributions that people make through formalising them.

Therefore, as a leader or entrepreneur, do pay attention to the casual conversations you are part of, and recognise how important they are to your results as a leader or entrepreneur. And consider convening some group interactions as "agendaless" meetings to see how you go. Of course, the term "agendaless" refers only to the lack of a formal agenda. There is no such thing as a truly "agendaless" meeting because all the participants will have their own intentions, interests and goals (or agendas) that they want to pursue. This comes with the territory of being a human working in an organisation.

Having a formal agenda doesn’t do away with the goals, interests and intentions of the participants. Such goals, interests and intentions of the participants are unlikely to make it onto the formal agenda of a meeting anyway.

To find more posts on this blog about formal and informal meetings, click here.

Entrepreneurship is often considered to involve the establishment of something new. So it is worth thinking about how new ideas come about in organisations.

It has long been thought that it takes a certain kind of person to come up with new ideas. The tortured artist mining the depths of an extraordinary imagination or artistic vision is one instance of this. Another is the model found in advertising agencies where the "creatives" are responsible for coming up with ideas according to the briefs developed and sold by the "suits".

So creative ideas have commonly been considered to be the domain of certain individuals who have a predisposition to creativity. For example, it is said that Einstein dreamt that he was riding a wave of light and this was a key part of his theory of relatively. Or Archimedes sitting in his bath shouting "eureka" when he realised his body mass was displacing the water. Or Newton coming up with the theory of gravity after being hit on the head while sitting under an apple tree.

While some individuals undoubtedly have greater facility for creativity than others, this does not reveal much about how it comes about that these new ideas are generated, apart from some mysterious faculty possessed by these creative people and not by others.

In studies of complexity, computer agents are programmed to interact with each other, over and over again. The computer can model countless iterations of populations of agents interacting with each other, which in the real world would take years or centuries to study. For example, patterns resembling the flocking of birds or the swarming of bees are able to be replicated, as are models of the rise and fall of populations of different species, as some species (i.e. types of agents) become populous and dominant for periods of time, often long periods of time, before they wane and die away. These patterns very much resemble the rise and fall of civilisations like the Greeks, Romans and even the British empire.

One of the most useful and interesting applications of this computer modeling of the complexity emerging from myriad interactions like this, is that the patterns that arise in the populations only change if the agents are different from each other. If the agents are the same, then the patterns repeat themselves. It is only if the agents are different from each other that new patterns emerge.

This is to suggest that it is from the interaction of diverse agents that novelty arises. Innovation or newness in these patterns, then, could be said to be a property of the interaction of diverse agents itself.
 

This provides an explanation for the innovative potential of multi-disciplinary teams, as long as the differences can be handled in ways that don’t blow the team apart through conflict.

This suggests that if you are an entrepreneur wanting to generate a new idea or establish or grow a business, you would do well to seek out interactions with others who are different from you in their backgrounds, professional history, experience, professional discipline, and approach. Seek mentors, directors and investors who think differently from you and have different world views. Seek employees who likewise have different backgrounds from you.

As an entrepreneur, it is from these multiple interactions and discussions you have with diverse others that you will generate new understanding and ideas that you can use to grow your business.

I think the main thing that distinguishes entrepreneurship from management or other forms of organisation is that with entrepreneurship a person takes the risk of bringing into being about an idea in a business form.

Much thinking about entrepreneurship focuses on the originality of the idea, and there are certainly plenty of examples of inventors or people with original ideas who create successful businesses.

For example, I am quite excited about the guy who has invented a jet pack that allows personal flight and am looking forward to the Jetson-age type of travel this might allow – no more traffic jams! Please hurry up and get this idea commercially perfected so that I can easily fly into Wellington city for my day’s work. Although I am also imagining mid air crashes and a whole set of new airborne traffic regulations.

However, I don’t think entrepreneurial flair is actually so much about the originality of the idea as it is about a combination of the idea and the execution. Richard Branson is an example of someone who would be seen as an entrepreneur, but not necessarily an inventor of new ideas.

I think about my own business, for example. I am a management consultant, and I am certainly not the first management consultant to exist in the world. In fact, I owe a great debt to other management consultants who have gone before me and have created a tradition in which I walk that has generated a market for the services I offer. Nevertheless I definitely offer these services in my own unique way.

So, what is it that is entrepreneurial about all this? One aspect is not working for an employer – being your own boss, and, so to speak, probably gaining the hardest boss of all. (more…)