Inviting Innovation Through Creative Destruction

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Bob: Hi, thanks for listening to the Practicing Connection Podcast. I’m Bob. My co-host Jessica is here as well. Today we’ll be talking about one of the principles of Liberating Structures, invite creative destruction to encourage innovation. Jessica will be sharing a practice with us based on that idea, that principle. Hey, Jessica, how are you doing?

Jessica: I’m doing pretty great today. It’s been a while since I’ve had a day almost completely free from meetings. Today is that day, and I’ve been able to catch up on reading and being a content consumer versus just someone who– well, not just someone who creates content, but that’s a good thing, too. I enjoy that very much. What’s really been the culprit lately is being a meeting participant. They’re all important meetings, and I enjoy many of them, but today has been just wonderful. I’m doing great. Thanks for asking.

Actually, one of those things I read was I recently discovered Cassandra Worthy’s Change Enthusiast Mindset. I wanted to share a passage from her website that inspired me from a piece called Anthem of a Change Enthusiast, and I’ve chosen a section from the middle of the piece that was particularly energizing for me. I’ve had change champion in my LinkedIn description for a long time, and I feel like this really describes what I mean by that. It starts with, “But we are change enthusiasts. We embrace the frustration, aggravation, isolation, and stress as signals. Signals that we are sitting in a moment of opportunity.

In this embrace, we are able to step back and view them objectively. In doing so, we first allow these feelings to exist, then inspire. To inspire us to the choice that will bring about a better feeling, to inspire us to the choice that will begin to slowly shift our reality from overwhelmed to anxious, from anxious to confused, from confused to clear, from clear to creative, from creative to excited, from excited to bliss. We are change enthusiasts. We use the feels of change to make conscious choice toward better feeling. We don’t ignore the feels, pretending they don’t exist in a blinding haze of optimism. We recognize the feels of change as guideposts leading us through the opportunity to choose our best, for we are change enthusiasts.”

Bob: That is really great. I love that. Thank you for sharing it.

Jessica: You’re welcome. I really have been enjoying reading all of Cassandra Worthy’s stuff.

Bob: I have an author to share as well that I’ve been inspired by for really going on maybe a year or more now. Daniel Halter has a substack called Sounding Slightly Off. Daniel is great. He’s a facilitator and a very talented writer. He works at AF CyberWorx, the US Air Force’s innovation hub. Daniel’s essays just always make me think he does a lot of work around complexity and systems thinking, things that, Jessica, you and I are interested in as well.

His posts, his essays usually include a book or a resource that I haven’t come across before, and I’ve shared some of those on this podcast before, like the book Unflattening and yes, so it’s just inspiring to read him. I just want to give him a shout-out. If you are interested, check out Daniel Halter’s Sounding Slightly Off.

Jessica: We’d love to hear what’s inspiring you, so please share what’s inspiring you by clicking the “send us a text message” at the top of the description of this episode. When you click the link, your text messaging app will open and you’ll see a seven-digit number and the words “Do not remove”. Type your message after that and click “Send”. Don’t remove that number or we won’t receive your message. To protect your privacy, we won’t see your phone number, and we can’t text you back, but we’ll share your feedback on a future episode. If you’re listening on a computer, you can email us at [email protected]. Let us know what’s inspiring you right now.

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Bob: I’m anxious to learn more about inviting creative destruction to encourage innovation. Jessica, can you tell us a little bit more about the practice you’ll be sharing and why you chose it?

Jessica: Absolutely. I chose the TRIZ activity. That’s T-R-I-Z from Liberating Structures, and that principle of inviting creative destruction to encourage innovation is also from Liberating Structures. This version of the practice was developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless. It promotes the idea of creative destruction by revealing where you might be getting in your own way as a collaborative team, which then makes way for new ways of working and being together. That’s the innovation part of it.

It encourages people to envision a better future together in a really fun way. TRIZ actually stands for– and I haven’t figured out exactly how it stands for this, but it stands for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, which does not spell T-R-I-Z, but that’s okay. A Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, and its origin is from Russian engineering. Perhaps that’s where the acronym comes into play. It’s a systematic methodology for addressing complex problems and encouraging innovation. It’s been widely adopted across many different industries like aerospace, electronics, and automotive.

The activity that I’m going to be sharing today only represents a small piece of the overall TRIZ structure. There are TRIZ certifications and even a TRIZ fest. There’s a lot more to TRIZ than this one activity, but this one activity can be an effective tool for organizational and community change and problem-solving. I’ve actually used variations of this activity with a community that was considering raising their tax levy and a small nonprofit that was undergoing a huge turnover in their board.

I’ve seen this tool be really, really effective. Besides its effectiveness, I also chose this activity for its playfulness. I’ve seen groups have fun with it. You can also do it on your own and I guess just chuckle to yourself when it gets a little silly.

Bob: This sounds really exciting. Can you walk us through the practice? I’m anxious to hear more about it.

Jessica: Yes. I want to make a note that on this podcast, we typically try to stay on the positive side, not toxically so, but we try to stay on the strengths-based side. I would say that this strays from that a little bit, but it does it in a really fun way. It’s meant to give you insight to how you might be blocking your strengths from shining through. I do think it’s connected to a strengths-based approach. You’re going to start first with a goal that you or your collaborators have defined. I want you to think about that goal. I want you to think about the worst possible outcomes and list any action that you can think of. This is a brainstorming part.

List any action you can think of that would ensure the worst possible outcome for your goal. It could help you to start by listing out a few of the worst possible outcomes. Then from there, listing the different actions that would ensure those outcomes. This is the part that it can actually be really fun, even though it sounds like the big bummer part. I would say list everything, even the things that seem just a bit ridiculous. That’s the part where people start to have a little bit of fun because they can’t imagine that anyone’s actually doing that action that would bring about that worst possible outcome.

I want you, though, to remember to keep this about process, policies, and actions, not about people. Okay. The next step is to identify which of these actions. Take a look at that action. All of those actions that would bring about the worst possible outcome, take a look at those and start to identify the ones that you are actually currently doing. Remember, I said that some of these might get a little bit ridiculous. It doesn’t mean that you’re doing that exact ridiculous thing, but you might look at that and say, “Oh, we’re doing a variation of that, or we’re doing a small snippet of that.”

I want you to imagine all the ways, shapes, and forms that you’re doing the things that fit with your worst possible outcomes list. It might end up being a variation. For example, if you listed not communicating with senior leadership at all as an action that would get you the worst possible outcome, you might list as an action that you’re currently doing, well, we don’t communicate with senior leadership until the last minute, which is a variation of not communicating with them at al.

Then the last one is find ways to stop these counterproductive behaviors. You’re going to review the list of things that you do that are counterproductive, and you’re going to decide on some steps to take or different processes to employ to stop these behaviors and make space for innovation. Because when you can stop those behaviors, you can then imagine what else is possible and what else could we be doing that’s different that will help us move forward differently than we are right now. We’ll provide a link to the full instructions of this activity in our show notes, but that’s the practice for today.

Bob: I like it. It reminds me a little bit of the future backwards process.

Jessica: I don’t know that.

Bob: Oh, so future backwards is a process that developed with no endorsement from me, by the way, the way that police interview witnesses and suspects because they find that if you start at the end of the story instead of– and make people go backwards, you get a more accurate account than if you have them go forwards because we’re used to telling stories. The idea is in strategic planning to think of the future state first and then work your way back and say what actions would have led to this future state. It’s similar.

Usually, I think we’re trying to do it with getting the positive outcome, but I love the idea of starting with the worst possible outcome and then just changing up the actions. Let’s not do that then.

Jessica: Yes, right. How do we avoid this worst possible outcome? Oh, don’t do these things that we’re doing.

Bob: Yes. Awesome. Thanks so much for guiding us through that, Jessica.

Jessica: Oh, you’re welcome. I love it.

Bob: That’s it for this episode. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, click the share button in your podcast app to share it with a friend. We’ll be back next week with one of our favorite things to do. It’s our annual reflections episode. Hope you’ll tune in for that. Until then, keep practicing.

Kalin Goble: The Practicing Connection podcast is a production of OneOp and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award number 2023-48770-41333.

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