The Performance Improvement Blog

Culture and Creativity

Workplace culture is the "what", "why", and "how" of organization. It is what work is being done and what resources the organization has to do that work, why that work is being done and how those reasons are communicated to employees, and how people work together and make decisions. Meghan Biro, in a blog post for Forbes titled "Your Employees Are Engaged...REALLY?", makes a distinction between the "what" and "why" of workplace culture. While I agree that employee engagement is heightened when employees know why things are done the way they are done (for example, work environment, benefits, promotions), managers must also pay attention to how things are done. Dov Seidman explains this concept in his book, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything. He says, for example, in a self-governance culture: 

People at all levels of the company are trusted to act on their own initiative and to collaboratively innovate; a shared purpose and common values guide employee and company behavior.

Examples of "how" are offered in Marla Gottschalk's blog post How to Develop a More Creative Workplace. She gives some excellent suggestions for how managers can promote creativity. For example, she recommends giving employees a notebook for recording their thoughts and ideas about customers, products, and processes. By doing the things she suggests and making the time and space for these activities, management is communicating the message that they value everyone and need everyone's input in order to be a successful organization. This is powerful. In addition to collecting creative ideas for new products, improving customer service, and solving problems, it is likely that employees will feel more valued and be more motivated to work hard and do their best in that culture. Soon the expectation is set and nurtured that this is a company in which everyone works hard and does their best. 

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is a software development company that has aligned its culture with its business goals. They have found that to produce creative, useful solutions for their customers, they need to support a particular kind of work environment. They describe that culture in this way:

The Menlo Way^TM is defined by JOY through the following practices:

• pairing; no one works alone
• High-Tech Anthropology^R
• open and collaborative workspace
• high speed voice technology^TM
• daily stand up
• 40 hour work weeks
• pets and babies at work
• making mistakes faster
• doing the simplest thing that could possibly work
• origami project management
• work authorization boards; storycards, yarn, and stickers
• estimation without fear
• integrated quality advocacy
• test-driven development

Clearly, how people work together and support each other is considered to be essential to the success of Menlo. They value collaboration and creativity and nurture a culture that communicates these values. 

In an interview that Dave Summers did with fomer Corning Glass exec Lina Echeverría, she is quoted as saying:

I was reading a website that was talking about the different rules for innovation. Many people have said "You should do this, you should do that, you should expect, you should choose from, you should know how to select", but if you do not have the culture that believes that innovation is everybody's role...not only that..that innovation is accessible to everybody. If you do not have that culture that says "I am also creative and I'm empowered to use that creativity as part of the overall goals of the organization, then you don't have much.

Processes can be wonderful, but they are not the real driver. The real driver is that culture that says "Let's make it happen!"

This is why I think culture is so important to an engaged, creative workforce. How you do your work says volumes about what leaders value. It's not "pets and babies at work" or jelly beans on every desk or shuffleboard in the employee lounge. What matters is the message that the culture communicates to employees. When done right, employees feel like management cares what they think and that what they do matters to the success of the company.

Opening the Black-Box to Evaluation

Black-box evaluation is measuring the effects of a program or service without examining the nature of that program or service. It is evaluating what people think and do after the intervention (e.g., training, classroom education, e-learning, coaching, policy change) and then attributing that behavior change or lack of change to what happened in the “black box”. Sometimes a comparison is made post-intervention to what people knew and did before the intervention.  However, nobody opens the black box to see what’s inside. Because of this, we don’t know what aspects of the program had the effect and why they had that effect. So, while we can be accountable for results, black-box evaluation doesn’t help us understand how to replicate those results in the future, we don’t know what should be continued and what should be eliminated, and we don’t know what should be changed about the program to get even better results.

My last two blog posts are about my recent work with Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, a residential community for orphaned youth in Rwanda. That work provides a good example of the problem with a black-box approach to evaluation. If we only examine the output (e.g., number of graduates, national exam scores) and outcomes (e.g., enhanced self-confidence, enrolling in college or technical school, starting a business), staff would not have the information they need to replicate ASYV, to improve programs, and to possibly figure out how to get the same results at lower cost.  

                   

                              

What ASYV needs is a way to link the contents and process of their programs and activities with outcomes. In addition, they need to know how circumstances of each child before coming to the Village interact with Village activities to affect results. And they need to look for the causes of those pesky unintended consequences that might become a predictable aspect of learning and change.

One of the methods we propose for this evaluation is in-depth interviews of a small sample of students at their time of graduation, then 18 months later, and then six years after that. Much like Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Evaluation Method, the Village staff will use these interviews to tell the stories of the youth. The interviewers will listen for links between what the students experienced at ASYV and how they’ve developed as self-confident, independent adults. They will listen for how the change has occurred from the time the youth came to the Village to how they are today. They will look into the “black box”, which is the Village experience of informal and formal education programs as well as the support of house mothers, counselors, social workers, and other staff, and examine how those experiences contribute to intended and unintended results. 

Continuous Improvement in Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village

In my last blog post I mentioned my evaluation work with Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda. One of the tools we used to help the Village staff think about indicators of success was a model of the residents’ total Village experience. See below.

We asked the staff, “What indicates that you have been successful at each point in this model?” At "baseline", they said that it’s knowing students’ abilities and expectations when they first arrive at the Village. It’s understanding the circumstances they came from and how the Village is different? It’s knowing their hopes and dreams...if at that point they are able to hope and dream.

During the “process” stage, indicators of success include the level of participation of residents in their school and non-school programs. Measures of learning, examples of leadership, examples of volunteering to help others in the Village and outside, and examples of showing initiative were all considered evidence that youth are learning and developing into knowledgeable, self-sufficient, and productive adults.

Some of the indicators of “output” success are the number of students who stay in the Village for four years, the number who graduate from the High School, and the number who pass Rwanda’s national exams. A low incidence of health clinic visits and emotional problems are also indicators of success at this point.

“Outcomes” that staff think are indicators of success include attending the university or a technical institute, starting a business, getting a job, raising a family in a responsible way, and maintaining contact with other graduates from their cohort. Also, taking a leadership position in the community and “giving back” to their communities in other ways are indicators of success.

“Impact” success is apparent in graduates who complete a college education, who are running a successful business, who have an adequate income that is supporting a family, and who are giving back to their communities through teaching, service, and economic development projects.  

What the ASYV staff and I explored together is that, given their theory of change, success is measured at a number of points in the learner’s experience. If they waited, as so often happens in organizations, until after a program (i.e., learning intervention) has ended for learners, it’s too late for continuous improvement. 

When Did You Become A Leader?

I recently returned from a nine-day trip to Rwanda where I teamed with two colleagues to train the leadership team of Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, a residential community for orphaned youth, in how to use evaluation to continuously improve their educational and personal development programs.

One of the first things we did with the staff was to ask them to share a story about when they discovered that they were leaders. This exercise, which had their enthusiastic participation, set the stage for our week of training and learning. We heard many inspirational stories. We heard stories about:

• Feeling compelled to take action to right an injustice
• Making a difference in other people’s lives and their communities
• Being entrusted with leadership responsibilities by people who are highly respected
• Taking a risk to fill a major leadership role and then succeeding
• Having leadership thrust upon them and rising to the occasion
• Being chosen by peers to be their leader

Interesting to me was that nobody mentioned a college course on leadership, a leadership training program, or leadership coaching. Their newly acquired awareness of their own leadership capabilities came from meeting challenges they faced in everyday life.

When did you first discover that you were a leader? Where were you? What were you doing? What happened that told you that you could lead others and be effective at it?