How cultural transformation begins with curiosity.
By Fran Chuan, Founder and CEO Dicere Global.
“Engineer fascinated by the potential latent in human attitudes. Passionate about Innovation”.
It’s time for Human Resources managers (which, let’s be honest is a terrible name for it!) to transform from being ‘people managers to ‘curiosity facilitators’. Their goal should be to encourage the creativity that we all have within us.
However, to spot talent in their organizations and help individuals to express their full potential, we need to be able to measure and diagnose. Instead of using subjective intuition, we need real data and a complete picture of the strength and weakness of a company culture before beginning that all-important process of transformation.
What is ‘innovation’?
Curiosity, imagination and creativity are the starting points of innovation. Stimulating your team’s curiosity means asking them to begin by looking for problems, not answers. What difficulties are we facing? What challenges are around the corner? What emerging trends have we missed? Curiosity is individual. But the innovative response to a problem comes from a team. We resolve problems together.
Innovation is the consequence of transformation. As an engineer I‘m constantly asked by companies to help them in their digital transformation. My response? “Forget about digital transformation. The important thing is ‘cultural transformation.” The first problem I face when I speak to a company is that there is no specific definition of what ‘transformation’, or even, what ‘digital’ means. Digitalization is just a means to an end. It isn’t a goal in itself. So, let’s begin by asking ourselves the following questions: do we really want to change? What do we want to change? What’s is the purpose of the change? And, how we will measure our transformation?
Curiosity, imagination and creativity are stimulated by questions.
What stops companies from taking this vital step? The answer can be summarized in one word: fear. Fear of not being able to measure outcomes. Fear of the unknown. Managers are trained to take their decisions based on the bottom line in an excel. But curiosity, imagination and creativity don’t fit on an excel. Transformation means thinking about the future. But we don’t have data about the future. We need to act first to generate new data. Then analyze it and act again. That’s a paradigm shift: the opposite of how we are used to doing things.
The King is dead. Long live the Team.
Successful organizations are moving from a top-down, ‘Medieval’ organizational model, to a ‘Renaissance’ model with a leader in the middle who constantly asks questions to a creative circle facilitating reflection, not just giving answers. That’s a good definition of ‘collective intelligence’. A model that takes us all the way from Lorenzo de Medici to Elon Musk.
We need tools that help us to share the ideas and trends that we detect; tools that help us to share knowledge. Tools that help us to really identify the talent of individuals—not what is found in their CV, but what actually drives their curiosity. And that is where a platform like TeamEQ can be very helpful: exposing individual and collective talent to identify the strengths and culture of a workplace and then help us to start generating a new one.
How can we emerge stronger from COVID19?
Every crisis generates change and opportunity. Every organization needs to strengthen. The current crisis will accelerate the demise of companies who are already in decline. This is the moment to concentrate on the essence of what makes you who you are. Ask yourself a question: If you were going to create your company today from scratch, what would you maintain? And what would you leave behind?
Having imaginative people in your organization will be key. Every change generates opportunity, you just have to know where to look for it. Forget the data you already have as it is now useless. Observe the current situation and start generating new data. What ideas are out there that we can identify?
What are you waiting for?
Don’t wait. What would you do if the future was the same as the present? Make the changes you are planning now. Fear of uncertainty can only be cured through the achievement of certainty. And certainty can only be achieved by generating data. And to generate data you have to act first.
My goal with Innoquotient is to give organizations a snapshot of their people and culture. And tools like TeamEQ are useful to measure the pulse. They can help us to evaluate the curiosity or, on the contrary, a lack of imagination in our teams. Data helps to identify organic talent and individual talent. The objective is to detect individual talent and combine it into successful teams.
Think big. Imagine. Dream.
The only difference between a crazy idea and a great one, is that it worked. That’s why you need imaginative people in your team, those that ‘think outside the box’. Creativity is finding ways to turn that idea into a reality, testing your hypothesis through ideas or prototypes. And that’s why you need the right people in your team for each stage of the process. TeamEQ is a great example of a platform that gives data that increases efficacy and the achievement of quick wins.
My definition of cultural transformation is the successful combination of talent and radical innovation. And TeamEQ is the perfect tool to identify individual talent and know-how to combine it.
Every company is only as good or as bad as its people combined. It’s time to put their imagination at the center of everything we do and start leading the cultural transformation that will take us forward into the future.
Find out how TeamEQ can help to support the cultural transformation of your business by taking a demo today.