Trust and Engagement : The Key Factors for Creativity and Innovation

Kusmayanto Kadiman Try not to become a man of success, but rather to become a man of value. Albert Einstein As many studies have reported, workplaces are continuously changing because the emphasis of today economies is increasingly on creative work. If a firm is to survive in dynamic competitions, it must end what it did yesterday — its ‘as usual’ ways of doing business. The employees must be constantly finding faster, cheaper or better ways to do things — they must be innovative. At the same time, the smart firm will need to do its best to give employees what they need to be creative. The fundamental aspect of this new workplace is that it is geared to harness creativity. In search for creativity drivers Many different views exist suggesting the ways to manage and motivate for creativity and innovation. As reported elsewhere and from personal communications, some creative industries seem to retain their old-fashioned way by imposing order, and simply recording the returns by counting the time their employees put in, or they seek formal and predictable procedures by eliciting creativity and making it more efficient. Some companies insist that creativity can not be managed from above; their approach is to hire talented people, give them the general outlines of a task, and then leave them accomplish their task. Other companies choose a blend approach, combining self-motivation and peer pressure. Two popular strategies to trigger and generate creativity in the workplace are job enrichment and job enlargement. Recently, the concept of job sculpting is advanced. The proponents of this concept assume that people who excel at their work are necessarily happy in their jobs. This leads to attempts to sculpt jobs in ways that reflect employees’ deeply embedded life interests. Though such an approach makes sense, many people do not quest after some workplace. Creative people and smart workers respond well to organization with solid values, clear rules, open communication, good working conditions and fair treatment. People do not want to be abandoned and they do not want to be micromanaged. They do not want to take order, but they do want direction ! The management Guru, Peter Drucker, asserted this point when he said that knowledge workers do not respond to financial incentives, orders or negative sanctions the way blue-collar workers are expected to. The key to motivating creative people is to treat them as volunteers. Furthermore, the Guru emphasized that what motivates knowledge workers is what motivates volunteers. The commitment of creative people is highly contingent and their motivation comes largely from within. Creative work can not be tailored like repetitive work in the old-fashioned factories or offices, because of the following facts: Creative work is not repetitive, A lot of creative work goes on inside minds, and Creative people tend to resist at efforts to manage them overly systematically. When a dean or a university administrator tries to manage highly independent-minded faculty members and researchers, she/he would learn about this latter point. Open source volunteers In his writing on Creative Class, the development economist Richard Florida takes open-source software development as a case to study how intrinsic motivation and voluntary membership can be used to motivate creative people. Florida describes open source developers as a far-flung network of individuals — yet together they have created high-quality products like Linux operating system and the Apache net-server. The open source community uses a subtle discipline and structure to mobilize the creativity of thousands of independent software developers. While coding remains a solitary activity, the great contributions or “hack” come from harnessing the brain power of many individuals. To say metaphorically, open source development seems to work less like the orchestrated symphony and more like the chaotic interplay of a bazaar. But when looked deeper, a clear structure and discipline emerges. In place of the bureaucratic hierarchy, the structure here is based on performance, capability and peer review. Thus, open source software development relies on the intrinsic motivation of volunteers. Its structure is horizontal to a certain degree, but organized around a core group that provides clear direction and comprehensive review. The practice of the well known reverse engineering approach also resembles that of open software development — it illustrates how creative workers work. Reverse engineering does not follow a linear pattern of development such as that in the traditional forward engineering practices. It involves unstructured co-operation between the users of existing technology, the suppliers, and those volunteering engineers that seek to add values by reverse engineering the technology. Open source and reverse engineering models reflect a key value of the creative economy: openness to new ideas and meritocracy. Learning through Engagement While individual creativeness are essential to learning organizations and firms, knowledge work is not a solitary occupation. As many recent studies have shown, knowledge work involves communication among loosely structured networks and communities of people, and that understanding it involves identifying the social practices that are operative in a particular context. Moreover, the process of communicating knowledge to others is not just a matter of getting the right knowledge to people. Rather, people need to engage with it and learn it. The mere presentation of information does not necessarily result in learning. Yet, often large organizations come to believe that simply making more information available more widely will solve knowledge management problems. Moreover, studies also show that people are better able to categorize and remember knowledge that is encoded on multiple dimensions. Yet, knowledge management practices often seem to focus on the content of systems while ignoring the context (i.e. the method of presentation). There are “missing pieces” when we characterize knowledge as isolated, context-free facts that could be put “in” documents or databases, and straightforwardly transferred “into” people’s heads. To be more complete, knowledge is bound up with human intelligence, shaped by social assumptions, and requires active engagement on the part of recipients if it is to be taken up. Some strategies Story-telling. As suggested in some social studies, stories and storytelling provide a possible way to foster creativity in individuals and groups, and they also provide a valuable way of presenting and communicating knowledge. For example, a marketing department may feel that the engineering department is unresponsive and takes too long to make changes. To counter this, the marketing department may develop a whole suite of requirements and ask for them earlier than is actually necessary, hoping to speed up development. Direct communication could backfire under these circumstances, because it can trigger defensiveness and defensive countermoves. An alternative approach is to provide a story to both groups about another situation in which common principles apply. Expressive communication. We may draw a distinction between instrumental versus expressive communication. Instrumental communication is that which is necessary for accomplishing tasks related to the immediate organizational goals. It is typically supported by specific forms and media, delivered in specific contexts, and need to include specific information. In contrast, expressive communication is communication in which individuals or teams are primarily motivated by personal or social aims such as sharing experiences. Expressive communication often occurs in informal settings including hallway conversations, informal meetings, stories, and e-mail about non-business issues. Some have argued that such communications are important in supporting innovative thinking and the building of trust within organizations. Studies by Robert Putnam — who coins the theory of ‘social capital’ — on local governments in post-war Italy, show that mutual trust, facilitated by various informal groups, clubs, and associations, was an excellent predictor of future economic growth. In a well-structured organization, instrumental communication minimizes choice; hence, it is difficult to learn about someone from purely instrumental communication. On the other hand, if a person tells a story about his or her self, he or she will inevitably reveal something personal. Over time, we learn something about another person and may come to trust them. This may be one reason why effective leaders turn to story. The importance of mutual trust in co-workers becomes evident in times of change or breakdown; mutual trust will allow collaborative effort to proceed toward organizational (as opposed to individualistic, locally optimized) goals. Information Technology (IT) mediation. Conversation within the digital medium has a property of great importance — It can persist. Instantiated as text, whether typed in or spoken and recognized, persistence and durability expands conversation beyond those within earshot, rendering it accessible to those in other places and at later times. Thus, digital conversation may be synchronous or asynchronous, and its audience intimate or vast. Its persistence and durability open the door to a variety of new uses and practices: persistent conversations may be searched, browsed, replayed, visualized, restructured, and re-contextualized to have profound impacts on personal, social, and institutional practices. We have reviewed briefly some important findings that refer to the roles of human and social factors in the nurturing of creativity and managing knowledge creation. This review is of course not, in any sense, comprehensive. We view social engagement and conversation as essential in knowledge creation, development, validation, and sharing, and hence, are also essential to the promotion of knowledge-based economy. With regard to the specific conditions of Indonesia—an archipelagic-state populated by diverse communities — we see a great challenge faced by business professionals, academic researchers and government agencies in our endeavor to leverage the nation’s human resource capacity.  Harmonization of policies related to research, and education and training, both vertically and horizontally, will be a necessity for the country’s economy to strengthen its knowledge base. Engaged interactions between business innovators and academic researchers have to be promoted and intensified in order to speed up the diffusion of innovation into small and medium scale industries.  We also conceive the potential role of IT for the expansion of interaction and the promotion of innovations within and among business organizations, including the small, medium and large industries, in big cities and in rural areas. There is no race to win and nothing to be proven, only dreams to be nurtured, a self to be expressed, and love to be shared. From a poem by Donna Newman Post Scriptum : 1. A different version of this article was presented in a workshop organized by LPPM, Jakarta, 2007. 2. The re-writing of this article is greatly supported by my good friend Sonny Yuliar, SP-ITB ( 25 November 2009, http://ekstra.kompasiana.com)