Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do by Daniel M. Cable

Author:Daniel M. Cable [Cable, Daniel M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633694262
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2018-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

So the leadership team had to play with different elements of the event to keep it fresh. It’s working great again for now, but of course they’ll need to keep experimenting with experimenting.

Changing the Game

Dealogic’s Creative Capital program is a micro version of a more comprehensive practice at Shell Oil.5 With over $100 billion in revenues, over 100,000 employees, and nearly a hundred years of tradition, Shell is not the type of organization where you’d expect to find entrepreneurial zest. In fact, one employee compared Shell to a maze of hundred-foot-high brick walls: access to capital is tightly controlled, investment hurdles are daunting, and radical ideas either die or move very slowly.6

Tim Warren, director of Research and Technical Services, set out to prompt innovation in the technical function of Shell’s exploration business. To trigger innovative new ideas, Tim tried to encourage employees to spend some their time working on “bootleg projects” and “nonlinear ideas” that are outside their normal job scope. He said the results were underwhelming—almost everybody was stuck in predictable, confined patterns of work. Which is not surprising when the drive to meet normal operations and hit existing KPIs consumes all our time and energy.

So Warren scaled things up by creating a small panel of employees with the authority to allocate $20 million to rule-breaking, game-changing ideas. The new practice, called GameChanger, started with the assumption that ideas could come from anywhere across the company, and did not need to come from a certain department. Then Tim waited for the avalanche of game-changing, revolutionary ideas. The avalanche was more like a trickle. The fact that even $20 million was not enough to break people out of their learned helplessness shows how shut off employees were to exploration.

But Warren didn’t give up. With the help of a consulting firm, he built a three-day Ideation Lab. Seventy-two would-be entrepreneurs showed up. Lots of them were employees whom no one suspected of harboring an entrepreneurial impulse. In the lab, these participants went through a process of discovery, focusing on disruptive changes in the external environment (both within and beyond Shell’s industry). They worked on how Shell might harness this disruption, overturning the normal rules of the game.

Going through this process turned participants on; in fact, because emotions are contagious, their enthusiasm created some curiosity in nonparticipants. So many people started checking in on the excitement in the lab that “the doors to the conference room had to be locked to keep the overwhelming number of ‘gate crashers’ out.”7

By day 2, the group had unleashed 240 new ideas. Some of the concepts were entirely new businesses, while others were new approaches within existing businesses. Like the Creative Capital program, the potential business concepts were then released into a kind of open market. Rather than organizational leaders funding people with time, however, at Shell, the investments were made by other Ideation Lab participants. These individuals responded to the “gravitational pull” that attracted them to one idea rather than another. It was self-selection at work.

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