The market never stops moving, meaning your team must stay creative for continued success. No matter how successful you are now, if you stand still, the world will move past you. If your team gets stuck repeating the same type of marketing strategies, product designs, or service delivery, customers will find other products and services with new ideas. But if you encourage your employees to hold different viewpoints, new ideas will thrive, giving you that competitive edge.
Monocultures: destroying business resilience
In agriculture, monocultures form when farmers always grow the same crops. And while monocultures make it easier for farmers to run efficient, easy-to-manage farms, this efficiency comes with a downside: when farmers rely on one crop, it’s easy for diseases to hop the fence into the next field. However, because pests and diseases (generally) only feed on certain crops, when farmers use polycultures by growing different crops together or nearby, pests and diseases don’t spread as easily.
Similarly, if everyone in your business thinks in the same way, it becomes easy for faulty ideas to spread. If everyone in your marketing team uses the same strategies, they might magnify false assumptions about how the market works, whilst missing the opportunities that come with other strategies. If everyone on the sales team is the same type of person, they might all pursue the same clients, while missing potential market sectors that they may be unable to recognise and capture.
Monocultures don’t go away by themselves, even as businesses grow. Instead, businesses can get bogged down in rules and administration, which can enforce a monoculture on employees. According to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the natural tribal size for humans is 150 people, and beyond this, administration is necessary to avoid chaos (qz.com/846530/something-weird-happens-to-companies-when-they-hit-150-people/). Unfortunately, these rules and regulations hurt the creativity that helps these same businesses grow.
Any business, even without being held back by excessive rules and regulations, can develop into a monoculture if its leaders do not take proactive action. And while monocultures might make for harmonious work environments, when there’s no conflict, no one is questioning anyone else’s ideas. To stay creative and innovative, you should create a polyculture of conflicting ideas by using the five methods below:
Don’t hire people just like you
If everyone in your team or company thinks and acts alike, you might have a good time at work, but no one will be around to call you out on faulty assumptions and biases. If everyone thinks like you, who’s going to spot the problems that you’ve missed?
Try to look for people who have the skills (and the passion if possible) to do the work you want them to do, but who have a different outlook on the world than other people in your company. If employees hold different opinions about how things should be done, that is usually a good thing, provided that you know how to de- escalate conflict should anything escalate.
Look for employees with diverse skill sets
Beyond looking for various types of people, try to hire employees who are ‘more than specialists’. For example, when hiring specialists like engineers, their same basic skill sets are often very similar. You may need the expertise of specialists, but that codified knowledge could lead to a monoculture where problems multiply without anyone noticing.
Even in a team of specialists, try to find employees who have different sorts of experience. Instead of hiring a coder who has never done anything but code, hire the person who worked various summer jobs in school/uni holidays, or maybe someone who changed careers. This experience will ensure that your team has various perspectives and can spot and solve problems from many angles.
Encourage discussion and manage conflict
Instead of demanding adherence to strict ideas (like some business leaders and managers do), leave some room for disagreement and discussion during decision making. Try not to fall back on your and instead ask your employees for suggestions to generate productive discussion. Encourage conflicting ideas and then try to synthesize those into creative solutions.
If your employees disagree with each other, it’s possible to encourage discussion while keeping it from devolving into an argument. Act like an arbiter or mediator, letting employees lay out their arguments instead of arguing with them yourself. As well as encouraging fresh, creative ideas, this also helps build respect by ending the discussion with considered judgment.
Force creativity with restrictions
Beyond encouraging discussion with conflicting ideas, some business leaders ‘force’ creativity by imposing restrictions on their employees. Despite what many assume, unlimited resources don’t improve creativity. When you have all the resources to do what you want, it’s easier to keep using inefficient methods instead of trying something new. On the other hand, imposing restrictions forces people to try new ideas to work around those restrictions.
For example, almost all managers use deadlines to keep employees on schedule and coming up with new ideas, and tighter deadlines often encourage creative workarounds, even if your employees might not appreciate it. One extreme example of this disciplined approach is in Japan where some companies use the ‘hangen game’ to force creativity by cutting teams in half, which forces teams to completely reassess how they do their work (books.google.com/books?id=sIckcFP-QbQC ).
If all else fails, identify and replace the employee that is holding the team back.
Your team might not like this option, and it’s probably a last resort if you want to shake things up, but if your team or business is really stuck in a rut, you might need to replace someone old with someone new.
Replacing a team member might cause dissent, but if continued success is at stake, one person might have to lose their job so that everyone else can keep theirs. Still, if you go to this last-ditch effort, make sure whoever you hire (or put in the position) is ‘worth the price’ by being someone unlike yourself or other members on your team. They should be someone who will ‘create conflict’ with new ideas that will shake the status quo.
Monocultures are deadly to businesses because when everyone thinks the same, problems spread without anyone noticing. To keep moving forward in an ever-changing market, your business has to be flexible and willing to change, and a great way to stay flexible is by encouraging new ideas and discussion with a polyculture of different people who have different skill sets.
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