What enables and blocks innovative thinking.
<p>Facilitated conversation on what currently enables or blocks innovative thinking in participants' teams, and what leaders can do to shift the balance.</p>
Conditions for Curiosity is grounded in two bodies of research that have significantly shaped how organisations think about innovation.
The first is Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety, developed at Harvard Business School over more than two decades. Edmondson's research found that the single most important factor in team learning and innovation is whether team members feel safe to take risks, share ideas, and admit mistakes without fear of embarrassment or punishment. Teams with high psychological safety are more likely to experiment, more willing to share incomplete thinking, and significantly more likely to generate useful new approaches. Psychological safety is created or destroyed primarily by leaders: by what they model, what they respond to, and how they handle the moments when things go wrong. Google's Project Aristotle, a large-scale internal study published in 2016, reached the same conclusion independently, finding psychological safety to be the strongest predictor of high-performing teams across a wide range of measures.
The second is Teresa Amabile's componential theory of creativity, which identifies three ingredients for creative performance: domain expertise, creative thinking skills, and intrinsic motivation. Of these, intrinsic motivation is the factor most sensitive to the environment leaders create. Amabile's research found that autonomy, clear goals, and access to resources are among the most powerful levers available to leaders. Excessive constraint, close surveillance, and pressure to deliver to tight timelines tend to suppress the exploratory thinking that creative work requires.
Because this is an open session attended by leaders from different organisations, the discussion benefits from a wide range of direct experience of what enables and limits innovation in practice. That variety makes the conversation more useful than any single framework could be on its own.
Participants identify the specific cultural and structural factors that most limit innovative thinking in their context, and leave with clear ideas about what they as leaders can change.
Run an open discussion about what currently enables or blocks innovative thinking in people's teams, then have each person name the one barrier they would remove and what they would model differently. Push for specifics; the conversation drifts to abstraction if you let it.
Discuss what currently enables or blocks innovative thinking in people's teams. Push past abstraction: "our culture doesn't support risk-taking" is a starting point, so ask what specifically happens when someone takes a risk, and what that reveals about what the culture actually rewards. Useful prompts: what would have to be true in your team for someone to suggest a genuinely unconventional idea and have it taken seriously? What do you currently model as a leader when it comes to questioning assumptions or trying new approaches?
Ask each person to name the one barrier they could remove that would make the biggest difference, and what they would model differently as a leader. If you removed one barrier tomorrow, which one would have the most impact?
Use Conditions for Curiosity when leaders suspect the environment is quietly suppressing good ideas and want to understand what enables or blocks innovative thinking. The discussion draws on the research on psychological safety and creativity, and each leader names one barrier to remove.
Using this tool with a skilled facilitator means that discussions are focused, time is used efficiently, and the group moves toward consensus, making the session productive and impactful.
