How to Improve Your Creativity: Tapping Into Professional Networks

Photo Credits: Daniel Horacio Agostini

What teams make the most creative Broadway Musicals ?

A research study by Brian Uzzi found that when studying Broadway musicals, the most successful creative teams were composed of new and old members. They found that the teams composed of mostly new people who had no experience with each other were not as creative. Teams that had lots of previous experience working together tended to rehash the same ideas and were unsuccessful because they lacked creative input from the outside. 

Bucket Brigade : The whole is greater than the sum

Photo Credits: Rupert Ganzer

Arranging your teams will improve your effectiveness by magnitudes.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but its through how you arrange everyone. One of the lessons I've learned reading a book called, "Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How they Shape Our Lives". This comes from a short story in the book about the bucket brigade and their work towards extinguishing a house fire and I thought I'd share it.

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FIRE !!

Oh snap ! Your house is on fire but luckily you live near the ocean cause. Quickly grabbing a bucket you rush back and forth to filling it up to splash water on your burning home. Unfortunately  on your own it will be impossible to extinguish the fire. Luckily you have a hundred friends who are keen to help you so they grab a bucket and start helping you. However, once they get started they are inefficient because all of them are wasting time running back and forth to the ocean. Through operating independently your house will burn down.

However, through forming a line and creating a bucket brigade your house will be saved. This is because you wont have to waste time running back and forth to the ocean but it also means people who aren't super strong enough to carry gallons of water back and forth can contribute too. This hundred person line might be able to do the work of two hundred people working independently and its all about how you arrange it.

You can improve the effectiveness of human beings by as much as an order of magnitude simply by arranging them differently

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For extinguishing this fire a simple line works very well. The best arrangement though is based on what your objective is. With the work that we have to do these days being more service oriented it can be hard to know how to configure a team to accomplish an intangible goal. Thinking about it made me wonder what are the standard ways you can structure a team ? Here are the four that I see and hear about most often:

Functional structure

People are organized by what they do and their function within the company. If your in sales your in the sales department, if you are in marketing you are in the marketing department, operational people are in the operations department. The classic and the most commonly heard organization structure that I hear about.

Divisional structure

Divisions can be focused on product or region and contain its own sales, operations and marketing department. For example divisions focused on geographical basis such as the US division and Asia division or product basis such as SUV division. 

Team

This is where you bring together people with different competencies and achieve greater results through synergy. As organizations become more lean and tend towards a flatter organization structure creating teams has become more common.

Virtual team

This is by far the most convenient and my frequently used organization structure. Leading volunteer teams where your working students and individuals where other higher priorities, scheduling in person team meetings becomes very challenging. Online meeting technology has been great for creating more opportunities to have meetings along and a more mentoring/coaching leadership style has helped me be successful.   

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By Stevie Vu

How to recover from Burnout: Networking as a Spiritual Salve

Photo Credits: Markus

Burnout is your enemy as a leader. 

People respond positively to passion. When the leader is genuinely excited, believes in the work, and shows his or her excitement, it is infectious. Similarly, when the leader is disinterested in the work, fails to respond in a timely manner or not at all to new ideas or requests for decisions, staff find it hard to keep their own passion for the work. When CEOs lose their passion, it is time for them to either voluntarily move on or for their boards to ask them to leave.

- Nonprofit management 101

Emotional Contagion

Emotions are contagious and can change whole groups of people through emotional contagion. Since emotions aren't tangible it can spread without you being aware. A great example of emotional contagion within an organization would be the County High school in McMinnville, Tennessee. One of the teachers believed she smelled gasoline and that caused her to have headaches  dizziness and nausea. The children seeing her response soon developed symptoms and other students seeing classmates feeling that way began to develop the symptoms as well. By the end of it all the entire school was closed for four days as a result. A report by the New England Journal of Medicine states that it spread because of individuals directly viewing others illness during the outbreak. 

Are you aware of your own emotions and what's being spread?

Whats your vision ?

Photo Credits: Justin Jensen

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said

the Cat.

"I don't much care where—" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

—Alice's Adventures in Wonderland BY LEWIS CARROLL

Overcome your limitations and achieve more: The Abundant Not-For-Profit Review

Photo Credits: Philippa Willitts

I’ve been reading a great book called “The Abundant Not-For-Profit” and how you can magnify your impact through tapping into the skills and talents of those outside your organization.

If you are constrained by limited human and financial resources, networking becomes your key to achieving goals beyond your reach. My own personal experience with networking to search for knowledge philanthropists has allowed me to repeatedly overcome limitations.  From when I was the student president of AIESEC Kwantlen to running my own marketing consulting team and being the chair for a youth entrepreneurial committee, recruiting outside talent has always been the key to achieving my goals.

I agree with the ideology presented in the book and have been thinking about why it’s so powerful from my own experiences. How does it work? Here’s my thoughts on why Not-for-Profits can have abundance.

Volunteer opportunities can be happiness opportunities

Based on a documentary on happiness called, “Happy”, they did research and discovered that those who focus on, personal growth, developing relationships and helping others made individuals happy. Much happier than those who are extrinsically motivated. With that in mind Not-for-Profits by the nature of their meaningful work can provide an avenue for these intrinsic goals to be realized. People are looking for a way to fulfill these needs and Not-for-Profits are uniquely position to provide this by providing them the opportunity to offer their expertise and talents as knowledge philanthropists.

Draw people in with a strong vision

With this in mind you can be pro-active towards recruiting knowledge philanthropists which means networking becomes a key activity. However, most people I meet including leaders do not spend a lot of time or effort towards making new connections for their organizations. Once you begin creating a network and developing new relationships it will start impacting your organization in profound ways as it can give you access to the resources of a social network. A great book that examines the power of social networks in depth is called, “Connected”.

When it comes to our own social networks we tend to be clustered in tightly knit groups that don’t change very often. Based on the research in the book if you were to take any two of your friends at random chances are higher than 50 percent that they would know each other. This common structure means that you don’t usually reach out into the larger network.

When it comes to accessing the power of a social network it is actually through weak ties and acquaintances that we gain access to new opportunities. For example there was a survey conducted by Granovetter to find out how workers in a suburb got their jobs. They were asked a simple question of how often they saw the person who helped them get their job. The findings confirmed that its through your weaker ties and acquaintances that opportunities flow your way.

• 17 percent responded often
• 55 percent said occasionally
• 28 percent said rarely

This power is at work in corporations as well where organization share their executives on the board of directors for other organizations. A great example would be Bill Clinton who sat on at least twelve boards at one point. By focusing on building relationships with externals this create network links between organizations that can serve and create new opportunities.

Networking to provide everyone with abundance

You can achieve goals and break through your organizational limitations through networking. Social networks allow us to achieve things that we could not achieve on our own. As a Not-for-Profit this is possible because of the nature of the work that Not-for-Profits provides to the community. You can attract additional expertise and talent through great volunteer opportunities that benefit all involved. However to attract that talent you’ll need both a strong clear vision and to get out there and start building new relationships !

Additional Resource:

How you can be successful at  Business Networking

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By Stevie Vu

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