leadingthoughts w/ dr. dave

Active waiting for teams and organizations

(If you haven't read the posting below this one, it provides context for this posting).

Waiting is hard.

Waiting is especially hard for leader types.

The process of creativity and innovation requires waiting. You can’t force the creative process. Of course, a creative person also pays the price of discipline. You’ll never be creative if you don’t make regular space for the process. Yet, creativity is indeed like the ocean, we are like the surfers.

Leaders, who seek to develop innovative and creative teams, will occasionally need to lead their teams into active waiting. This is the moment where ambiguity is thick and solutions are thin. Here are some ways to invite a team into the active waiting process:

Help the team understand the seasons of creativity. Have a conversation about ambiguity and why sometimes it’s part of the process of creativity. This can help the team relax through the difficult time.

Invite the team to pay attention to the clues that could lead to the creative
spark. Creativity usually pops out like an “aha” moment. Though we can’t
force those moments, we can be watching for them. If we have an attitude of expectation as a team that the innovative solution is coming and that we are giving our best attention and thinking to it, it’s more likely we’ll see it when it emerges.

Point back to a time in the team’s history when active waiting made a difference. Examples of the past, can give a team the courage to wait through a current season of ambiguity.

Keep the issue in front of the team without unhealthy pressure to solve it. Talk about it, consider options, but do it in a way that keeps the team engaged in the process rather than fearful that they will be in trouble if they don’t hurry up and solve the issue.

What other things have you done to help a team with active waiting?

creative tension and active waiting

I talked in my last leadingthougts podcast about the value of holding ambiguity and tension as a leader. People who tap their creativity on a regular basis demonstrate this ability. The artist, in any domain, understands the tension of creating. You don’t “control” the process, you move with it and ride it like a wave. It doesn’t mean you are completely passive. A surfer is surely not passive. But, neither can she control the wave.

Great leaders and teams hold tension in order to pull the creative life out of it. This is hard to do, because the ambiguity can be frustrating—even maddening.  One of the teams I’m currently leading is really struggling to get to a new place of effective collaboration and productivity. The solution, if you will, is coming slow. There’s a collective sense, on the team, that things are not as they could be, BUT the new way has not yet emerged. This is the tough spot in the creative process. The moment when leaders and teams are tempted to give up, run back, distract themselves with a favorite dysfunction, or panic just for fun. 

There is an ability I will call “active waiting” that can enable a team stay vigilient for the solutions needed, but stay in the angst long enough for parts of those solutions to emerge. Remember the wave? We don’t control everything going on. There are forces at work we must allow and wait for. But while we wait for the wave to form, we watch, we dialogue, we prepare…and then we get up and ride the wave—implemnet the new as it surfaces.

What would it take to move your team toward this kind of “active waiting?

More on active waiting soon…