Contents

Preface ..................................................................................................xi
Acknowledgments .................................................................................xiii
Chapter 1 Introduction ....................................................................1
Chapter 2 Team Assessment and Development Using
Personality Factors ...........................................................9
Chapter 3 Team Assessment and Development Using
Multiple Intelligences Teory ........................................23
Chapter 4 Team Design with Roles ................................................33
Chapter 5 High Performance Improvisational Teams .....................45
Chapter 6 High Performance Design Teams ...................................59
Chapter 7 High Performance Research and Scientifc Teams ..........73
Chapter 8 Models of Organizations................................................81
Chapter 9 Rise of the Poietic Organization ....................................93
Chapter 10 Organizational Transformation ....................................101
Chapter 11 Transforming Your Organization into a
High Power Creative Design System ............................119
Chapter 12 Summary and Conclusions ..........................................133
Appendix ............................................................................................147
Notes..................................................................................................165
References ...........................................................................................171
Index .................................................................................................177
Preface
Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music
yet to be heard.
Warren G. Bennis, leadership scholar and author
Tis book is about developing creative high power teams and organi-
zations. Great teams grow out of a solid foundation of creativity, trust,
knowledge, commitment, and leadership. Great organizations are built from
metaphors appropriate to the world we live in. Not based on the images
of machines or organisms, great organizations are built on the view of
the organization as a community of practice for performance, design, and
creation. Tis is the focus of the book.
Tose interested in developing personal and professional creativity are
referred to my book Fostering Creativity in Self and the Organization: Your
Professional Edge, which is also available from Business Expert Press.Te
reader will fnd further resources on these topics at ideasmethod.com,
which covers material from both of my books and the authors website
(ericwstein.com).
Acknowledgments
Several groups of people deserve acknowledgment. My thanks to the stu-
dents who frst connected with me on these concepts. Teir questions and
comments helped to sharpen my thinking. To those who reviewed earlier
drafts of this work, I share my appreciation for providing helpful feedback
to me. To those friends who took the time to engage with these ideas,
I hope you got as much out of those conversations as I did. My thanks
to Maureen Benner, Paul Hilt, Chris Johannessen, Andrea Laine, Anne
Calbazana, and Lou and Irene Stein for their insights and support along
the way.
Special thanks to Joy Field of Boston College for leading me to Scott
Isenberg of Business Expert Press. Many thanks to Scott for getting my
proposal to the right people at Business Expert Press and special thanks
to David Parker for giving this project the green light. Special thanks to
Destiny Hadley and the Exeter Team for a job well done on the produc-
tion of my frst book, as well as collection editors, Jean Phillips and Stan
Gully for their constructive feedback on this manuscript and Fostering
Creativity, my frst book with Business Expert Press. I also want to thank
Stewart Mattson for embracing new methods of delivering and marketing
content at BEP.
My appreciation for those who have inspired me by building great,
creative communities of practice that have had a huge impact on the
world: Jef Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and many others. To all who have
contributed to this conversation, past, present, and future, thank you.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working
together is success.
Henry Ford, American industrialist, 18631947
Individual commitment to a group efortthat is what makes a team
work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
Vince Lombardi, American football coach, 19131970
The Rise of the Poietic Organization
Apple, Google, Facebook, PayPal, and Amazon have all dramatically
changed the basis for competition by unveiling game-changing products
and services, new methods of bringing goods to market, and great design.
We are interested in how these great organizations, through organizational
design and by leveraging the power of IDEAS (improvisational capacity,
design profciency, experimentation, aesthetic awareness, and strengths
1
),
have developed creative high-performance teams and workplaces; that is,
how they maximize poiesis.
2
Poiesis is the Greek word for production and creation, or simply to
make. What is distinctive about poietic organizations is that they fully
master three types of knowledge, which are illustrated in Figure 1.1.
Teoria pertains to knowledge accruing from a study of the
natural world.
Praxis pertains to knowledge of the world of action and
practice (e.g., medicine).
Techne pertains to knowledge about the creation of art
or craft.
2 DESIGNING CREATIVE HIGH POWER TEAMS AND ORGANIZATIONS
Poietic organizations learn to apply all three types of knowledge
(theory, practice, and craft) in the production of innovative products and
services. Tey invest in the domains of knowledge listed in Table 1.1 in
order to excel at what they do.
For example, it has been shown that improvisational models from jazz
are relevant to new product development. Much more so than making
due, improvising organizations leverage existing processes and procedures
by learning to adapt and modify them to changing conditions. Companies
such as Nest, Virgin Air, OXO, and Apple take advantage of the power of
design to craft award-winning, highly diferentiated products and services
that are hard to imitate. Tey are very aware of the role of aesthetics in
product and even workplace design. Tey embrace new emerging models
of organization that tolerate uncertainty, duality, creativity, and even
chaos. Experimentation is the cornerstone of science, but poietic organiza-
tions also use experimentation and tinkering to learn.
Poietic organizations also leverage core competencies (Prahalad and
Hamel 1990) in science, technologies, and systems to their beneft. Tey
are adept at managing change, embracing processes of transformation,
building superior teams, and reinventing themselves. By making these
investments in their knowledge base, they consequently excel at produc-
tion and creation. At the individual level, they help their employees to
realize their creative potential; that is, to become creators. Tey then pair
creators with great managers, leaders, and knowledge workers (i.e., those
who infuse teams with new data, information, and knowledge) to create
Theoria
Praxis Techne
Creation
Poiesis
Figure 1.1 Knowledge essential to creativity and production
INTRODUCTION 3
great teams. Te purpose of this book then is to focus on how to transform
your team and organization to compete with these top creative companies.
Competitive Advantages of the Poietic Organization
Poietic organizations have several competitive advantages over others.
Consider the primary ways that businesses compete: cut costs or increase
revenues. Tis insight derives from the equation fundamental to all
businesses:
Profts = Revenues Costs
Tese generic competitive strategies were frst articulated by Michael
Porter in the 1980s. In his model, a frm assumes either overall cost
leadership or diferentiation (Porter 1980, 3446). Cost leadership requires
paying attention to business processes and resource management. Diferen-
tiation requires attention to marketing and enhancing the overall value of the
product or service. Tis is accomplished by increasing the quality, aesthetics,
functionality, or fexibility of the product or service. Kim and Mauborgne
(2005) take these concepts further by suggesting that companies can difer-
entiate and cut costs at the same time. Tey ofer some very useful tools such
as the Strategy Canvas for mapping out how to simultaneously eliminate or
reduce high-cost components of the product or service, while at the same
time increasing or adding new dimensions of value. Poietic organizations
are highly efective at implementing these concepts.
Table 1.1 Knowledge essential to organizational creativity
and production
3
Creation and production (poiesis)
Practice Theory Craft
Managing
Leading
Decision making
Scientic methods/theory
Systems and organization theory
Theories of human potential
Improvisation
Design
Experimentation
Aesthetics
Strengths and core competencies
4 DESIGNING CREATIVE HIGH POWER TEAMS AND ORGANIZATIONS
Lets look at the iPhone as an example. To begin, Apple began by
increasing the overall quality of mobile phones. During design and devel-
opment, Apple also increased and paid close attention to aesthetics and the
look and feel of the phone in customers hand. It is elegant and makes a
fashion statement. Apple also added a new component of value to go along
with the phone: Apple Store support, which distinguished Apple from its
Android smartphone competitors such as Samsung, Nokia, and others.
Beyond its ability to make phone calls and send text messages, what
makes most smartphones exceptional are the multitude of apps that can be
downloaded to the device by consumers, a concept introduced by Apple.
Hundreds of thousands of apps are available that can turn the phone into
everything from a browser to a shopping tool to a carpenters level to a radio
to a GPS device to a game machine. Consumers love choice and smart-
phones provide it. In short, they deliver value and buyers are willing to
pay more for these features. Te iPhone is therefore not a budget item and
the product of a low-cost/low-price strategy. Apple charges premium prices
for most of its products. Interestingly, despite the quality of Apple prod-
ucts, Apple has fne-tuned its supply chain and invested heavily in advanced
manufacturing technologies to reduce its production costs at the same time.
4
For Apple to diferentiate its products and services required an under-
standing of aesthetics, which concerns itself with an appreciation of form
(from the perspective of the consumer). Aesthetics goes hand in hand
with design, which considers both form and function (from the perspec-
tive of the designer). By function, we mean, What kind of experience is
created for the user? To create the best designs, Apple empathizes with its
users. Designing its products and services required fexibility, adaptability,
and the ability to improvise and experiment. Great design companies like
Apple learn from their mistakes and move on to the next iteration of the
product or service. Tey take risks.
So this book is about how to restructure your organization like a poietic
organization to leverage the creativity needed to diferentiate products or
services and thereby raise the value proposition. Tat same creativity can
be mobilized to dramatically improve the operations side of an organiza-
tion as well. Amazon is a terrifc example of a company that redefned
methods of distribution that are now copied by all major retailers who are
desperately trying to catch up.
5
INTRODUCTION 5
How This Book Is Organized
Tis book is structured in the following way. In Chapters 2 and 3, we
examine the general characteristics of high power teams and introduce
ways to assess teams and help them to develop. In Chapter 4, we examine
the power of roles as a part of team design. In Chapters 5 through 7, we
look at the unique characteristics of high power improvisational, design,
and research teams.
In the latter half of the book (Chapters 811), we bump up to the
systemwide, organizational level to examine the characteristics of diferent
types of organizations, models of organizations, methods of transforma-
tion, the emergence of poietic organizations, and new methods of organi-
zational transformation.
Readers interested in team development can focus on the frst half of
the book. Tose interested in change at the organizational level can jump
to the second half. However, in order to get the complete picture, readers
are advised to read the entire work.
Creative Organizations Require Creative People
In the companion book to this one Fostering Creativity in Self and the
Organization: Your Professional Edge,
6
I explored fve essential creative
skills for 21st century professionals:
Improvisational capacity
Design profciency
Experimental and scientifc thinking
Aesthetic awareness
Cognitive, kinesthetic, interpersonal, and emotional strengths.
Tese fve qualities, which are easily remembered as IDEAS, are
defned as follows:
1. Improvisation is the ability to make efective real-time decisions in
new and complex situations using current information and appro-
priately chosen (or modifed) routines, scripts, and patterns.
6 DESIGNING CREATIVE HIGH POWER TEAMS AND ORGANIZATIONS
2. Design is the ability to envision and construct an object or a process
that meets the goals and requirements of a particular user.
3. Experimentation is the ability of an observer to decide between two
competing goals, courses of action, or viewpoints by designing a pro-
cess that yields sufcient information to rank each choice according
to certain criteria. Tis process is often referred to as an experiment.
4. Aesthetic Awareness is the ability to discriminate between various
sensory inputs (e.g., visual, auditory), to recognize the feelings and
thoughts invoked, and to rank the object of refection in terms of
certain criteria such as beauty.
5. Strengths pertain to the multiple intelligences possessed by all peo-
ple that can be targeted for development and creative expression.
My goal in writing the book Fostering Creativity was to help the
reader increase his or her improvisational capacity, develop design prof-
ciency, learn to experiment and tinker, expand aesthetic awareness, and
to leverage natural abilities and strengths. By applying these concepts
to their careers, individuals can make themselves more valuable in the
marketplace and to their organizations through their unique creative
skills and abilities.
Tis new book represents a continuation of that theme. Teams are
the fundamental building blocks of organizations, and without them,
nothing would get done. Organizations are the context within which
teams operate and their efectiveness is a function of good design and
development. Tis book is about how to develop creative high power
teams and organizations that are populated by creative people who
e xercise these skills and core competencies.
Who Should Read This Book?
Tis book is suitable for executives, managers, team leaders, and human
resource professionals. It addresses the following needs:
You want to develop the creative potential of your people
You want to turn an average performing group into a creative
high power teams
INTRODUCTION 7
You want to improve your ability to lead and manage creative
people
You need to redesign your organization to be most efective
You want to attain competitive advantage
For faculty, it can be used as a textbook or supplemental text for
a class on organizational design, creativity, change management, design
and systems thinking, strategy and innovation at the graduate and
undergraduate levels.
Other Resources
Tis book is also meant to be used in conjunction with other resources
and activities:
In conjunction with the companion book Fostering Creativity
in Self and the Organization: Your Professional Edge, which is
also available from Business Expert Press
In the context of a corporate training class
In the feld, that is, in an organization undergoing change,
development, or transformation
In the context of a university class
Te Ideas Method website
7
(ideasmethod.com) and the authors
website (ericwstein.com) provide additional tools and resources for team
and organizational development.