Four Peaks

We hear a lot these days about how schools could be better run if they were treated more like a business. After this last Four Peaks TV Show however, I’m thinking about how my business can take a page from schools, and in particular the classroom.

The entire Seattle office of Current Lifestyle Marketing was curious enough about the topic to attend the taping of Four Peaks’ TV Show with guests Susan Enfield and Greg Bear.

The topic was curiosity and its role in innovation, and for companies that rely on a creative edge (and who doesn’t?), I’m convinced that the curiosity we bring to our work is what will separate creative leaders from the followers.

Curiosity by definition requires us to raise questions – of how things are currently done, what could be better, and what else could we learn to improve. Curiosity will drive us to develop better ideas, rework organizations, and develop better solutions. Every leader willing to lead a change must first be curious about how he or she can improve something worth changing.

While the value of curiosity may sound simple enough, a curious mind might ask a follow up question that’s much harder to answer. How do we foster curiosity amongst our coworkers? It’s one thing for Seattle Schools Superintendent Susan Enfield to say that Seattle wants to foster curiosity amongst 48,000 students. The real question is how to foster it amongst thousands of teachers, or professionals of any stripe.

One answer might be how the classroom setting gives us a permission to try new things, and more importantly, fail at them.

This past year, I was lucky to be able to teach a masters class at the University of Washington on Anyscreen Storytelling. Since I’d never taught before, I took some good advice and did what I knew best – I ran the class like a PR agency.  We had a client, we brainstormed ideas, developed a strategic plan and pitched them like my agency does to its clients every day.

Now because these were students, I also wanted to make sure they could be credible counselors, so we assigned research and presented findings to each other on cutting-edge communications tools. The innate curiosity of the students, and tacit approval of a University setting, allowed me to ask for research and force students to ask hard questions as they developed points of view.

At one point, we explicitly discussed that the students had ‘permission to fail.’ Grades were given, but more important was the act of learning. Students were judged on the thoughtfulness applied to their topic, the questions posed, the research conducted, and the ability to draw conclusions. Any ‘failure’ of an idea could be quickly backtracked from, or lead to a new more successful path of thinking for all of us.

Now I’m thinking about how to take that classroom approach back to work. It is one thing to say it’s ok to fail, and it’s quite another to really mean it. The realities of business are that you can fail if you ship a bad product. You can ask a bad question if it’s one that hurts a client relationship.

But that doesn’t need to be where all our efforts go every day. So, instead of just relying on the experience we gain from our work (invaluable on-the-job training, to be sure), I’ll be looking to create other opportunities to build a University-like feel, a safe haven to allow co-workers to express their curiosity and explore new ideas.

Right now the safe haven I’m picturing feels a lot like a classroom. That might be a good place start.

Brooke Shepard is a member of the Four Peaks leadership and head of the Seattle office of Current Lifestyle Marketing, where he and his colleagues specialize in helping technology companies become lifestyle brands.