The four gifts: a cultural framework for innovation
One wonderful thing about the internet is how it enables us to find like minded people, anywhere in the world, and engage with them. With a smartphone and a wifi connection, it is ridiculously easy to find a community of people who share your passions and interests, participate in an exchange of ideas, exchange content, and even collaborate on projects.
I believe that this is changing us on a cultural level. In the workplace, employees (particularly digital natives) increasingly expect to be able to collaboratively engage with one another and co-create solutions to business challenges. There is a hunger for constructive engagement. People want to participate in meaningful projects and make a tangible difference. They want to apply their personal gifts in the context of work that they believe in.
Creative leaders are harnessing this will to engagement and channeling it into innovation. Companies from SMEs to major corporations are engaging their staff in collaborative work with a view to creating cultures of continuous innovation. They are teaching people the value of design thinking, encouraging them to empathize with customers’ problems and to prototype solutions that they can test with them. They are experimenting with agile methodology, enabling employees to self-organize into teams to select viable chunks of work to complete within set time frames, with a view to adding value with each release. They are instilling an entrepreneurial mindset using lean start-up methodology, encouraging creative employees to hone their grand vision into a Minimal Viable Product and to test this product on potential customers to see what they can learn from them.
Design, agile, and lean are valuable ways of organizing collaborative work. These innovation processes help teams work in the right way towards the right goals. Many collaborative teams require a shared sense of process, otherwise the work can easily degenerate into a directionless free-for-all. But processes, by themselves, are insufficient to build an innovation culture.
Processes establish a path, but they don’t motivate people to walk along it. They may organize collaborative work, they don’t inspire people to give their best to it. To inspire people to give their best to collaborative environments, you need the right kind of culture. You need to give people the opportunity to catalyze magic by applying and exchanging their gifts.
What do I mean by ‘gifts’? The English noun ‘gift’ has two meanings. In the first sense, a gift is something that is volunteered free of charge. If I give something to you, I don’t expect payment for it. I might be getting paid to give things to people; I might, for example, work for a charity that distributes items to people in need. But my gift to you is free of charge.
Notably, it doesn’t follow from the fact that gifts are free of charge that they have no economic value. In many indigenous and non-indigenous communities, gifting is used intentionally to forge tribal solidarity and to create the conditions for a continuing exchange of gifts. While no money exchanges hands, givers are rewarded in terms of reputation and social status, in addition to the self-esteem that they derive from their efforts.
Anthropologists call these social structures: ‘gift economies’. A thriving innovation culture is a kind of gift economy. It is a self-perpetuating engine of value production, fueled by the exchange of gifts.
In a second sense, a ‘gift’ is a natural talent or ability. We say that someone is ‘gifted’, in this sense, when they display an innate capacity for excellence in some art or pursuit. Mozart, who mastered the violin and was composing sonatas by the age of five, was an incredibly gifted musician. But we don’t need to be incredibly gifted to have gifts. All of us are gifted in some way. The way to discover your gifts is to embrace diverse challenges and see how you perform. Some people discover their gifts early, while others spend their lives searching for the conditions under which they are able to express them. Generally, human beings are abundantly gifted, with an innate talent for language, an ability to think and reflect, and a capacity to focus our energies creatively, investing them in works of science, art, and literature.
Both these kinds of gifts play a role in innovation culture. To create a thriving innovation culture, we need to give people the opportunity to volunteer their gifts. This is how we catalyze creative magic. When people are able to contribute their gifts to a collaborative project, they work from passion. Not only are they able to express themselves in a manner that they find ideal, unleashing their talents and potentially achieving their personal best, they have the opportunity to be recognized for their gifts, which is rewarding in itself. Inspired by this opportunity, and emboldened by the feedback and support they receive from their peers, participants will work to sustain the gifting dynamic created by the team.
The emotional labor that participants invest in sustaining a gifting dynamic is a kind of shared gift that the whole team gives together. When participants invest energy in creating a safe space for contributions, co-creation takes on a life of its own, and people collaborate for the sake of it.
The astute reader will note (and perhaps object to) the proliferation of ‘gifts’ here. The best kind of gift is an expression of one’s gifts. To create a thriving innovation culture, we need to give people the opportunity to express their gifts. A gifting dynamic creates the impetus for a shared gift that a team gives together. How many gifts does it take to create an innovation culture?
The answer is four. In the past few years, I have had the opportunity to explore various collaborative communities, from hacker communities through to design and start-up cultures. I have learned in the process to distinguish four kinds of gifts that contribute to the collaborative work of all these communities. Each community values and organizes the four gifts differently depending on the style of collaborative work they employ. The art of creating a cultural environment for collaborative innovation hinges on understanding what kinds of gifts are important for different innovation processes, and how to solicit these gifts from participants to the best effect.
The four gifts are: [1] personal gifts; [2] gifts to collaborative work; [3] gifts to customers or users; and [4] gifts of context, time, and space.
1. Personal gifts
These are the innate talents and abilities that individuals bring to collaborative work. To create an innovation culture, it is vital that people feel able to disclose these talents and abilities and apply them creatively.
2. Gifts to collaborative work
Second are the gifts that participants volunteer to a collaborative session. While these contributions should ideally reflect participants’ personal gifts, it would be counterproductive to insist on this. To sustain the creative energy of a collaborative session, participants must be encouraged to contribute whatever ideas and resources they have on hand, irrespective of whether or not they reflect personal gifts. The essential thing is that people feel motivated to give what they have to the session at every moment.
3. Gifts to customers or users
Innovation culture can’t exist in a vacuum. It derives its power from a shared focus on creating value for the customer or user, offering them something that changes their life. Typically, this ‘something’ comes at a price. But the people who create it must see it as a gift, otherwise there is little chance they’ll produce anything great.
Many commercial innovation teams suffer from a meanness of spirit. Swamped by their workload, hemmed in by management, and creatively stifled by leaders who can’t see beyond their quarterly reports, they never think of their work as ‘giving’ to the world, and their solutions suffer for it.
Truly great innovation teams are out to make a difference. They are not just creating products, they are co-creating a better world, and there are few things more inspiring than that.
4. Gifts of context, time, and space
Great leaders are gifters too. The leader’s role is to establish the environment for collaborative innovation through gifts of context, time, and space. This means, first of all, establishing an inspiring vision and mission for collaborative work. An inspiring vision and mission gives creative teams a meaningful context for their work. If the organisation is driven by a noble cause, like the struggle to cure cancer or the effort to develop a new renewable energy solution, innovation becomes a noble pursuit, and participants feel that they can aspire to greatness.
The second thing that a leader can contribute to collaborative work is the gift of time. Counter-intuitively, this doesn’t mean ‘all the time in the world’. The most successful innovation processes involve setting strict temporal constraints on teams and challenging them to see what they can produce in this time. Working to a temporal constraint inspires teams to pull together and invest 100% in the creative activity. If the session fails to produce a valuable result, the team resets the stopwatch and starts again.
The third thing that a leader can contribute to collaborative work is the innovation space itself. More than just a physical space, kitted out with tools, this is a social and cultural space as well, a space in which people feel comfortable throwing around ideas, making mistakes, and showcasing their gifts. Without a social and cultural space that supports these activities, it can be hard to convince people to commit to collaborative work, and impossible to create the kind of gifting dynamic that drives continuous innovation.
The innovation space is the ‘original gift’ that enables the other four gifts to come into play. By leading with a noble cause and a judicious set of temporal constraints, great leaders make space for inspired creation.
In forthcoming posts, I will discuss how the four gifts framework can be applied in the context of co-design, agile development, and lean start-up work. Hopefully, this post has at least given you an idea of the kinds of questions that you need to ask in order to create an innovation culture.
If you employ collaborative techniques, you are making space for gifting. So check your performance against the four gifts. Are you giving people the opportunity to employ their personal gifts, or are they expected to perform specific tasks or play out certain roles? Have you created an environment for fast-paced, collaborative input, or is the gifting dynamic being blocked in some way? Is your team excited about the incredible gifts that they are developing for end-users, or are they boring themselves silly by iterating on what has come before? Do your leaders take innovation culture personally, priming it with purpose and nurturing it like a gift? If they are not, they are missing out on the magic, and chances are you are too.
