Bruno Milani    Challenge – How might we cultivate creativity in the workplace?    I chose the challenge of increasing employee engagement in the Federal Government by cultivating  cultures and leaders who inspire and unleash everyone’s creativity.  Studies show that only 65% of  Government employees are engaged at work.  It’s lower in the private sector.  But, as managers, we should  ask whether we are contributing to their disengagement.  Are we allowing them to share their ideas? To  discover their talents?  Are we bringing them along on the journey?  To meet this challenge, I reached out  to a group of leaders in the Government in charge of training and talent development and management.   This like-minded group faces this challenge too, but may not see it in the same way.     Selection - Storytelling    To reach my audience, I turned to storytelling. I find that telling stories is a powerful way to connect with  others and persuade them to listen to my ideas.  We all grew up hearing stories.  Of far away lands.   Princesses and dragons.  Magical spells.  These stories fueled our imaginations and captured our attention.   But what exactly is storytelling, especially in the design thinking context?  As we learned in Week 2,  storytelling is a design tool we can use to put human beings and their experience front and center.   Storytelling is not only educational and compelling, it is informative and inspiring.  The stories we tell can  raise questions and offer our audience opportunities to contemplate the status quo and how we might  redesign it.     To address my challenge of driving more innovation in the Federal Government by creating cultures that  support everyone’s creativity in the workplace, I told the story of the current environment.  As one of my  teachers, Deek Mela of the design firm, IDEO, says, “every innovation begins with a story.”  I explained  how employees may become disengaged because they don’t feel comfortable sharing their ideas.  Maybe  this is because managers rejected their ideas before or didn’t allow them to speak up.  I combined appealing  to the rational and emotional concerns of both the employees and the managers, and explained how my  audience might have the ability to use learning and development to reframe and reshape culture to alleviate  these concerns.     Application     To tell my story, I designed a webinar presentation.  Specifically, I wanted to take my audience along on a  journey.  I wanted them to know what it felt like for employees who feel like their voice is NOT heard, but  who have a lot of ideas to share. But, as the lesson in Week 2 explained, I thought about my audience and  their needs and concerns.  To start, I researched recent articles about employee engagement that my  audience often referred to, including from Chief Learning Officer magazine and Deloitte.  I even asked  friends who have this role what their interests, concerns, and needs were.  I actually reshaped my  presentation then after colleting this data.     I then developed a Powerpoint presentation for my webinar.  Because my audience would not be in person,  I created simple slides with one image and a few words on each that helped me guide the audience on a  visual journey through my story.  For example, when talking about how we develop a “creativity scar”  when people reject our ideas, I just wrote the words “creativity scar” and had an image of a broken heart  with a bandaid on that slide.  Other slides were similar.     My story reminded my audience that we are all creative.  We play and use our imagination as children, but  we grow out of it, or it’s taught out of us, as Sir Ken Robinson says.  I then described how instead, we  could cultivate cultures and leaders who support everyone’s ideas.  I even took them through some creative  exercises to give then a feel for it themselves.     I told the story of a disengaged employee and how we might collaborate to change the culture to allow her  to share her ideas.  I even explained how we could use design thinking as a collaborative tool to achieve  this goal and how we could cultivate leaders to lead for creativity by using design thinking tools.

I ended my story by asking them to think about how they might reframe their jobs or experience, thinking  about it from their users’ perspectives – how the employees they lead might feel or think, and to question  what they really want and need. As a result, my audience was energized and felt passionate about my ideas.     Insight     After my presentation, some told me they found my approach and strategy easy to implement and started  using “how might we” questions to collaborate together, as I suggested.  They told me they really  connected with the feeling these rejected employees had based on the story I told.  My story helped put  them in their employees’ shoes.  Some examples I gave, like my first boss telling me “we don’t pay you to  think” really resonated with my audience.  Looking back, I would stress those personal examples some  more and early on.    Approach     Alternatively, I could have created and presented mindmaps that highlighted specific insights from  interviews with employees who felt their ideas were not heard.  I could have created personas that  summarized the themes and patterns from multiple employees, developing examples of those.  In a way  similar to storytelling, this would have allowed me to focus on the questions to be answered, but based on  the empathy and insights gained from specific employees.

