“Nothing,” said the customer experience leader of a company that we’d all acknowledge as an industry leader. I’d asked him what had resulted from asking his team to bring ‘out of the box’ ideas to their last off-site meeting. “Just variations on the same old themes. There must be new ideas but we’re not finding them,” he lamented with genuine exasperation.

It was one of those moments that sometimes happen during my coaching sessions when I wanted to give someone a sympathy hug. This experienced, skilled and well-intentioned man was trying his hardest, getting nowhere and was genuinely frustrated. Since business protocol generally frowns on hugging, I did what good coaches are taught to do. “Perhaps I can help you think through the problem by asking you some questions,” I said.

Although first defined as the problematisation approach about 15 years ago, my method was learned from Darwin’s notes from the voyage of HMS Beagle in the 1830s. So I began with asking my client to describe the customer experiences of healthcare professionals, payers and patients. His long and wide experience allowed him to do this easily, in lots of useful detail. He found it equally easy to answer my second question, to compare and contrast different cases of customer experiences provided by different companies. This was very useful but when I asked my third question, we ran into the proverbial brick wall. “Why,” I asked, “are some companies creative in their customer experience approaches and others aren’t?” Here, the conversation stalled, so we adjourned to his office restaurant for a change of scene.

On the walk down, I pulled two areas of research from the dusty recesses of my professorial brain and, as we ate lunch, I shared these with my client. The first was the work on ‘organisational slack’, which shows that a cushion of spare resources allows firms to adapt better to change. The second, more esoteric reference from my Darwinian research, was fascinating work on how captive monkeys learn to use tools. Long story short, captive animals often solve problems faster than wild animals. I recounted these findings in a way that explained the link between them. Caged creatures, freed of the task of finding food, have ‘slack’ time, which allows them to experiment in the same way as employees can in similarly slack circumstances.

As I talked, I could see the wave of learning wash across my client’s face. His team had shrunk and been asked to do more with less. They had also complained of time-consuming compliance bureaucracy. This had robbed them of any slack time they might have once had. When I asked my third question again, we made more progress. “Could it be,” he asked, “that creativity needs slack and while some companies have allowed for this, others haven’t, and this is reflected in the creativity of their customer experience approaches?” I was able to tell him that there was no research about that question that was specific to his field, but that his proposed explanation would certainly fit with research findings in similar fields, showing
that pressured teams merely do enough to satisfy their bosses.
That is, they tick boxes and go through the motions to get a problem off their desk as quickly as possible. What they don’t do, however, is spend precious time thinking out of the box.

The answer to the third question allows the fourth to be asked: “So how can we improve the creativity of your team?” His answer was to set aside time for ‘out of the box’ thinking and more importantly, to make that possible through a combination of changing some arcane and ineffective compliance processes and a little outsourcing of minor tasks. We also agreed to oil the creativity process with some tried and tested ways of reframing the problem, which I might discuss in a future column. It was, he said, remarkable how obvious solutions were with hindsight when they are quite invisible with foresight.

justified the unruly and eclectic state of my hippocampus; there aren’t many people who know about both Cyert and March’s 1963 ideas on slack and Haslam and Huffman’s studies of monkeys’ learning. But mostly because it carried two lessons for my client that will be practically useful in any team. The immediate lesson is that creativity needs slack. The ultimate lesson however is that the ‘four question’ problematisation approach is a powerful universal solvent for many business issues. What does the issue look like? How do different cases of the issue compare and contrast? What explains those differences? What practical solutions does this explanation lead to? I use this problematisation approach (with due credit to Alvesson and Sandberg, who coined the phrase and explicated the questions) in both my academic research and my business coaching and advisory work. Try it, you will like it.

If you would like to know more about this published work, contact me at brian.smith@pragmedic.com