Unlocking the creative potential of cross-functional teams

Full transcript

Intro

Silvi: You have immense talent, you have great perspective. Bring it. You know, you don't have to be the designer. Bring your expertise to help us solve this problem.

Jay: If I asked you to picture all of the people involved in creating new products, who would be the first people that you've named? Probably your designers, your engineers, your product people, your technologists, maybe some marketers, but if you've been part of a true design thinking workshop or a sprint, you know that real innovation happens when you have that true cross-functional slice of people - folks joining from business, from operations, legal, customer service. And sometimes those folks struggle to show up and give their best ideas. It's intimidating to walk into a room filled with designers and engineers that do this for a living.

Well on today's episode of Facilitator's Q&A, we have Silvi Haldipur the Executive Director of Experience Design Research and Strategy from a large pharmaceutical company. In Silvi's design workshops, she has a range of people that she helps bring their best ideas: clinicians, scientists, folks from the business side. Today, she's gonna share ideas with you to help these folks show up and bring the creative talent that they already have.

Today’s episode

Jay: Silvi, the work that you and I do is hard and requires a lot of commitment and accountability and certainly a lot of creativity to solve really hard problems. And one thing that always brings up a lot of anxiety in me is, 'Can I facilitate the group in order to get them to show up and really put forward their best ideas?' And sometimes people are worried about what that's gonna be like. 'Am I a creative person? Will I be able to be part of the conversation to like unlock these big ideas?' Especially for me when I know that I'm gonna be in a room of designers, the non-designers sometimes tend to feel a little intimidated by that.

And you do all this amazing work. And we were talking about some of the folks that you work with, and I'd love to hear who you work with and how you get them to show up.

Silvi: So Jay, it's a really great question. I've been doing this for quite some time and you know, it is really interesting to watch people come into situations that are new. I hear people say, you know, "I'm not creative. I can't go into this situation & be able to perform the way that these other people who've been doing it for a number of years can perform."

And so when I've been in that situation, what I realized first and foremost, that actually what's happening is the individual is preventing themselves from really being all that they can be - from their full potential, from their full creativity. Usually it's a number of things that contribute to it. One is, you know, ego, pride, fear of failure, these things present themselves.

And sometimes it's, you know, them having some kind of experience in their lifetime that told them 'I'm not creative.' And so those experiences where it came across like 'I'm not creative,' or 'I can't do these things,' we have to kind of recognize that those fears exist. And as facilitators, when we're presented with this, I believe we have to bring people in and create those right environments, right? Those right environments for individuals to unlock, to realize that they do, or they can be really creative.

Jay: Yeah. I've heard similar quotes like, "First design the team, then design the products." It's like what you're talking about, it's like design the environment, like the safe space where one person sees another person putting forward good ideas.

Who are the folks that you've seen struggle the most with like entering into the conversation, really kind of like having their shields up to begin with?

Silvi: You know, sometimes there's this, or not sometimes I think corporations are starting to move into this direction of more collaborative teamwork. But for so long, they've been individual contributors. And so being individual contributors, they know that they're being evaluated based on what they bring to the table versus, 'How do I work as a team and bring new work, you know, forward?'

As more and more organizations move into more of this team collaboration type model, it becomes a lot harder for individuals to break out and say, "It's okay for me to be one of many."

But what's really surprised me is the individuals who tend to take more of the risks are those that are actually already building products within the organization.

So I work in a pharmaceutical organization with a number of scientists, right? And if you think about it, they have to really understand a disease category immensely well, they have to understand the problem that they're really trying to solve. They have to empathize with who they're solving it for. Then they have to think of a number of ways that they can solve for it and try different permutations. And so I found, it's been really surprising. The scientists in our organization are immensely creative, right? Because they're always challenged to take those risks and they're used to failure as well. Things not going so well. Right? And so, you know, when we lean into that kind of mindset of like being able to just try, just take risks, to fail, and know that you're not always gonna get it right, that's when I've seen people flourish, right?

And so, you know, some people who find themselves to be not as creative when we help them unlock and say, "You don't have to come to the table with all the answers. You don't have to be, have the best idea in the room. You just need to have A idea, and then it could actually build in with other ideas. Your perspective matters." When you start creating that kind of mindset and environment and synergy between the individuals in the room, that's when there's flow. And that flow leads to really immense creativity.

Jay: Yeah. It sounded like you were talking about almost like the scientific method and it felt like there's this direct correlation between like this design driven, design thinking.

Silvi: Yeah. Actually I was surprised to find out that design thinking happens to be a curriculum in med school. And, you know, and as because, you know, med school, you know, what are they doing every day? They're, you know, they came to really help patients, right? And they're solving complex problems day in and day out. Jay:

But so like if you work in pharma and human life is on the line, I imagine that tolerance for failure and needing to be right, is even more strict. Is that true? And if it is like how do you get people past that initial fear of failing?

Silvi: You know, they go in and they know that they have to make split second decisions you know, during, you know, really intense moments either in the operating room or in the intensive care unit that is gonna save someone's life, right? And, but there's times that it's just not going to happen, But they do, right? 'Cause they have no other choice but to be in that moment and make something happen. And I think that's kind of what we're doing with design and design thinking is to say, "Just do, let's just try."

And it's not saying that you're not a phenomenal talent. It's actually saying the opposite. It's you have immense talent, you have great perspective, you're probably, you're the most skilled individual in you know, your areas of expertise. Bring it. You know, you don't have to be the designer, bring your expertise to help us solve this problem.

Jay: Yeah. And I imagine you've done a great job to say like, "On the operating table, yeah. Maybe there's not a lot, a ton of room for error, but this is a safe space where you're allowed to just like dive into the problem space and diagnose it and have a conversation about it."

Silvi: Yep.

Jay: So Silvi, then, you know, this conversation has almost made it feel like it's almost like a luxury that a lot of my work is in digital where like people are sorta like wired for design and experimentation, and rapid prototyping. Your work sounds challenging to like really create that environment. So for others that are working, maybe in the medical community and working with clinicians and scientists and doctors, what would you tell them to if they were trying to bring more of this mindset into the practice, what's like the one thing that you would tell them?

Silvi: Keep going. I honestly would say, "Keep doing what they're doing." And really bring more of the design practice into the organization. Really do what's right for the patients, for the HCPs, you know, for the policy makers, for the payers, right? Help your colleagues really understand what it's like to save lives.

Jay: Yeah. Put the customer kind of back in front of them.

Silvi: Yep, exactly.

Jay: Wow. Thanks Silvi. This has been a great conversation. Thanks. I'm glad you were with us. I hope that this has been helpful. I hope that if you're a facilitator doing brave work like Silvi here's doing that this has inspired you to keep going. Thanks again, Silvi.

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