Practical ideas for better teamwork through creative integration from Leading Systems Change in Public Health
Interpersonal Leadership - Creative Interchange
In general, leadership and communication skills (outside of PowerPoint presentations) are easily skipped over during graduate school programs, and it’s possible to find yourself in the charge of someone who… just doesn’t know how to manage their program effectively (or worse, you find you don’t know how to manage your program). It happens. The issue though, is that that leaves the the involved parties hobbled and potentially frustrated, even if all mean well. We can do better than that, and the nature of our work - the mission of preserving our communities’ health and quality of life - should hopefully inspire us to do so. The recent publication by the de Beaumont Foundation, Leading Systems Change in Public Health: A Field Guide for Practitioners, is tailor made for those of us working as public health practitioners.
If faced with an environment that you think warrants systematic improvement, it might be worth examining Leading Systems Change in Public Health. There are a number of agreeable ideas in the book, but here in this post I run through chapter 5 - “Interpersonal Leadership.” How we lead and communicate with others is not only the part of our environment we control most directly, but also the ideas within the chapter I found to be particularly applicable today for communication in general, when group polarity is commonplace and the problems we’re trying to tackle can feel insurmountable.
The model that the authors provide as process to foster meaningful interactions and interpersonal systems change is called Creative Interchange. I’ll introduce the concept in this post, but you can find the book here. Essentially, this is intended to allow for better communication and leadership in groups and teams.
Creative Interchange
Creative Interchange has an interesting history as the effort of an Episcopalian minister and as a mainstay of contemporary Unitarian Universalists, but here we will skip over that and present it here in the same manner that the authors do - just as a system for conceptualizing more optimal interpersonal interactions. I found that this system was very much a better expression of how I already instictively thought about communication.
So, let’s get into it with communication in groups and why creative interchange might be helpful. When working in a group, there are a number of undesirable outcomes that I know I’ve seen and that can easily happen:
Divorce - members of the group remove themselves as much as possible and avoid interaction
Agreeing to disagree - group members accept the situation as it is, with no further discussion and potentially no solution or change
Compromise - everyone settles for a less desirable solution and everyone loses in reality
Groupthink - members may withhold input because there is a dominating voice that is more popular, loud, or powerful, etc. Group dynamics are unbalanced and creativity and functionality are potentially at lower levels than in the previous outcomes.
Creative interchange presents a way around these outcomes through a four-component process that seeks to find strengths in ideas proposed from the whole group, incorporating everyone’s best and respecting contrasting views. I’ll go through each of these components in the next sections, but they are:
Authentic Interacting
Appreciative Understanding
Creative Integrating
Expanding Capacity
Authentic Interacting
Authentic Interacting can be summed up as a couple of things; sharing your genuine self and ideas to inform, and humbly listening to learn. This requires psychological safety, trust, and openness to others’ perspectives. Practically, this is practiced through creative communication instead of other modes. here are the types of communication presented:
Creative communication: communication leading to an emergence in the mind of something that wasn’t there before
Deceptive communication: Concealing what we do not want others to recognize
Manipulative communication: Attempting to suppress the thoughts and feelings of others insofar as they run counter to what one wants to communicate
Reiterative communication: Repetitious and no new information
“Muddleheaded” communication: Communicating odds and ends, but there is no information to integrate
“Other directed person” communication - a persona takes over, and actors are putting on a false front or altering communication based on the situation or audience in order to please others. This one is suggested to be most common.
The implication is that we should be working towards an environment in which we are comfortable bringing our best ideas to the table, but also evaluating ideas as objectively as we are able and having an ability to let go when we need to.
At this point, we can also infer that a lot of this about not only being vulnerable and listening to others more intently, but also incorporating an ability to assess one’s own ideas and perspective at the same time in light of others’ ideas - metacognition appears to be an required implicated component.
In this day and age, I also believe that this serves a prescient reminder that, the goal of being “open” in communication is not to engage in debate about who is right or wrong - if someone doesn’t want to hear your conspiracy theories and manipulative communication, that isn’t wrong. All parties need to be approaching communication with an intent to genuinely interact. We also must strive to create environments in which this is accomplished.
Appreciative Understanding
There are three keys to this component: 1. curiosity, 2. tolerating ambiguity, and 3. an ability to acknowledge that everyone on the team has equally valid versions of reality - essentially an ability to drop the “my way or the highway” style of thinking.
This can be applied through a couple of suggested practices. The first is empathetic listening - this is a step beyond active listening. That is the skill of not simply hearing and understanding what the other person is saying, but their viewpoints and feelings on the matter. The second is confirmed paraphrasing - just confirming what you think you hear is what the other person really means. Academics I know are guilty of this constantly - someone says X is a good idea, and their collaborator says I agree and does Y. Just ask if they mean Y or X by saying to them what you think they mean, or even better, asking. The third, is finding positives and drawbacks - whenever there is a disagreement on what path to take forward, help parties involved remain objective and learn from each other by listing out the positives and drawbacks for the ideas on the table. This ensures team member’s ideas are listened to, in a fairly objective way, and can reduce emotional escalation.
Again, the idea isn’t to prove you are more correct, superior, or to throw down authority. That might keep the ship afloat, but it leads to a less than optimal, potentially polarized working environment.
Creative Integrating
Potentially the most difficult part, creative integrating is the effort to actively combine outcomes that are inclusive of the strengths of ideas, emotions, and values surfaced through genuine interacting and appreciative understanding. It is the application of creativity in order to think outside the box in order to create win-win scenarios instead of compromises.
The first application technique the book lists is the old improve rule, “Yes and…” It’s an old improve game for a reason; it requires creativity to build off of another’s work. When working on a project with others, try to change your “Yes, but” to “Yes, and.” Three plusses and a wish - a straightforward way to phrase a disagreement, in which you list three things you like about it, but then one thing that you wish was different. There are also three purely creative exercises - finding connections, using analogies and metaphors, and reframing. These are essentially what they sound like, and are meant to help teammates really get their creative juices flowing, and communicate their ideas in creative ways so that the idea comes across more clearly.
Expanding Capacity
After all the discussion and creative work, the idea must be put into action through discipline, skilled action, and commitment. When it’s time to really roll up your sleeves, the authors have a few helpful applications as well; implementation planning, adopting a Growth Mindset, action learning, and celebrating. If you are truly disciplined, committed, and dedicated to skilled action, some of this section will come naturally as you go.
Essentially, an research effort or public health program needs to be responsibly managed, and I believe that this is where creative interchange relies more on ideas that are not unique to it alone. The growth mindset is fairly well-known now in academic and scholastic circles, and guidance on creating teams and management will depend on the team and context. I felt like the real, novel takeaways from this section were really the idea of action learning (for which you can find more information from the World Institute of Action Learning), and remembering to celebrate when something good happens. The work of public health researchers and practitioners is never done, so it’s important to take time to appreciate small victories when they come about.
Let’s Wrap it Up
In this loose summary of what was presented in Ch. 5 of Leading Systems Change in Public Health, I hope I’ve introduced the concept of creative interchange to a point where you can at least know whether or not you would like to read more about it. I definitely found the earlier sections in the chapter on communicating and interacting to be the most helpful. In my experience, the practical ideas could be extremely helpful in meetings and intereactions at academic institutions and local health departments. And, if you’re a graduate student like I am, remember that when you graduate or change jobs, you may be thrust into environments that are already siloed, or already have uneasy interactions. Hopefully, this will provide practical ideas so that you can do something about it for the better.