Article originally published in InnovationIOWA

Story by Lisa Rossi; Photo by Duane Tinkey

James Altamirano, Business Innovation Director at EMC, shares more.

James Altamirano, business innovation director at EMC Insurance Cos., came on board last February to help lead the company’s innovation strategy.

He said although there’s a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and how talent will be replaced, he doesn’t believe that to be true.

“I do think that there’s going to be a big shift where we’ve taught kids for so long to fit a box,” he said. “That’s the corporate box. … This is how you act. This is how you show up. This is what you do. And that served us well for a long time, and to a degree, probably in some functions, still serves us really well. But I think … we’ve neglected to create more room to [prepare] people, especially the youth, to be creative, to show up authentically, to challenge, to question, to offer new ideas in … a healthy way. And we need more of that.”

Altamirano recently sat down with innovationIOWA to discuss how to get teams into an innovator’s mindset in the new year. Here are five excerpts from the conversation. They have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Get into the innovator’s mindset by becoming a scientist.

“I think that the innovation piece comes in when we have an opportunity to look at a problem and ask ourselves, ‘Am I seeing this from all the different perspectives that I possibly can? Can I get curious? Can I learn and what points of view can I have to thinking about how I might solve this problem?’ And then you experiment. You become a scientist. You try to think of ways in which you can put these ideas less focused on the solution and more of the hypothesis. How do I test this hypothesis and see what I learned? It’s that learning mindset along with doing an experimentation.”

Boundaries and guardrails help create the conditions for creativity to happen.

“Good, clear boundaries and guardrails help creativity, because you know where you’re playing and you know your objective. So then you have flexibility to think … within that sandbox that you’ve created. Whereas sometimes we think that being creative and risky, or the perception sometimes is that being creative and risky means doing things without taking into account the risk, or without an aim. … We might think of [it] like a blue sky, blue ocean, everything goes and what that creates is actually more chaos. Because you’re just without a direction, just shooting out into space. But if you have a well-defined problem space, and you set good guardrails and constraints around where the risk is, [it] helps people put their guard down a little bit, because now they’re like, ‘OK, I can take some risks and and I know where the boundaries of that risk [are].’”

“Psychological safety is incredibly important. Not only are you establishing with your team where the boundaries and guardrails are of the problem you’re trying to solve, and that helps to create some space for us to be creative and generative, but also you establish within the team what’s allowed, what are the norms that are allowed, so that people can take that risk. They know that there’s an expectation that you’ll ask questions, that you’ll offer ideas, that you’ll bring your perspective, and that you’ll even challenge ideas, and that you’ll lean into healthy tensions with the focus on the thing that you’re trying to solve and not necessarily on the person. So there is no judgment of the people and what they’re what they’re bringing to the table.”

Take care of yourself creatively by giving yourself time to get into the flow.

“There’s a wonderful book called ‘Flow.’ I think [it] really does a nice job of talking about where people find themselves in moments where they just love what they’re doing, and how you start to fall in love with the work that you’re doing. To spark real creativity, you have to find yourself in that space where you really are passionate about the problem that you’re trying to solve, and there’s curiosity, and you can just lose yourself in that. And that looks different for different people. For some people that’s surrounded by others, and for some people, they need to be in that space by themselves. They need that zone that they can fall into. And sometimes it’s a little bit of both. I think it’s helping people to identify what is right for them, and then designing ways that your team can interact to support those moments of focus time. And I personally need blocks. I don’t get into my flow until I’ve given myself some time to get there. Having a lot of meetings and then trying to get into a zone in 30 minutes doesn’t work. I’m going to need some extended block of time.”

Having a deeper ‘why’ helps to create awareness, which becomes intention.

“Intention starts at the very beginning, when you really peel the onion on what’s the problem that I’m trying to solve or the reason why I’m doing what I’m doing. … If you think about the human experience, for example, you could say, ‘I need to give somebody a gift for Christmas.’ If your goal is to give a gift, well, there’s a lot of gifts that you can give, and you can check that box very quickly. I chose this, gave it to that person, done. But if you reframe that and think, ‘I want this person to experience X when they receive whatever gift I decide to give them,’ then that starts to become the foundation of your intention, because now you go with my intention, how do I deliver on that? And you stay curious about that. Now it’s not just the gift, but it’s the experience around the gift. What was the wow factor when they received it? How did we anticipate it? What happened afterwards? Could I capture information about what I really wanted them to have and experience and go through, and did I accomplish that? So I think that asking the right questions and framing the problem with the right why, a deeper why, helps to create awareness which becomes intention. In our world, what that looks like is, those become our learning objectives. Those become milestones. Those become things that help us to keep measuring whether or not there’s progress being made toward the thing that we want to accomplish.”

Create platforms for others to shine by incentivizing and recognizing contributions.

“Is the experience that you’re creating properly rewarded and incentivized? And are people being recognized for what they’re contributing? Are they feeling safe in what they’re able to contribute, and not judged or feeling like they’re stepping on a career landmine, because sometimes it feels counter to the norm. And I think another big piece is that you clearly establish agency for people around what they’re there to do. … [It’s] this notion of intentional versus polite. If you know that I’m here, and people are clear that I’m here for a reason, I bring a specific experience, skill set, way of thinking, perspective, and that’s being appreciated, then I know I’m not just checking a box, and it also creates an additional responsibility for me that I can’t just sit back and not participate. I can’t just blend into the crowd.”

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