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I am sad today because the last space shuttle, Atlantis, made its final flight last week. When it lands in a few days, the time of the space shuttles will be over. It is true that the space shuttles are old and obsolete…some have said that the shuttles were obsolete before they flew.

Just after the Columbia disaster I was speaking with one of the astronauts who was in Houston helping with the investigation. We spoke on the phone as he took a break from combing the countryside for pieces. He told me that the astronauts felt they were risking their lives every time they flew and especially upon re-entry and landing. He didn’t think the shuttles were such a great idea from the start.

I know the shuttles were not the optimum space machines, but they symbolized something. Maybe they were the trailing end of the Kennedy spirit; we felt such exhilaration in the belief that all things were possible and that unbounded imagination was an asset. But we’re thirty years older now.

We’re all grown up.

We are respectably all grown up. The lesson seems to be that youthful exuberance and optimism must give way to sober cynicism, and that the thirst for knowledge must be tempered by the grinding realities of budgets and politics, where vision might be just an encumbrance.

So my sadness goes beyond mourning the end of the beginning of the space age. Rather I mourn the loss of hope in the future and the confidence to know that, yes, we really can do whatever we set our minds to do. I mourn that our world today has become cynical and turned in on itself with shadowed, darting eyes. But most of all I mourn the loss of the infinite frontier, a universe without limit that says to us, come if you dare, and we respond, “You bet we dare.”

“What will allow my organization to gain and maintain the competitive advantage in coming years?

The answer lies with its culture.”

Results! That’s what separates successful companies from unsuccessful ones. A company’s culture is the single greatest determinant of lasting results.

A collaborative results-producing culture requires two important capabilities: the ability for decision makers on all levels to work collaboratively, and the ability of leaders to lead and mentor subordinates effectively so that they produce results.

Powerful Strategies and Creative Ideas

Powerful strategies and creative ideas result when a company’s culture fosters trust, communication and dedication. Managers uncover and seize opportunities, problem-solving time is shortened, and market-breaking products capture new customers.

A results producing culture makes it possible for the strategies generated by the leaders to reach down to employees who put them to work. In turn, employees send information and ideas upward so that managers can create new strategies.

Results-Producing Powerful Cultures

The Veritas Group has developed an innovative process for transforming organizational cultures into powerful results-producing cultures.

Organizational sciences, not fads, inform our work.

According to a recent IBM study, CEOs see creativity as the greatest challenge affecting their organizations today. Yet, while understanding that creativity is crucial to the success of organizations today, they admit to being in the dark about how to promote its growth.

Why the mystery surrounding something that is so critical and of which we have such powerful examples in the last few decades.

The answer lies in the fact that creativity is not what we think it is: it is not a “thing” that can be manipulated. It is an emergent property. An emergent property can technically be defined as a characteristic that emerges within a system when the parts of the system operate in a certain way and in a certain relationship to each other. We can never affect an emergent property directly: the only thing we can do is work with the ways of operating that foster that property.

So what does this mean to creativity in organizations? Since creativity is an emergent property of the organization system, then only certain ways of being can result in its emergence, and those ways have everything to do with the culture.

Creativity emerges in a culture that rewards original thinking, calculated risk taking and speaking up. People in a creative organization would be expected to play devil’s advocate and openly offer their ideas, and they would be rewarded for doing so.

No idea would be scoffed at or rejected without examination. The culture would be one in which learning from mistakes rather than punishing them is rewarded, because fear of making a mistake kills creativity. And most importantly top leaders would demonstrate this by publicly owning and learning from their mistakes.

If a company does these things, it doesn’t have to think about creativity; creativity will simply happen, it will be the property that emerges from the culture. And, no, it isn’t easy, but it can be done with enough commitment from leaders.

We are veteran sleuths and masters of the “secret lives” of organizations. With our tool kit of systems-based methods we uncover and interpret the hidden causes beneath the most important, critical and persistent issues in your organization.

Whether it’s turnover, conflict, workplace lawsuits, creativity, accountability, or sagging profits, we design plans for implementing changes that stay changed.

High Voltage Communication Saves the Day

I was winding down the section of a communication training on “how to be certain you got your point across” when a man suddenly looked at his watched, jumped out of his seat and ran out of the room.

My client, a quality commercial builder in San Diego, had engaged me to do a series of trainings for their top managers including project managers and site superintendents.

Their specific goal was to reduce errors, do-overs, and accidents. On this particular day the training was on communication.

About twenty minutes later the man came back into the room. He was the project manager on a new job for a large energy company in Southern California, re-asphalting one of their energized substations. He had given the crew detailed instructions, asked for and gotten assurance from them that they understood every aspect of the job, and left the site to come to the training.

At the “how to be sure you got your point across” part of the training he looked at his watch and realized that crew was minutes away from starting the job, and he couldn’t be sure that he actually had gotten his point across.

Here’s a little background: electricity enters the sub-station through the high tension wires at a very high voltage. That voltage is then stepped down for distribution to customers. This generates lots of static electricity. Now remember, lightening is static electricity!

So electricity sub stations have something called a safety ground-grid, a web of wires under the asphalt that grounds the large amount of static electricity in the station, so that it doesn’t discharge and wipe out equipment and people.

When the project manager called his crew he found that he had not gotten his point across. In fact they were just moments away from dropping the big claw of their wrecking machine onto the asphalt to begin ripping it up along with the safety ground-grid!

A few years earlier another construction had made this same mistake: they had ripped up the asphalt and all the electrical wires underneath. Besides having to bear the huge cost of replacing the grid, the construction company was forever banned from working on their sites.

That day my construction client got back their investment in manager training a hundred fold, thanks to their great commitment to quality.

What they hadn’t expected to get out of these trainings was the answer to a problem that had costs the construction industry hundreds of millions dollars, miscommunications.