Spencer Harrison – Organisational Behaviour

Spencer Harrison is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD. His award winning research has been published in top scientific journals as well as premier outlets like Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and Fast Company. He is a TEDx speaker.

He co-founded The Creativity Collaboratorium, the world’s largest working group of creativity researchers, now over a decade old.

He has been a culture advisor to many of the fastest growing organizations in the world, helping organizations map and revitalize their culture and develop practices that enhance creativity and innovation.

He has worked with Google, Salesforce, Deloitte, Danfoss, Atos, Cargill, and Schneider Electric along with other top organizations.

Spencer’s Keynote topics

The Curiosity Edge

Change is a constant, but the pace of change is not.

It is accelerating. Massive changes in the climate of our world, robotics, artificial intelligence, and in the political landscape will have ripple effects for business.

To adapt to change requires investing in uniquely human skills. Curiosity is one of the most human of skills.

We can think of it as an element.

Like carbon or oxygen, curiosity is the building block of other human skills. In fact, curiosity is a part of viral discoveries in popular psychology from the last few years including grit, growth mindset, and psychological safety.

Using fun examples and the most recent science, we’ll practice skills that can help you develop curiosity to help you as a leader and in your life.

What Happens to Creative Jerks?

Research shows that individuals generate more innovation than organizations. This means organizations need to create practices and cultures that sustain individuals generating new, risky, odd, weird, and off-the-wall ideas.

What are the keys to keeping creativity alive in organizations?

Using cutting-edge research focused on careers of Hollywood Directors that leave projects due to “creative differences” along with stories from dramatic successes as well as failures, this talk brings creativity to life and illustrates the key connections between individuals willingness to share new ideas and how organizations can bring those ideas to life.

The Zone of Acceptable Violations: Why Your Audience Rejects Your Last Idea

Creativity requires generating new ideas. But audiences often want more the same.

Why do creatives and audiences get stuck moving in different directions?

Using research from popular music (looking at sequences of albums), movies (looking at the top 35 highest grossing film franchises), and the world of design (looking at the careers of individuals that worked for the Eames Office), this talk reveals the often overlooked importance of meaning in creativity.

The creative process often means something different to creatives than the products eventually mean to their audiences.

By understanding that products in sequence create a Zone of Acceptable Violations creatives can begin to better understand how to craft their next product to align with their audience.

Leadership Development and Executive Workshop topics:

1. How Culture Meets Strategy for Breakfast: Cultivating Your Best Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is important. Research shows a strong culture can increase net income by 765% over ten years. But culture feels too big, too important, and too invisible to manage.

And even when leaders try to manage culture, it still feels mysterious and leaders are left relying on re-writing the values, hiring outside consultants to run focus groups, or simply hoping that a new strategy will work without the culture “eating it for breakfast.”

The goal is that “culture meets strategy for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the afterparty.”

Using a series of interactions, data, and descriptions of organizations attempting to change their cultures, this session brings to life the key principles that transform culture from something invisible and unmanageable into something leaders can cultivate and leverage to sustain long-term success. (Can be a half or full day).

2. Developing Deep Partnerships

We often measure business success by producing higher profits, successfully shifting strategy, or by measuring individual performance.

But none of these outcomes is attainable without successful partnerships.

Partnering – the set of skills that build effective relationships – is often the forgotten link in business success. Importantly, partnering is what makes networks work, it is what makes clients willing to keep coming back, and it is what makes achieving big internal goals possible.

We will be working through 4 key skills that cutting edge research shows leads to Deep Partnering:
1) Growing Expertise
2) Connecting with Tensility
3) Recognizing Emotions as Resources
4) Cultivating Curiosity.

Understanding Your Leadership Identity

Leadership is the ability to use influence to get a group to achieve a goal. A lot of research focuses on individuals psychological traits or innate skills.

However, as followers, we do not just follow a set of skills, we follow an identity that speaks to “who we are” as a group and “who we can become.”

Importantly, our identities are not singular (“I work for company x”), they are plural (“I am a programmer, I am an athlete, I am a parent, etc.”).

Using leading edge research on leadership along with a custom case written about the experiences of Ana Ros, one of the best chefs in the world, this session allows leaders to reflect on who they have been, who they, and who they can become.

It also allows them to build resilience by considering how future shocks might disrupt some identities and force them to rely on others.