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Next generation leadership

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Our youngest colleagues, Generations Y and Z are transforming the future of work, management and leadership. If you want them to thrive and deliver value, you’ll need to do some serious thinking first.

Ask anyone over the age of 40, and they’ll likely say the same thing: promotion, reward, and the steady climb up the corporate ladder are all earned and paid for by commitment to the job, loyalty to the company and perhaps more than anything else, by investing the time at work. It takes time – several years – to really learn the ropes and to demonstrate readiness for more responsibility. However, our youngest generations in the workplace have turned much of this accepted wisdom on its head.

A generation on the move

HR leaders and managers describe a new wave of workers who are prone to leave their jobs with ‘frightening’ rapidity. This is a generation that stays around for two to five years before moving on to the next opportunity; a cohort that cleaves more to purpose than to material reward, that demands to know why as much as what they are required to contribute or accomplish, and whose primary dedication is not to the organisation but to the immediate team and the individuals who surround them.

Generation Y and Z are our leaders of tomorrow. And they are starting to agree to positions of influence already. They are also causing friction with existing leaders who don’t know how to manage them.

In researching my book, Next Generation Leadership: How to Ensure Young Talent Will Thrive With Your Organization, I had plenty of opportunity to survey, interview and observe Generations Y and Z, as well as the organisations and managers who hire them. The core issue is a shift in priorities, expectations and values; a sea-change in the paradigms of work and leadership that set the upcoming generation apart from (and very often at odds with) the existing leaders. And it’s not their fault.

Economic and social realities impacting younger generations

You have to remember that this is a generation that won’t have the security of retiring on a defined benefit (final salary) pension. The golden handcuffs and a job for life simply don’t exist for them. They’re also the first generation that will experience the 100-year life as a reality, as explained by London Business School Professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott. Now, as we live longer, the expectation is that we’ll also have to work longer; the luxury of retiring at 65 will be replaced by the necessity to go on working into our 80s. Many Millennials will be spending probably sixty years of their life working, and that has shifted expectations and driven a stronger feeling of choosing where they work, who they work for and how long they choose to stay.

    The younger generation also prioritises values beyond material possessions, such as purpose, development, culture and work-life balance, demonstrating a broader perspective on what constitutes fulfilment compared to their forebears, who were mainly focused on salaries, bonuses and promotions.  Capitalism is a ‘fungible concept,’ and as these emerging leaders assume influence, we are likely to see a swing in focus from outcomes to outputs: from returns and share prices to impact and value for customers, employees, communities and the world.

    The need for leadership recalibration

    To manage this new generation more effectively and to ensure that they thrive, deliver value and feel better connected to the business, organisations need to start thinking differently.

    I believe today’s leaders need to rethink their ideas and expectations about managing tomorrow’s leaders. There are things that the Baby Boomer and X generations have to let go of: the idea that young talent will stick around forever, that investment in things like development and training is tied to occupation, or that emerging leaders must be 100% dedicated to their job at the expense of all other interests or activities. We need to embrace their agility and recognise that the workforce can be fluid without it always damaging our long-term prospects.

    But how do we enact this kind of shift in thinking? My work over fifteen years with emerging high-potential leaders and their companies harvests key insights. I surveyed such talent across 44 countries, complementing quantitative evidence with qualitative analysis across a sample that spans highly diverse industries and sectors. My findings point to a broad homogeneity in their priorities – a generational ‘tightening’ that stems from having much in common. They are the first truly global generation, the first to be digitally connected from the start, and a generation who will live – and work – longer than their predecessors by a considerable margin. This consistency or homogeneity makes it possible to see Generations Y and Z as a more coherent group while recognising that to discuss generations does force one to generalise, but I urge us not to dismiss the findings merely because one can find an exception: If we can better understand patterns and trends that are more true than not, then this can only benefit our ability to manage and empathise with our youngest colleagues.

    Six strategies for managing young talent

    This, in turn, makes it possible to distil insights about them into actionable ideas for their managers: practical frameworks, strategies and tools that he shares to ensure that young talent can thrive within today’s organisations.

    Here are six effective strategies for successfully managing and nurturing young top talent:

    1. Articulate your purpose: Be proactive in terms of helping employees articulate their purpose and help them connect it to the mission of your organisation. An impactful and cost-effective means of doing this is to put together a workshop. Build this around two central ideas: Why should talent work here versus anywhere else? Why should customers come to us versus anyone else?
    2. Hold each other to account: Organisational culture is something that needs to be engineered versus emerging organically. Aim for transparency, responsibility and accountability as a rule, and be clear about the kinds of behaviour that model your organisation’s ethos. Consider what behaviours, if shared among your bellwethers, would become new norms.
    3. Be fluid about development: Understand that development opportunities should not be tied to tenure. There are a host of cost-effective measures your organisation can take to weave training and development into everyday life, from shadowing to coaching to international placements to secondments. Aim to think more dynamically about development.
    4. Re-consider what work-life balance means: The top priority for Generations Y and Z is work-life balance, a request many organisations have resisted. However, the shift to remote work has made it essential for employers to adapt. Even post-pandemic, our digitally connected workforce must become adept at managing virtual teams, as a complete return to pre-pandemic norms is unlikely. Through experimentation, I’ve found that certain tasks are more effective in virtual settings. For instance, brainstorming sessions benefit from an asynchronous discussion board, which minimises the influence of dominant voices and fosters a more equitable exchange of ideas. Work-life balance often sparks generational misunderstandings. Baby Boomers and Generation X tend to view it as a “when” request, mistakenly believing that younger generations seek to work less. In contrast, Gen Y and Z see it as a “where” request, viewing the traditional 9-to-5 model as outdated in a world where technology allows constant connectivity. Emerging leaders crave flexibility and autonomy in how and where they work. It’s crucial for organisations to ensure clarity in their policies to avoid differing interpretations across generations. The current climate of self-isolation offers a valuable opportunity to practice effective remote work strategies.
    5. See the value in side hustles (projects on the side): Talented young people often have interests that go beyond their role or your organisation. Whether it’s charity work, a personal website or projects that leverage professional skills, try to reframe these activities as sources of dynamism – both intra- and entrepreneurial development. Encourage your employees to pursue opportunities to learn – and to share that learning.
    6. Be flexible about people leaving: After all, they might well come back. Try to onboard new staff faster. It shouldn’t take two years to learn the ropes. Encourage a sense of fluidity that leaves the door open so that your leavers build new skills and knowledge to bring that back to your organisation should they choose to return further down the line. Embrace this fluidity and find ways to make it work to your advantage. Many professional services firms are world-class at cultivating an alumni network of former colleagues, even hosting reunions!

    As Generation Y and Z accede to leadership, I believe that our world of work is set to become more ‘human’. The real challenge for today’s employers is to leverage this forward momentum to the advantage of the organisation.

    Prepare your leaders for the future. Discover how we can help your organisation develop leadership strategies that align with the expectations of the next generation. Learn more

    About author

    Image for Adam Kingl
    Adam Kingl
    Adam Kingl is a faculty member with Hanken SSE and an author, keynote speaker and consultant. His most recent book is Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset (Kogan Page, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Business Book of the Year Awards in the Smart Thinking Category. He is also the author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020). He served as Executive Director of Learning and Thought Leadership at London Business School for a decade. He is a dual British-American citizen, living in London. www.adamkingl.com
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    Is your organization ready for ‘Generation Blizzard’?

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    Rather than molding Gen Z to fit the workplace, L&D can create a way of working that’s fit for the future.

    Gen Z could have up to ten times more employers than their grandparents had. That’s according to research by Adam Kingl, Adjunct Faculty at Hult International Business School. Companies have already experienced high turnover among millennials in the wake of the financial crash. “Now, with Gen Z mimicking that habit, it’s not a surprise,” says Kingl. But if you’re already jaded by attrition spikes and think it’s par for the course, you could be losing talent unnecessarily. “If they’re leaving the organization with frightening rapidity, you’ve got to change your habits.”Job hopping is always more typical among junior workers – it’s something Jo Owen tapped into after co-founding Teach First in 2001. “We realized there’s actually a strong market in what we call the ‘first bouncer market’” – junior workers looking to pivot into something different.

    “The question is: are things different for 20-year-olds today versus 20-year-olds thirty or forty years ago?” asks Owen, who sits on Hult EF Corporate Education’s Global Advisory Council. “Most of the time, the answer has actually been no – but now, it is.”

    Cohort birth years:

    – Baby Boomers: 1946-1964

    – Gen X: 1965-1980

    – Gen Y (Millennials): 1981-1996

    – Gen Z: 1997-2012

    – Gen Alpha: 2013-present

    Between the cost-of-living crisis and the ripple effects of Covid-19 furlough and lockdown, “the youngest people have had a really rough time as they’ve entered the workforce,” says Owen. “Gen Z are often called ‘snowflakes’ but, you know, a lot of snowflakes make a blizzard – maybe they’re really Generation Blizzard.”

    What’s changed?

    1. It’s harder to connect Companies know this group wants to be in the office to learn – the challenge is enticing senior people in. As Owen points out, “the older generations have nice home offices far away from work. They want to ditch the commute and, critically, they already have those networks of influence and support.”

    2. Mental health is deteriorating  

    Striking data from the Resolution Foundation shows that Gen Z are more likely to experience mental health challenges than any other age group, and to be out of work because of it than people in their 40s. “Historically, it’s always older generations that have to take more time off because of their health,” says Owen. “So something very unusual is happening here.”

    3. Purpose matters more 

    “We’ve got a generation with a much stronger sense of values,” says Owen. This translates into attitudes toward employers, says Kingl: “They will not work with organizations that they feel are doing wrong by the planet or behaving unethically. It’s not enough to have articulated your purpose. Do you live it? Do your people experience it every day?”

    4. Their future is unclear

    Retirement is a much hazier prospect for young people to plan for than it was in the past. “What’s becoming increasingly important in the workforce is development, because they need to always be able to work well past what we currently consider retirement age, so they are seeking employers that make them more employable,” says Kingl. People expect development from their employer, “and if they’re not getting it, then they’re going to seek it elsewhere.”

    What can L&D do differently?

    “If you want to develop people, you have to understand their personal purpose,” says Kingl. “Otherwise, any development you give them is random. Leaders should always have that conversation with their people: ‘Why do you do what you do? Why do you choose to do it here?’” From here, you can connect their development to that story, and personalize their place within the organization.“From an L&D point of view, it isn’t about trying to extol the purpose of the firm,” Owen highlights. “You have to turn that round and help people discover their intrinsic motivation.” Unilever, for example, runs an in-house workshop: Discover your Purpose. When organizations focus on purpose, it supports well-being too.

    Altogether, there’s actually a radical and quite exciting agenda for L&D.

    Jo Owen, Global Advisory Council, Hult EF

    As for creating and maintaining connections, consider an alumni network. “Professional services organizations are often world-class at this, but most organizations don’t do it,” says Kingl. “It’s often more industry specific than common business practice.”It’s a missed opportunity, he says. “If people are leaving more often, you still have collective wisdom in the world of people who have been through your company. How can you foster a sense of community among your alumni? Is there a forum where they can talk with you and with one another? Do you hold reunions like universities?”

    It can also keep potential boomerangs warm. “If they’re leaving an organization every two to three years, they might come back,” says Kingl. “And if they do, you get all the benefits of their external perspective and the growth journey they’ve been on. But that will only happen if you exit them well.” This means being supportive of non-linear career paths. “People might still work for you for 10 or 15 years, just maybe not all in one go. Embrace that new way of way of working.”

    “Altogether, there’s actually a radical and quite exciting agenda for L&D,” says Owen. “It’s about helping Gen Z discover their purpose, and putting the right experiences in place with the right support. But it all comes down to L&D needing to reinvent itself around new realities.”

    Generation Blizzard is on its way and the forecast is clear: rather than shaping junior cohorts to fit into the workplace, it’s about evolving as a workplace to embrace new ways of working.

    What can you do now?

    → Ask your peopleStart the conversation about purpose with Gen Z-ers in the organization, formally or informally.

    → Establish an alumni network

    This is one way of nurturing relationships after people move on, and can even keep potential boomerangs warm to eventually return.

    → Set up reverse mentoring

    This fosters relationships up and down the chain and creates more flow in the organization.

    → Stay open to people’s side hustles

    Kingl says that as long as personal projects don’t detract from the day job, it gives people a chance to stretch their entrepreneurial and business development muscles, which the organization can then benefit from.

    → Give people autonomy over remote working

    When their future is hazy, affording people autonomy over work patterns leads to greater overall well-being.

    Further reading:

    – Next Generation Leadership, Adam Kingl– The Leadership Skills Handbook, Jo Owen

    Sparking Success

    Humanising leadership through the arts: part 2

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    A NEW YEAR, A CREATIVE YOU: HOW TO COMBINE ARTISTIC AND HUMANISTIC MINDSETS FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS In keeping with our annual tradition, we begin the New Year with a book review on creativity! Here are some key insights and tips. Happy New Year! Madanmohan Rao

    Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2023/12/creativity-leadership-art-success-book-adam-kingl

    Thriving in the face of fast-moving trends and disruptions in the modern business landscape requires leaders to cultivate a more creative and humanistic mindset, according to the book Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset by Adam Kingl. The author profiles innovative approaches at organisations like Pixar, Disney, Unilever, 3M, Bosch, Panasonic, and Carnegie Hall. Each chapter ends with a useful ‘Monday morning’ checklist of actions that can be implemented by readers. Adam Kingl is Adjunct Faculty at the UCL School of Management, and was earlier an associate at Saatchi & Saatchi. He holds business and arts degrees from London Business School, UCLA and Yale. Kingl was raised in Silicon Valley and now lives in Surrey, UK.

    Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2023/12/creativity-leadership-art-success-book-adam-kingl

    “In these times where the lines between industries are blurring, cognitive diversity in innovation is more important than ever,” he urges. He calls for more cross-industry learning and cross-skills collaboration. Here are my key takeaways from this enjoyable and practical 225-page book.

    Foundations

    Times of technological change and business flux call for leadership approaches that are creative, humanistic, fluid, and agile. Inputs from the artistic sector are needed to help industrial age leaders better manage teams, ideate, innovate, improvise, adapt, and organise. The author draws inspiration from the Renaissance period, when commerce, science and the arts intermingled in a creative synergy. Unfortunately, much of this creativity and humanity seems lost in modern management. Five chapters provide management lessons drawn from the fields of jazz, writing, performing arts, entertainment, and even culinary arts. In these contexts, Kingl showcases a range of innovation types: strategy, product, process, technology, platform, and management.

    Jazz

    The improvisational, collaborative and spontaneous nature of jazz performances has a number of lessons for business. They include being comfortable with uncertainty, enhancing serendipity, exploring ideas, and making partners look good. Structure and practice are important, but so are working with constraints and being resilient. Kingl explains that truly creative leaders don’t always have the answers but are authentic, vulnerable and imaginative, and facilitate emergence of solutions from their team.

    Writing

    The world of writing shows the importance of humility required to encourage and reject many ideas before landing on the right one, Kingl explains. Feedback, a bigger picture, and a change of environment can help get unstuck. Techniques like discussing films while walking were used by the scriptwriters of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The writers of Friends would pivot from the original script depending on audience attachment. Alternative perspectives from roles like optimist and devil’s advocate can help refine a plot. Breaking up into smaller groups or harnessing the pressure of a deadline can also speed up clarity. The author cautions that moving too quickly on ideas without seeking broad inputs can be damaging. Introverts and junior colleagues tend to defer to leaders who speak first.

    The performing arts

    Successful performers in theatre and music highlight the importance of the growth mindset. This involves willingness to learn, driving abilities through attitude, eagerness to experiment, and acceptance of failure as a source of learning. Business firms can bring in new perspectives via artist residency programmes. Storytelling can help create compelling and inspiring narratives, as shown in the creation of the National Youth Orchestra when the foundational idea was shared and socialised with donors. Making many smaller bets should go hand in hand with a few larger bets. Employees should be given room to be imaginative and entrepreneurial, and speak up when there are problems. Questions and conversations are more important than answers. “I have to behave like the founder of a startup,” says Clive Gillinson, executive and artistic director of the iconic Carnegie Hall in New York, who effectively combines creative and commercial leadership roles. Successful performers regularly take risks, pushing themselves as well as their audience. Reinventing and repositioning are key to long-term success. Examples here include saxophonist Sunny Rollins. Faith and conviction in the extra-ordinary are hallmarks of visionary leaders, as seen in the cases of Steve Jobs and Akio Morita. A passion and commitment to always connect to its audience helped Carnegie Hall pivot to online broadcasts and storytelling during the pandemic. “Successful leaders hold seemingly competitive dynamics in a creative tension: innovation and risk, freedom and constraint, prototype and fully-realised project, spontaneity and planning. The trick is not to choose one over the other,” Kingl observes.

    Entertainment

    One chapter addresses the ‘Imagineers’ of Disney, where engineering, design and customer experience are effectively blended. Human connection, artistic freewheeling, secure platforms, and rapid prototyping are the key enablers. Andrew McGuinness, Co-founder and CEO of multimedia entertainment company Elipsis, describes himself as an evangelist who motivates employees and inspires investors. “My challenge is simultaneously to be an architect, juggler, visionary, and accountant,” he explains. While motivation is important, Kingl cautions leaders against assuming that what motivates them also motivates their employees. They must regularly find out what employees dream about, and see how the company’s mission fits here.

    Culinary arts

    Celebrity chefs view cooking as a combination of science, art, skill, storytelling, and even divinity. Kingl illustrates combinatorial creativity in action in the food business with examples like the hot dog and ice-cream cone. Mixology and fusion cooking are widely popular today as experts push the boundaries of experimentation. Ferrand Adria’s El Bulli restaurant had a dedicated R&D team, and the restaurant would shut down for half a year just to invent new dishes and codify its experiments. In the world of toys, the author cites LEGO MINDSTORMS as an example of combinatorial, crowdsourced brainstorming. It leveraged its community of super-user consumers to invent and test different products. As for reinvention, Alain Passard switched from being a meat preparation expert to launching a vegetarian restaurant. He thus legitimised vegetables as “worthy stars rather than support players” in French cuisine.

    The road ahead

    Art is an importance source of reframing, renewal and reinvention, Kingl shows by the end of the book. Artistic forms like drawing and painting can also help people express emotions when they struggle with words. “Expertise is important, but genuine creativity might include putting yourself in the shoes of the beginner,” observes artist Peter Moolan-Feroze. Elements of playfulness and humility help overcome such blocks of prior expertise. Customers and employees expect more humanity and creativity at work today. Leaders must hire diverse employees but also tap their fresh perspectives on what is different and what needs to improve. Technology advances continue to force companies to focus on efficiency and risk management. “Technology is the master of scale, but it need not be our master. Efficiency does not replace innovation, adaptability or inspiration,” the author affirms. “It is up to people, not technology, to create purpose, invent, adapt, engage, connect. In that regard, disciplines like art should not be seen as a fun diversion but as the source of crucial insights and skills,” Kingl signs off. In sum, this is an insightful book for beginning the new year with a boost of creativity, with a combination of compelling examples and actionable tips.

    Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2023/12/creativity-leadership-art-success-book-adam-kingl

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    Three reasons why a holiday can boost creativity and innovation at work

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    Three reasons why a holiday can boost creativity and innovation at work

    Perhaps the biggest question in creativity is, ‘What do you do when you’re stuck?’

    By Adam Kingl July 3, 2023

    Perhaps the biggest question in creativity is, ‘What do you do when you’re stuck?’  In interviewing Andrew Reich, one of the head writers and executive producers of hit TV sitcom Friends when researching my latest book, I discovered that there are a number of techniques in boosting the creative process that can be generalised and applied to any function or industry. One of the techniques that emerged repeatedly was to embrace taking breaks, changing one’s environment, even taking a holiday.

    Sometimes the solution is not to encourage a different answer but spark a different mood or energy. In Japanese gardens, if you walk from one area to the next, the garden might suddenly look and feel entirely different, which in Japanese is loosely translated as ‘change feeling.’ If you walked into the writers’ room of hit TV sitcom Friends, so often what they’d be doing would not look as if they were working. They’d be tossing a ball around, playing some stupid game, or just talking about something that seemed totally off subject. But very often they would do that for a while, and then someone would ask, ‘Wait a minute. Is there a story in this?’ So often, appearing as if they were wasting time would lead to: ‘Wait, there is something here!’ There were times when the room would just get really quiet. Everyone was stuck. So how do you get unstuck? Andrew Reich understood that sometimes the team just needed to blow off steam, or be shocked awake, or laugh, or indeed just ‘change feeling.’ A holiday is a similar ‘change feeling’ tactic.

    If the next level of unsticking a group is to change mood, Andrew would take his team into a completely different environment. He relates, ‘I’ve taken teams of about four people on a walk, going back to my earliest writing experiences, maybe not with twelve people because that becomes a parade rather than a walk, and you end up having a bunch of separate conversations. But after sitting for a long time and suddenly you’re out in the fresh air and moving, that alone shakes things up. Or completely the opposite – a nap! I’m a big believer in napping for refreshing the brain. Sometimes you have to get out of the room when you’re hitting a wall. It’s also about keeping perspective to relieve the pressure I may be putting on myself. It’s just a television show. Sometimes it starts to feel so weighty and serious, I have to step back and let go of whatever attachment of the moment I’m obsessing about.’ A holiday, hopefully including copious walks and naps, is perhaps the ultimate practice of changing the environment.

    Working harder doesn’t always produce better results, but creating or recreating the conditions or environment for inspiration does. There is an urban myth that renowned TV writer and show runner Aaron Sorkin of hits like The West Wing would take five showers a day because he comes up with so many great ideas there. If you think, ‘I have to think of a great idea for a show,’ you’re just not going to. The best ideas really often do suddenly appear – a force outside of yourself. So how do you put yourself in a position to be receptive to those things? How do you relax because it will never happen if you’re looking at your phone and doom scrolling? Andrew finds it may happen being in nature, a beach, a forest, and of course in the shower. You do relax there to the point where you realise, ‘I was clenching and working so hard, but as soon as I relaxed, ding! There’s the solution.’ You cannot ‘hard work’ yourself into creativity. Once you have an idea and an outline, then you can work hard. But at the inspiration point of the process, there’s no forcing that. In taking a holiday, you trust the process, yourself and the environment that helps you reach innovative solutions.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Adam Kingl
    Adam Kingl

    Adam Kingl is a speaker, educator, adviser and author who specialises in the areas of leadership creativity, innovation and adaptability. He is an adjunct faculty member at the UCL School of Management and at Hult Ashridge Business School, and is an instructor at Imperial College London, Sauder Business School, the Irish Management Institute at University College Cork, and at Headspring Executive Development. Adam Kingl is also author of Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset

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    How art and play can benefit organisations

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    HR lessons on creativity from LEGO and Pixar

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    Looking to catalyse a team’s creative capacity? Adam Kingl shows you how to learn from artists and creatives with simple hacks from LEGO and Pixar.

    5th Jul 2023

    Every human being on the planet possesses an abundance of creativity, adaptability and inspiration, and it stands to reason that when we come together in these communities that we call companies there should be a multiplier effect.

    Yet our collective effort usually only produces a deficit of these characteristics.

    Our organisations typically suffer from little creativity.

    I doubt that claim shocked you; we intuitively know this to be true.

    Why is this so?

    Primarily, we are burdened by underlying assumptions of how we are supposed to organise work, assumptions that for the most part originated at least 150 years ago at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

    HR can uncover better solutions to fill the deep craters in our corporate spirit with the creative, fluid and humanistic approaches from artists and innovators as well, rather than solely from management engineers.

    At the same time, agility – the ability to pivot, invent and reinvent – has never been more important in a world where change itself is occurring at a scale and pace that can leave us breathless.

    Our ability to keep up is a key leadership capability today.

    Of course, one industry has always been creative and ever-evolving, and that’s the arts.

    Might we be able to apply its leadership lessons to any other industry in order to unlock further human capability?

    I believe undoubtedly we can.

    We are burdened by underlying assumptions of how we are supposed to organise work, assumptions that for the most part originated at least 150 years ago at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution

    Implementing new habits for success

    One of HR’s contributions may be to help colleagues practise personal habits in their daily interactions that enhance the creative and adaptive capacity in themselves and others.

    Here are two of many habits that I learned from my interviews and observations within some of the most innovative organisations in the world:

    1. From LEGO: the humility to bring colleagues into your idea sessions, even if they are not in your department or function
    2. From Pixar: practising ‘yes…and’ in order to nurture courage and a volume of ideas.

    Let’s explore these habits one by one.

    1. Learning from LEGO

    Danish toy company LEGO is a fanatical proponent of prototyping and getting as many colleagues as possible to offer feedback.

    Former LEGO brand manager for southern Europe, Per Enggrob Larsen, recalls: “We would invite people from all markets to give feedback on concepts. We’d be looking five years into the future and thinking about which way the market will go.

    “We’d look at loads of drawings and knock down this huge pipeline to about twenty-five concepts. Then we’d go to year three and what will launch then. We’d see prototypes and sample product boxes.

    “We would give feedback on these concepts all the way from five years from launch down to a product launching in twelve months where we would delve into detailed discussions about box sizes, pricing and volume”.

    In this manner, LEGO reduced their new product pipeline risk by applying all the market heads to comment on possible launches, refining their thinking each year on each product from five years out all the way to one year out.

    2. A new phrase from Pixar

    Luckily, there’s a very simple hack to the most dreaded phrase in the manager’s vocabulary: ‘Yes, but…’ We all know this phrase means ‘no, sit down, be quiet.’

    When managers and even HR Directors use it copiously, they need not wonder why their colleagues refrain from offering new ideas anymore.

    The issue is not that the company lacks creativity but that the environment discourages it.

    The simple hack that I observed at Pixar Animation Studios is to get into the habit of saying, ‘Yes, and..’ instead as often as possible.

    Even when you fundamentally disagree with someone, dwelling in their reality or context even for a minute or two will help them get behind whatever solution you ultimately adopt because they feel that you listened

    Replace ‘Yes, but…’ with ‘Yes, and…’

    Changing this one word flips the whole tenor of the conversation on its head.

    It encourages, builds upon and validates the idea and the colleague you’re addressing.

    Try making a habit of immediately responding ‘Yes, and…’ to an idea.

    You may not even know what you’re going to say next, but that preamble programmes your brain to start thinking about how the concept might work, or how you can go even bigger or bolder.

    Remember, you don’t ultimately have to implement the idea, but giving it a little airtime goes a very long way in helping your team feel engaged and valued.

    You may also surprise yourself about the idea’s merits, which you hadn’t considered until you explored it a bit.

    If a leadership community is committed to a different behaviour, then the organisation’s culture will also de facto change

    A small word makes a big difference

    Even when you fundamentally disagree with someone, dwelling in their reality or context even for a minute or two will help them get behind whatever solution you ultimately adopt because they feel that you listened.

    When I introduced ‘Yes…and’ to the executive team of an antipodean mining services company, their HR department almost immediately returned to me, demanding, ‘What did you DO to them?! The difference is night and day!’.

    Of course, the difference wasn’t just that they were using the magic phrase, but the phrase triggered a different behaviour.

    If a leadership community is committed to a different behaviour, then the organisation’s culture will also de facto change.

    Like the ripples in a pond created from a small pebble, these micro-habits from LEGO, Pixar and other creative paragons teach us supremely practical but simple habits to catalyse the creative capacity in our teams.

    This is an idea I explore in my book Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset.

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    How art and play can benefit organisations

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    How art and play can benefit organisations

    Adam Kingl discusses the advantages of using art and play to develop creativity in leaders

    We may think of creativity as a product of a lifetime of cultivation and therefore is too unwieldy to introduce into the boardroom. However, creativity is something we’re born with and then develop or repress throughout our lifetimes. We can always rediscover it.  It’s odd that some people say, ‘I’m not creative,’ when put outside their comfort zone. We need to demystify creativity since it’s a natural state.

    Artist and executive facilitator Peter Moolan-Feroze says, ‘There’s a joy in not having to be an expert and in rediscovering that. For business professionals, this is often about renewal and reframing how one sees oneself in order to return to creativity.’ Helping the busy executive to do this through the medium of art is to help them move their perspectives and preferences further to the right along several spectra:

    • Words to Images
    • Introspection to Empathy
    • Adult to Child
    • Observation to Intuition
    • Replication to Exploration

    If leaders and bellwethers embrace this openness, then their organisations too increase their capability for transformation, innovation and inspiration

    What holds us back from moving to the right?  Moolan-Feroze points out that we tend to overweigh experience: ‘Expertise locks us in, our ego rises and makes us fearful of stepping outside of that state.  Expertise is important, but genuine creativity might include putting oneself in the shoes of the beginner.  That can be scary and is a primary reason we don’t innovate, so we can unlock that fear by using art to explore different parts of the self which are not so judgemental, where there is comfort in being wrong,’ or perhaps we could say comfort in pivoting from ‘impossible’ to ‘not impossible’.  That requires the right environment where creativity can reflow.  As Evan Williams, co-founder, former chairman and CEO of Twitter said1, ‘I definitely think people can learn how to be creative, but I think for the most part people unlearn how to do it.’  To create the right environment to help with this very challenge, Moolan-Feroze works with companies and executive education groups at business schools to facilitate playful exercises that tease out the participants’ perceptions of their realities and sometimes of themselves.

    For example, executives spend a lot of time trying to get better at leading change since their companies are in a constant state of flux. Moolan-Feroze leads an exercise that helps senior managers reveal how and what they think about change itself.  In this exercise, he asks them to draw a white coffee cup that he places at the front of the room. Next to the drawing, he encourages the group to write or draw their feelings and observations about the cup, then write a poem to a child about the cup. Then Moolan-Feroze asks his group to draw the cup again through the lens of the poem they’ve just composed. Now the participants are not just drawing the cup but their feelings and perceptions as they evolved throughout their poems. They have to reach for a higher understanding of their own philosophy about transformation. On one programme, an executive threw down his pastels exclaiming, ‘This is ridiculous, a waste of time!’ He was struggling to express himself outside of relying on traditional expertise. While this man didn’t see the point of the exercise on that day, a year later Moolan-Feroze received an email from the executive saying he’d taken a cup home and put it on his mantlepiece to remind him to be more openminded.

    Art as metaphor

    Another corporate example of using art as a metaphor to embrace new ways to think about how one contributes value comes from Quest International, which produced flavours and scents for consumer brands before its acquisition by Givaudan. The oral care division within Quest wished to explore the concept of their products’ essence through graphic art. After workshopping, the team ultimately landed on the style of painter Mark Rothko as an inspirational metaphor for how they might draw their company essence or DNA. After this exercise, the team rebranded itself ‘Cool Blue River’ and within a year or so was one of the most profitable teams in the company. Their department head transformed the offer by saying, ‘When we visit clients, we are not selling flavours or fragrances but essences – creative ideas in our clients’ contexts.’ Part of that offer included helping their clients shift their own creativity and reveal their brands in a new light. Quest was a hundred-year-old company, and one could easily assume they knew their purpose or reason for being. But using art and metaphor, looking at themselves through the lens or identity of Rothko, helped the oral care division to expand their vision of what they were about rather than rest complacently on their laurels.

    Much of how we observe art in business is in relation to rediscovering play and curiosity that is every child’s normal state. The rediscovery of that state reveals a new openness to change because it’s an adventure rather than a trial. If leaders and bellwethers embrace this openness, then their organisations also increase their capability for transformation, innovation and inspiration.

    In his poem Little Gidding, T S Eliot mused, ‘The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ The last time in human history that the worlds of art and commerce naturally intertwined regularly and synergistically was in the Renaissance, that revolutionary time of human invention. Today, leaders’ ability to spark success will be correlated to their willingness to rediscover lost aspects of their nature, as if from under an old and beloved rock in the garden and remember their proficiency as creative prodigies.

    Reference

    1. Chris Griffiths with Melina Costi, Grasp the Solution (Delhi: Proactive Press, 2011), 22.

    Adam Kingl is the author of Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset find out more here

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    Future of work, a new renaissance where commerce and arts meet

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    Future of work, a new renaissance where commerce and arts meet

    IN EVERY CONFERENCE AT WHICH I SPEAK, WITH EVERY CORPORATE CLIENT WITH WHOM I CONSULT, I HEAR PEOPLE SAY THAT WE NEED TO ACHIEVE A GREATER BALANCE BETWEEN THE ART AND THE SCIENCE OF WORK, PARTICULARLY WHEN THE CONVERSATION TURNS TO INNOVATION. BUT WE FEEL STUCK, UNABLE TO MAKE THE CHANGES WE KNOW WE MUST. A BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP STUDY ASKED CEOS WHERE INNOVATION RANKED AS A STRATEGIC PRIORITY. SEVENTY-NINE PERCENT SAID IT WAS A TOP THREE PRIORITY, AND YOU HAVE TO WONDER WHY THAT NUMBER WASN’T ONE HUNDRED PERCENT SINCE YOU COULD ARGUE THAT INNOVATION IS THE ONLY PROTECTION FOR REMAINING RELEVANT. SO, INNOVATION IS NOT AN ADVANTAGE; IT IS THE ADVANTAGE! HOWEVER, A MCKINSEY STUDY REPORTED THAT NINETY-FOUR PERCENT OF EMPLOYEES SAY THEIR ORGANIZATION IS INEFFECTIVE AT INNOVATION. I’M NOT SURE THAT THERE IS A BIGGER GAP IN OUR COMPANIES BETWEEN HOW CRITICAL CEOS THINK SOMETHING IS AND HOW BAD WE ARE AT IT, BETWEEN WHAT WE KNOW WE NEED TO DO AND WHAT WE ACTUALLY DO.
    A significant factor behind this knowing-doing gap is that we’ve been trained as leaders since the beginning of the Industrial Age to push out those very human qualities that would better enable our organizations to navigate these turbulent waters: inspiration, innovation, adaptability, empowerment, curiosity. While business has worked very hard to drive these qualities out with its incessantpreference to value only those merits which can be acutely measured, the arts have always toiled to drive them in.

    Yet the reason I am optimistic today is that we happen to live during one of those inflection points of history. Scientific management has had its day in the sun, making many executives and investors admittedly very wealthy. We now require a new Renaissance, a flowering of interchange between the arts and business whereby we recreate work around human fulfilment. In the privileged position of a consultant and educator to executives, I hear from leaders all around the world who are feeling an unprecedented pressure to reinvent how they lead, learn, operate, structure, incentivize, hire, promote and communicate. Business must reflect the needs of its employees, customers and society in better ways than those we have experienced. If the leadership of the corporate estate requires reimagining, then the new solutions will come less from

    the science of management and more from the art.

    If you’re creative and you know it, raise your hand
    If we’re going to adopt more practices from the arts in order to be fit for tomorrow, we might well ask if we have sufficiently innate creativity to accomplish this goal. In facilitating workshops on innovation for business, I usually begin the sessions by asking, ‘Please raise your hand if you do not regularly think of yourself as a creative person.’

    Almost inevitably, I’m confronted with a forest of arms signalling agreement with this statement. But if we reflect on our childhoods, we intuitively understand that the exact opposite would be true. As children, we are supremely creative human beings.

    The late Professor George Land at the University of Minnesota assessed sixteen hundred people over their development from children to adults on their ‘genius’ levels of creativity, defined as ‘divergent thinking.’ Research had already established that high IQ and creative aptitude are not correlated. At ages three to five, ninety-eight percent of the test subjects scored as creative geniuses. At ages eight to ten, that percent plummeted to thirty-two. At ages thirteen to fifteen, only ten percent were geniuses, and by age twenty-five, a paltry two percent were still creative paragons. Notice that by the time these children reached adulthood, their creative capacity completely and exactly inverted (Greg Orme, The Human Edge). At the youngest ages, only two percent were not creative geniuses, and as adults only two percent still were geniuses.

    These results may not surprise us. When I discuss this study, most people respond that school and society are to blame, incentivizing conformity and ‘one right answer’ thinking. If that diagnosis is true, then the solution is apparent as well. For us individually as adults and collectively as organizations, we must rediscover at least some of the rhythms, routines, incentives, and habits that we practiced as children. For starters, I’m sure we all remember that a typical day as small children included an abundance of art and play. Isn’t it funny that the corporations that we celebrate today, from Google to Kickstarter to Pixar to LEGO, create those same environments of art and play in their cultures that most of our organizations work terribly hard to suppress?

    Human expression to human engineering
    In humankind’s quest to perfect the process by which we create wealth, the previous ménage à trois among science, business and art became a cosier domestic arrangement between science and commerce, elbowing the arts into the periphery in terms of the habits, goals and philosophies of leadership and organizational life. This paucity of artistic creativity and inspiration is a symptom of the Industrial Revolution, which perfected the philosophy of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management, whose hypothesis was that the way in which we organize business is to drive efficiency in and variance out, implying a human labourer is but a cog in an industrial machine. Taylorism was specifically perfect for the manufacturing heyday of a century ago when Henry Ford once famously quipped, ‘Why is it every time I hire a pair of hands a brain comes attached?’ Over a short period of time, the skyscape of business lost its constellation of artistic exploration – a critical mindset laid to waste. We dehumanised our companies in perfecting Taylorism and combined that philosophy with the obeyance-driven, hierarchical architecture of the Roman legions. Yet today, we lament that we lack humanity in our work life. Why are we surprised?

    The fault does not reside with our front-line employees but with our leaders and their philosophy of governance from an era and context that effectively ended half a century ago. Some predicted that the digital revolution or information age was to herald a nirvana of wealth and contentment. But while the technologies and industries changed, the manner in which we organised work did not, so work-life continues to be unliveable. The German sociologist Max Weber remarked, ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.’ (Anthony Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity) We still find ourselves in a cage of our own making, unprepared for a world in which the need for humanising is increasing by the hour.

    Therefore, adaptability, creativity, and inspiration are the leadership qualities that our organizations require today. Both employer and employee need these capabilities now, and we don’t have centuries anymore to develop them. Making these qualities preeminent in our organizations is the next revolution. You can be at the forefront of this changing tide. In rediscovering art and play, two virtuous habits that spark and nurture those characteristics of innovation including divergent thinking, collaboration, mindfulness, inspiration, exploring untraditional ideas and picturing the future, we uncover anew the state of mind and spirit that we have always naturally possessed. We begin to encourage an environment that allows our companies collectively to discover what we know individually that we have always craved.

    Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset by Adam Kingl is published by Kogan Page, available now. Adam is on the faculty of the UCL School of Management and Hult International Business School.

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    A three-part framework to ignite team creativity

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    A three-part framework to ignite team creativity

    Very early on in my experience teaching and consulting to creative companies and arts organisations, I identified a three-part framework to invent and explore new ideas within a team dynamic: ideate, evaluate, select.

    This structure does not imply that you accomplish everything in one conversation; it might require several. The approach outlined below can be facilitated with groups as small as three and as large as a hundred. But this is a structure that has served me well, and you will see as you read on how this may be applied implicitly in your own team meetings.

    1. Ideate

    Everyone proposes ideas. Nothing is shot down. You’re going for quantity, not quality. So much research on creativity indicates that the best ideas emerge from many ideas, rather than one, proposed at the beginning. Ask the team to consider the answers to the ‘exam question’ well before you all meet in person. This will be helpful for the introverts in your team. Stress that you want a LOT of ideas rather than each person to bring ‘their best idea’. You don’t want the team to edit itself, as the group itself can pull out value and explore the hidden depths in an idea more than the individual owner of the idea could. When you get together, ask everyone to say or write down (writing it all down on a wall is best) all their ideas without any feedback. Then ask, ‘What else?’ Ideas proposed may have sparked new ones that haven’t yet been offered. Capture those topics too.

    At this stage, think of yourself and your team as an oak tree. The oak wants to produce more little trees, but it doesn’t know where the best combination of soil, moisture and sunlight will be. So its strategy is to drop thousands of acorns over as wide a space as possible. The tree maximises its chances that some of those acorns will land on the perfect plot of land.

     

    On the other hand, most organisations when trying to produce new ideas behave more like pandas when they try to reproduce. Pandas may want to produce little pandas, but they seem to want to get it right in one go or not attempt the activity. So a panda couple will try once per year if they’re lucky and frequently requiring the encouragement of their zoo keepers: mood music, aroma therapy, romantic dinners of bamboo canapes, you name it. It’s such a rare occurrence that it becomes a global headline when a zoo announces a new baby panda. As a result of these divergent strategies from nature, we know that we have no shortage of oak trees in the world, while pandas are an endangered species. Here is the lesson: be the oak tree, not the panda!

    1. Evaluate

    Only when the team has a wheelbarrow full of ideas should it even begin to assess which ones to explore further.  Only now do you formally close the ‘ideate’ stage, and move to ‘evaluate’ when you now want people to respond to the proposed ideas. The team should all play the role of optimists first, and only when that stage is complete should the leader ask for devil’s advocates.  In other words, encourage people to first only ‘yes…and’ rather than ‘yes…but’ the ideas, or at the very least nominate their favourite ideas and why. Try to solicit at least one ‘yes…and’ for every idea. Only at the end of this stage should you ask the team why they may have concerns about some of the ideas, why some ideas may not work, or why they don’t excite.

    As the leader, you should always contribute last in the ‘evaluate’ phase! If you state your opinion at this early stage, everyone else will assume that the decision has already been made. And if the leader judges every idea as soon as it’s proposed, immediately playing devil’s advocate, they find in short order that no one pitches any more ideas! Before deciding to kill a proposition, it’s useful as well to consider the mood and energy of the room. In this way, the soil is fertilised for the next request for pitching new ideas, as everyone’s egos have been protected. After this exercise, then one can reasonably decide a short list of the best concepts.

    1. Select

    Based on the previous stage, what ideas excite us most, have the biggest upside, the smallest downside, the easiest to implement? Which ideas, though perhaps difficult to execute, would be worth the effort? You don’t necessarily have to bring it down to the one idea and declare, ‘OK.  We’re doing this!’ The reality in corporate life is that you may now have to run this by other people who are not in the room. However, you now have a lot of reasons, perspectives and additional contexts to contribute to those conversations as a result of the team’s brainstorming. The team leader needs the bigger picture perspective in making the selection of which idea or ideas to pursue from the shortlist. Make sure the team knows the criteria in advance of the exercise, and then apply those criteria with some rigour. In that manner, selection is not subjective, random or showing favouritism.

    I cannot stress enough that, regardless of the size of the group, you must devote adequate time to this exercise. First, while you may reach the point where all ideas in the room are captured if you hurry, you will not have true buy-in from the group. Sure, everyone will have dutifully completed the exercises in the time allotted, but it will become about task completion rather than shared agreement that everyone can get behind these answers. Second and related point, the meeting is not only about capturing ideas. You will require at least as much time to discuss which ideas the group will willingly advocate as the time you spent generating those ideas in the first place. Third, you need time to draw out multiple views. If you rush, the extroverted personalities and/or the most senior people in the room will jump in with their ideas, and the introverts and junior colleagues will defer. But silence does not imply assent; it might simply mean that some people were not given adequate time or space to share their opinions. Fourth and finally, and perhaps it goes without saying, but the participants in this exercise should ideally include those with the authority and influence to align the company or department around the decisions made during the meeting(s), but these discussions should not solely involve these people.

    Any manager in any industry will be confronted with challenges and opportunities that require leading a brainstorming session to identify an unobvious solution. The good news is that creative facilitation is a skills rather than a genetic trait, and therefore the technical skills and structure to lead that session effectively are the very same skills and techniques that any successful team in a creative arts organisation would employ.

    Adam Kingl is author of Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset.

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    Article by ADAM KINGL
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    Creativity: A key skill for the future

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    Creativity: A key skill for the future
    Future of work expert Adam Kingl tells UNLEASH why the art of management, not the science, is what’s needed to foster creativity in business.

    23 May 2023
    |
    By: Adam Kingl
    Why You Should Care
    Adaptability, creativity, and inspiration are the leadership qualities that our organizations require today.

    Your organization can be at the forefront of this changing tide.

    Adam Kingl tells UNLEASH more.

    Every human being on the planet possesses an abundance of creativity, adaptability and inspiration, and it stands to reason that when we come together in these communities that we call companies there should be a multiplier effect.

    Yet, our collective effort usually only produces a deficit of these characteristics. Our organizations typically suffer from little to no creativity. In fact, focus on innovation in recent years has been cut in half according to a McKinsey study of over two hundred global companies. I doubt that claim shocked you; we intuitively know this to be true.

    Why is this so? Primarily, we are burdened by underlying assumptions of how we are supposed to organize work, assumptions that for the most part originated at least 150 years old at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

    We can uncover better solutions to fill the deep craters in our corporate spirit with the creative, fluid, and humanistic approaches from artists and innovators as well, rather than solely from management engineers.

    In every conference at which I speak, with every corporate client with whom I consult, I hear that we need to achieve a greater balance between the art and the science of work, particularly when the conversation turns to innovation. But we feel stuck, unable to make the changes we know we must.

    A Boston Consulting Group study asked CEOs where innovation ranked as a strategic priority. 79% said it was a top three priority, and you have to wonder why that number wasn’t 100% since you could argue that innovation is the only protection for remaining relevant.

    So innovation is not an advantage; it is the advantage!

    Creative effectiveness
    However, a McKinsey study reported that 94% of employees say that their organisations are ineffective at innovation. I’m not sure that there is a bigger gap between how critical CEOs think something is and how bad we are at it, between what we know we need to do and what we actually do.

    A significant factor behind this knowing-doing gap is that we’ve been trained as leaders since the beginning of the Industrial Age to push out those very human qualities that would better enable our organizations to navigate these turbulent waters: inspiration, innovation, adaptability, empowerment, curiosity.

    While business has worked very hard to drive these qualities out with its incessant preference to value only those merits which can be acutely measured, the arts have always toiled to drive them in.

    Yet the reason I am optimistic today is that we happen to live during one of those inflection points of history. Scientific management has had its day in the sun, making many executives and investors admittedly very wealthy.

    We now require a new Renaissance, a flowering of interchange between the arts and business whereby we recreate work around human fulfilment. In the privileged position of a consultant and educator to executives, I hear from leaders all around the world who are feeling an unprecedented pressure to reinvent how they lead, learn, operate, structure, incentivize, hire, promote and communicate.

    Business must reflect the needs of its employees, customers and society in better ways than those we have experienced. If the leadership of the corporate estate requires reimagining, then the new solutions will come less from the science of management and more from the art.

    Human expression to human engineering
    In humankind’s quest to perfect the process by which we create wealth, the previous ménage à trois among science, business and art became a cozier domestic arrangement between science and commerce, elbowing the arts into the periphery in terms of the habits, goals and philosophies of leadership and organizational life.

    This paucity of artistic creativity and inspiration is a symptom of the Industrial Revolution, which perfected the philosophy of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management, whose hypothesis was that the way in which we organize business is to drive efficiency in and variance out, implying a human laborer is but a cog in an industrial machine.

    Taylorism was specifically perfect for the manufacturing heyday of a century ago when Henry Ford once famously quipped, ‘Why is it every time I hire a pair of hands a brain comes attached?’

    Over a short period of time, the skyscape of business lost its constellation of artistic exploration – a critical mindset laid to waste. We dehumanized our companies in perfecting Taylorism and combined that philosophy with the obeyance-driven, hierarchical architecture of the Roman legions.

    Yet today, we lament that we lack humanity in our work life. Why are we surprised?

    The fault does not reside with our front-line employees but with our leaders and their philosophy of governance from an era and context that effectively ended half a century ago.

    Some predicted that the digital revolution or information age was to herald a nirvana of wealth and contentment. But while the technologies and industries changed, the manner in which we organized work did not, so work-life continues to be unlivable.

    The German sociologist Max Weber remarked, ‘The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.’ We still find ourselves in a cage of our own making, unprepared for a world in which the need for humanizing is increasing by the hour.

    Therefore, adaptability, creativity, and inspiration are the leadership qualities that our organizations require today. Both employer and employee need these capabilities now, and we don’t have centuries anymore to develop them. Making these qualities preeminent in our organizations is the next revolution.

    You can be at the forefront of this changing tide. In rediscovering art and play, two virtuous habits that spark and nurture those characteristics of innovation including divergent thinking, collaboration, mindfulness, inspiration, exploring untraditional ideas and picturing the future, we uncover anew the state of mind and spirit that we have always naturally possessed.

    We begin to encourage an environment that allows our companies collectively to discover what we know individually that we have always craved.

    Adam Kingl is an educator who specializes in the areas of leadership creativity, innovation and adaptability.

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    How Regular Breaks Can Increase Productivity

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    HOW REGULAR BREAKS CAN INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY

    WRITER Adam Kingl

    Perhaps the biggest question in creativity is, ‘What do you do when you’re stuck?’ In interviewing Andrew Reich, one of the head writers and executive producers of hit TV sitcom Friends, I discovered that there are a number of techniques in leading the creative process that can be generalised and applied to any function or industry. One of the techniques that emerged repeatedly was to embrace taking breaks and changing one’s environment.

    Sometimes the solution is not to encourage a different answer but spark a different mood or energy in the room. In Japanese gardens, if you walk from one area to the next, the garden might suddenly look and feel entirely different, which in Japanese is loosely translated as ‘change feeling.’ If you walked into the writers’ room of hit TV sitcom Friends, so often what they’d be doing would not look as if they were working.

    They’d be tossing a ball around, playing some stupid game, or just talking about something that seemed totally off-subject. But very often they would do that for a while, and then someone would ask, ‘Wait a minute. Is there a story in this?’ So often, appearing as if they were wasting time would lead to ‘Wait, there is something here!’ There were times when the room would just get really quiet. Everyone was stuck. So how do you get unstuck? Andrew Reich understood that sometimes the group just needed to blow off steam, or be shocked awake, or laugh, or indeed just ‘change feeling.’

    If the next level of unsticking a group is to change mood, Andrew also returned to his origins of creative writing and would take a group into a completely different environment. He relates, ‘I’ve taken teams of about four people on a walk, going back to my earliest writing experiences, maybe not with twelve people because that becomes a parade rather than a walk, and you end up having a bunch of separate conversations. But after sitting for a long time and suddenly you’re out in the fresh air and moving, that alone shakes things up.

    Or completely the opposite – a nap! I’m a big believer in napping for refreshing the brain. Sometimes you have to get out of the room when you’re hitting a wall. It’s also about keeping perspective to relieve the pressure I may be putting on myself. It’s just a television show. Sometimes it starts to feel so weighty and serious, I have to step back and let go of whatever attachment of the moment I’m obsessing about. I also don’t want to apply too much process in the writers’ room, particularly early in the brainstorming or gestating of ideas. Structure comes later. First, we have an interesting idea or dilemma proposed. Then we ask how we fit that into a structure that makes it satisfying.’

    Working harder doesn’t always produce better results, but creating or recreating the conditions or environment for inspiration does. There is an urban myth that renowned TV writer and show runner Aaron Sorkin of hits like The West Wing would take five showers a day because he comes up with so many great ideas there. If you think, ‘I have to think of a great idea for a show,’ you’re just not going to.

    The best ideas really often do suddenly appear – a force outside of yourself. So how do you put yourself in a position to be receptive to those things? How do you relax because it will never happen if you’re looking at your phone and doom scrolling? Andrew finds it may happen on a walk, being in nature, a beach, a forest, and of course in the shower. You do relax there to the point where you realise, ‘I was clenching and working so hard, but as soon as I relaxed, ding! There’s the solution.’ You cannot ‘hard work’ yourself into creativity.

    Once you have an idea and an outline, then you can work hard. But at the inspiration point of the process, there’s no forcing that. You just have to trust the process, yourself and the environment that help you get there.