Brain scan

How Are We Creative? The Realm of Neuroscience

I attempt to stay firmly and proudly in the practitioner camp in terms of my perspective and professional life. Research is a tremendous gift to humankind in our search for truth, particularly in this age of so-called ‘fake news’. Could I say anything less, given I’ve spent most of my life studying in and working for universities? But for the realm in which I operate in terms of my clients, that of the business world, the most important question to answer is, ‘What do I do with this insight? How does this move me or my organization forward?’ So how might we apply some of the insights I learned from the realm of neuroscience?

We know that we have to build in time for the brain to focus on the new and unexpected, proactively seeking surprise, reflection and experimentation. The best advice an executive coach ever gave me was to block out time, at least three hours but ideally a day, in my diary every week that was just for me. This time was sacrosanct; no one could get a meeting or call with me during that window unless the topic was specifically a creative or adaptive challenge. And this coach was adamant that I should not use the time to catch up with work. It was not ‘free’ time but had its own purpose, which was most certainly not to fulfil the day to day but to engage my creative muscles.

I found that Friday afternoons worked best for a couple of reasons. First, as the work week was nearing its close, colleagues and clients slowed their pace a little, and some escaped early for the weekend, so it was easier to keep that time blocked out. Second, since changing my environment would also stimulate different neurons in my brain, Friday afternoons were also easier to spend outside my or my clients’ offices. Surely maximizing my creative opportunities would not be best served sitting at my desk at work, staring at my trusty laptop, waiting for inspiration to pounce, jaguar-like, onto my unsuspecting scalp. So even if I did book a creative meeting with a colleague, I would usually insist that we hold it elsewhere: a park, museum, gallery, funky café, you get the idea. This tip reminds me of a similar piece of advice given to me by one my mentors many years ago: ‘Pick different routes to work.’ In other words, don’t get stuck in routine and allow yourself to be surprised by different sights, paths, parks, trains, bus routes, stores, blocks and people.

The funny thing is that, when I did have a meeting outside the office in an untraditional space, inevitably my colleagues would comment how refreshing and stimulating it was to meet in a new environment, yet when the next meeting request came along, they usually suggested meeting at our desks or in a bland conference room again! It just goes to show how pernicious and deep our habits are, how dominant and comforting it is to dwell in Beta state – where our brain wave frequency is stuck in ‘gentle awareness’ mode. It would be comforting to assume we could disrupt our environments and routines as little as possible and somehow transform into creative geniuses through willpower alone. As Hemingway mused in The Sun Also Rises, ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’ But our own brains’ habits oppose that ambition until we train them to be receptive.

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Humanising leadership through the arts: part II

Humanising leadership through the arts: part II

Adam Kingl examines why we’re lacking in creativity and demonstrates how leaders can make simple changes to shift mindsets and reinvigorate their organisations

In the first part of this two-part article, I made the case for recreating work around human fulfilment by learning from the arts and curbing the demise of creativity in our organisations. But if we’re going to adopt more practices from the arts to be fit for tomorrow, we might well ask if we have sufficiently innate creativity to accomplish this goal. When I facilitate workshops on innovation for business, I usually begin a session by saying: “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.

Creative capacity inverted

The late professor George Land at the University of Minnesota assessed 1,600 people over their development from children to adults on their ‘genius’ levels of creativity, defined as ‘divergent thinking’. With research already establishing that high IQ and creative aptitude are not correlated, Land’s study produced some intriguing results. At ages three to five, 98 per cent of test subjects scored as creative geniuses. At ages eight to 10, that plummeted to 32 per cent. At ages 13-15, only 10 per cent were geniuses, and by age 25, a paltry two per cent were still creative paragons. Notice that by the time these children reached adulthood, their creative capacity completely and exactly inverted (see Greg Orme’s The Human Edge). At the youngest ages, only two per cent were not considered creative geniuses, while as adults only two per cent continued to score as creative geniuses.

These results may not surprise us. When I discuss this study, most people respond that school and society are to blame, incentivising 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 organisations, 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 and Kickstarter to Pixar and LEGO, create those same environments of art and play in their cultures that most of our organisations work terribly hard to suppress?

Catalysing shifts in mindset

While I am indeed advocating for revolutionising how we work, I stress that such revolutions begin at the level of the individual within their own work life. Leaders, of course, have an overweighted influence in what is prioritised and how their culture is role-modelled among their teams and organisations. The payoff then has a high rate of return in that a small degree of personal change may catalyse widespread shifts in habit and mindset in the people around the leader. Such shifts then allow both leader and team, and even company, to enable the priorities of innovation, adaptability and inspiration to materialise rather than to languish eternally as aspirations.

In humankind’s quest to perfect the process by which we create wealth, the previous ménage à trois between 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 organisational life. This paucity of artistic creativity and inspiration is a symptom of the Industrial Revolution (1760-1914), an era that perfected the philosophy of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management. That philosophy hypothesised that the way in which we should organise business is to drive efficiency in and variance out, implying that a human labourer is but a cog in an industrial machine. ‘Taylorism’ was perfect for the manufacturing heyday of a century ago when Henry Ford once famously quipped, “Why is it that every time I hire a pair of hands a brain comes attached?”

Nurturing adaptability, creativity and inspiration

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? Adaptability, creativity and inspiration are the leadership qualities that our organisations require today. Both employer and employee need these capabilities now and we don’t have centuries to develop them anymore. Making these qualities preeminent in our organisations is the next revolution and there’s still time to be at the forefront of this changing tide.

In rediscovering the virtuous habits of art and play, we can spark and nurture the characteristics of innovation. This encompasses divergent thinking, collaboration, mindfulness, inspiration, as well as the ability to explore untraditional ideas and picture the future. In so doing, we can uncover anew the state of mind and spirit that we have always naturally possessed and encourage an environment among our companies that we have always craved as individuals.

Read the first part of this two-part series on Business Impact.

Adam Kingl is the author of Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023) and an adjunct faculty member at UCL School of Management and Hult Ashridge Business School. He is also an associate of the Møller Leadership Institute at Churchill College, University of Cambridge.

 

** This blog originally appeared on businessgraduatesassociation.com on 23 July 2023.

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On Perfection and Innovation

Perfection is not a precondition for invention or reinvention.  The culinary arts teach us this lesson so aptly.    

The doyen of fine dining in New York City, Chef Andre Soltner, speaks to an important concept in pursuing excellence when he said that ‘it works well most nights,’ the idea that perfection is worthy of the pursuit itself but may not ever be fully attainable.  As Martha Ortiz, the chef at Mexico City’s Dulce Patria, describes, ‘Creativity becomes a vessel for us to deliver the flavours of our food.  I don’t believe the perfect dish exists, but as chefs, part of our craft is striving for perfection hoping to create a masterpiece.’[i]  Or as chef Ana Roš of Slovenia’s Hiša Franko observes, ‘You dream about perfection and are always on the hunt, but…imperfection is the engine for evolution.  I do not believe there are signature dishes that should never be changed or modified.  Evolution, like the rest of nature, is unstoppable and we must always adapt to change.’[ii] 

There are a few reasons that we never achieve complete perfection.  First, perfection is in the eye of the beholder; nothing would be perceived as perfect to everyone.  Second, short of robotic manufacturing, no output will always be identical to its predecessors.  It is as important to acknowledge this in cooking as it is in music, theatre, painting, or professional services such as management consulting.  The nature of human-produced repetition inevitably includes variation, which by definition precludes perfection: Third, one never experiences the same sensation twice: ‘All sensations are modified through repetition, for the very fact of recurrence alters the nature of the sensation.’[iii] 

Just as one chef would not invent a new dish in exactly the same way as another colleague, the culinary arts teach us at least three approaches to innovation.  Perhaps the fastest method is to combine one idea with a previously unrelated one and brainstorm what that marriage could resemble, such as Chef Bobby Chinn in Hanoi creating Wasabi Mash.  This routine produces a high volume of new concepts, which is always desirable.  A second process is the singular, novel idea, and the stories of these chefs demonstrates that this takes time and cannot be forced.  A new ingredient such as Ferran Adrià’s foam (an ‘ingredient’ we didn’t see on our plates more than twenty years ago) required proactively creating the space for the concept to gestate and the patience to iterate.  The third method is personal reinvention, such as Chef Alain Passard’s (of three Michelin starred restaurant Arpege in Paris) philosophical pivot from meat and fish to mostly vegetarian cuisine.  Our choices, routines, habits, and assumptions can stifle creativity if we do not occasionally step back and reflect on which of these help us and which are no longer useful.  Redefining what we do or how we wish the world to perceive us can open new avenues and in itself realise personal adaptability.    

Adam Kingl, www.adamkingl.com, is the author of Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset. Please visit his website for more on his writing and speaking on these themes.  


[i] Rahim Kanani, A Wealth of Insight: The World’s Best Chefs on Creativity, Leadership, and Perfection (Black Truffle Press, 2019) 130. 

[ii] Ibid, 23. 

[iii] Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 73.

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Is your organization ready for ‘Generation Blizzard’?

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

Alice Dietrich FwF FKj5tBo Unsplash

Managing Creativity and Risk

Managing Creativity and Risk

Organisations usually take a view that to innovate is to take more risks, and so risk and creativity are conflated.  As I was researching my book on business creativity, Sparking Success, I interviewed Sir Clive Gillinson, Managing and Creative Director of Carnegie Hall in New York City, who had a clear and specific perspective on balancing creativity and risk.   Clive argues that risk isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you have to possess the right perspective about holding the two conditions of invention and risk in balance: ‘You can’t run anything successfully without taking risks.  My view is the greatest risk of all is trying to avoid risk because then you’re almost guaranteed to fail.  So I’m an absolute believer in taking risks.  I’m not interested unless we’re taking risks.  We have got to be breaking new ground all the time, trying new things out.  But the most crucial thing to me is not about taking a risk, which is fundamental, but it’s how you manage risk.’  

Gillinson admits that he started out by taking risks which were probably unacceptable.  When he moved from being a cellist in the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) one day to being manager of the orchestra the next, he heard that the conductor, cellist and one of the greatest artists who ever lived, Mstislav Rostropovich, was going to be celebrating his sixtieth birthday with two orchestras.  Clive went to Rostropovich’s manager and said, ‘This is crazy.  Why is he doing this with two orchestras?  It should be one orchestra so there’s a singular focus on him.’  She said, ‘Well, it’s such a massive project that each orchestra can’t afford it on its own.’  So Clive offered that the LSO would do it solo.  And she said, ‘But you’re on the verge of bankruptcy,’ and they were on the verge of bankruptcy when Clive became the interim manager.  That was the only reason he went into management in the first place – the previous managing director had lost his job as a result.  But Gillinson retorted, ‘That’s the way it’s got to be done for Rostropovich.  It’s such an extraordinary project for one of the world’s greatest artists, I’m sure we’ll find the money.’  At that, the manager went to Rostropovich, and she told him the story about this lunatic at the LSO and what he’d said, and he responded, ‘Well, if he believes in me like that, I believe in him.  And if he’s a cellist as well, then that settles it!’  Rostropovich brought the project to the LSO, they did raise the money, and they were better off financially and artistically for having taken the risk.  

Gillinson admits, ‘The fact is at that time I did not know how to calculate risk, so it was purely based on my view that this project had to happen in that way, and if I believed it, then I could get other people to believe it.  But that was, I would say, an unacceptable risk.  When I went to the board and declared, “We’ll raise the money,” they said, “Are you sure you can raise it?”  I said yes, but obviously I had no idea except my conviction that it had to happen.  Nowadays we would never do that.  But my view about projects is, firstly, I’m not interested in good ideas.  They have to be great ideas because who are you ever going to excite about just a good idea, and why are they going to give you money?  It’s got to be extraordinary.’

Now, unlike the Rostropovich example, Clive will work out the strategy with his team for how the organization will implement the idea and how to raise money for it, but at the end of the day there is still risk.  No matter how much you’re convinced yourself, you still have to convince other people.  But at the same time, Gillinson can’t ever remember a situation where he couldn’t persuade others to back an idea if he and his team were absolutely convinced in the first place that the idea was amazing.  

For example, creating the National Youth Orchestra of America was a huge demand, and Carnegie Hall decided on the level of risk they were willing to take before embarking on the project in earnest. They decided that if they could get a few founder patrons to donate a million dollars each over five years (because they felt it couldn’t be launched with just one year’s funding – it had to be five years at the very least), then they’d have the possibility of underpinning the project with long-term funding.  The team thought this was going to cost something like ten million dollars over five years.  If a critical mass of founder patrons could be found who would give sufficient backing so that everybody believed it’s got to happen and will happen, then they’d raise the rest of the money.  And that’s exactly what they did; Carnegie Hall succeeded in getting three or four founder patrons at a million dollars each, and that was sufficient to provide the launchpad.  

Clive recollects, ‘If we were able to get several people to put in a million as founder donors, that tells you about the importance of our idea.  I mean, that’s a lot of money to commit!  You would never be able to sell it if you haven’t got a great idea.  There wouldn’t be a hope in hell.  The fact is, by going out and saying we’ve got to raise three or four founder patrons, we were effectively checking risk because it meant that if nobody had come in, we would have known it wasn’t a compelling enough idea, and we wouldn’t have gone with it.  If nobody had given anything, you have to listen to that.  So that was how we approached that project – you eliminate some of the risk, and you calculate the rest of the risk.’

Once you have those platform advocates, it’s simpler to attract other supporters because they see that the idea has already been vetted.  After that stage, it’s much easier to raise money for something that exists.  As Clive elucidates, ‘The minute the National Youth Orchestra play, and people can hear what it is, and they can hear how extraordinary it is, it’s much easier to be inspired about giving money than people selling you an idea, where you have to believe it when they say, “This is going to be one of the greatest National Youth Orchestras in the world.  It’ll be a phenomenal orchestra with huge impact in terms of international understanding as they travel the world as youth ambassadors for their country.”  The theory is always less powerful than the fact.  The minute it exists, it’s much more fundable.’  

Gillinson set Carnegie Hall a target: they would only go public with the National Youth Orchestra and put it on the launchpad if they had raised three to four of the ten million dollars they required to fund the first five years.  Thereafter, they’d still be raising more money, but by that time they would be flying with commitments around a real project rather than a concept.  If the worst came to worst after two or three years, it’s possible that Carnegie may have had to scrap the Youth Orchestra if they simply couldn’t raise any more money.  But the initial risk they had to take related to the fact that they knew that once the orchestra had performed, people would be blown away by it, and that fact therefore would draw in the rest of the money, and that is precisely what happened.  Clive recalls, ‘We definitely didn’t raise the full five years of funding before the orchestra played.  You’ve got to try your very best to create a position where you’re not taking one hundred percent risk.  We’d eliminated thirty to fifty percent of the risk before we started, whereas I hadn’t eliminated any of the risk at the LSO with the Rostropovich decision.’    

Clive is really speaking about the power of displaying a prototype rather than merely summoning an image of what an idea could be.  This practice is core to Pixar Animation Studios’ success with their ever-present habit to ‘Display’.  If you are walking through the Studios, you can’t help but encounter work-in-progress, whether it’s an open screening of the dailies of a film, or a gallery of character studies or storyboard drawings.  These displays serve as an instant visual representation of the state of play, inviting everyone, even those just walking by, to contribute.  Thinking of work as in a state of perpetual Beta and inviting comments, questions and improvements facilitate learning, widen ownership of the challenge, and ultimately lead to better outputs.  All told, Pixar will often produce twelve thousand storyboard drawings to make one ninety-minute feature film.1  They wholeheartedly buy into the power of prototyping.  

Gillinson remembers another aspect of eliminating risk was not only attracting donors at the beginning but attracting world-famous artists to collaborate: ‘I knew that, in a country the size of America, the standard of the students would be among the greatest in the world.  But I also knew we had to get a great conductor for the National Youth Orchestra at the beginning.  That would also de-risk the project.  I managed to get Valery Gergiev, and Gergiev bought it sight unseen because he believed in Carnegie Hall, and this is where having a brand has huge power.  But you have to have such a compelling idea, and you’re pitching it at a level that’s right because without a great conductor, we wouldn’t have gotten concerts and television in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Proms in London.  Without Gergiev, we wouldn’t have gotten Joshua Bell, one of the world’s great violin soloists.  So all the pieces have to interact with one another, and if you go for a safer approach, if we’d gone for a conductor who wasn’t one of the world’s superstars, none of the other pieces would have fallen into place.  You’ve got to go for broke on every single part of implementation.  I knew we had to get the international concerts and television, but we also had to communicate that Carnegie Hall was an institution that will only do things if they’re extraordinary.  With all our projects, we set out to create a magnet for talent, so all the parts work together to ensure that every element is world class.’

Once a company has the reputation for ‘going for broke’ on absolute quality with every offer to the market, there is a shift in the customer-supplier relationship whereby market research is to a large extent disintermediated by the trust in the supplier.  In other words, the customer trusts that a new product or service is worthwhile because they trust the source of the offer.  Without the permission to invent things the world doesn’t know it needs, a company can never reach tomorrow.  Market research only tells you about what already exists or what the world already knows.  

Clive recognises this truth: ‘Steve Jobs sold things that market research would have told him he couldn’t sell.  But Jobs’ view was always, “I’ve got to create something that people want, but they don’t know they want it until I’ve created it.”  That was exactly the same with the Walkman at Sony.  Sony did all the market research around the Walkman, which told them it wouldn’t work.  Japanese companies were not necessarily known at the time to be huge risk-takers.  Sony chairman Akio Morita was, however, and he said, “I know it will work.  We’re doing it.  Never mind the market research.”  He believed in it, and of course it was an extraordinary success.’

To achieve radical creativity requires questioning how much we are managing ourselves and our teams in terms of what is acceptable novelty.  Are the boundaries we set as leaders too tight?  Exponential creativity perhaps means managing less.  Highly ‘manageable’ creativity will most likely at best earn incremental improvements rather than revolutionary ones.  As author and educator Richard Farson concluded with his characteristically radical candour: ‘Real creativity, the kind that is responsible for breakthroughs…always violates the rules….  In most organizations, when we say we desire creativity, we really mean manageable creativity.  We don’t mean raw, dynamic, radical creativity that requires us to change….  The problem with creativity in a lot of companies (and a lot of individuals as well) is that they just don’t want to go through all the necessary changes.  They want creativity the easy way.  Manageable creativity means lukewarm, half-ass creativity, which unfortunately usually means no creativity at all.’ 2  

1 Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc. (London: Transworld Publishers, 2014).

2 Richard Farson, Management of the Absurd (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) 131.

For more on this topic, please see my book, Sparking Success: Why every leader needs to develop a creative mindset (Kogan Page, 2023). 

     

Sparking Success

Humanising leadership through the arts: part 2

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

Manwithsparkler

Making Time for Creativity

Is creativity a product of nature or nurture?  While some people have a higher proclivity to creative expression, we all have the potential; it’s part of human nature.  But we are forced to specialise so early in our development, we shut down pursuits, interests and disciplines unconscionably early.  The arts are often the first to go, either because parents push their children toward so-called ‘safe’ subject matters to set them up for stable careers, such as engineering, mathematics and the like, or schools shove art, music, creative writing and drama into the periphery of the curriculum, if they appear at all.  In grade school, I recall that my music and art classes only occurred once a week versus daily sessions in math, history and science.  There may be exceptions, but most schools do not hesitate to shave funding from the arts at the first sign of budget cuts.  As the harried principal shouts when firing the titular music teacher in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus, ‘If I’m forced to choose between Mozart and reading, writing and long division, I choose long division.’  To which, the music teacher Mr. Holland retorts, ‘Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene.  Sooner or later, these kids aren’t going to have anything to read or write about.’[i]

Too many schools minimise or ignore creativity, too many parents discourage it and too many companies devalue it.  Our firms abrogate responsibility for innovation to a select fraction of the employee population, often someone with a lofty title like Chief Creative Officer, which of course tacitly communicates to the rest of the company that they should leave creativity to the specialists.  This is not only a shame but a great waste since seventy-five percent of productivity gains can be traced back to bottom-up ideas from front-line employees.[ii]  Or our company’s leaders encourage innovation in their words but deprioritize it in their actions, always selecting the safe, the incremental and the staid in their decisions.  Or if we observe how our leaders spend their time, and by extension how we should spend ours, they are tacitly telling us that creativity is relegated to possibly a few minutes a week and ideally in one’s free time, not when we’re ‘on the clock’.  In my advisory work, I usually find this last condition, lack of time, to be the most common and pernicious reason why people tell me they cannot be creative at work.

The problem is that if we budget very little time in our lives to innovating or adapting to try new ideas, we typically incur a double deficit in our creative capacity.  First, we never make the time because creativity is always at the bottom of our priority list.  Inevitably, we can never plan on all the firefighting and pop-up meetings that will occur in the week, so our real week is much more full of ‘dealing with the day to day’ than our diaries suggested on Monday morning.

Second, if we do keep and honour a tiny fraction of our week or month to creative thinking, brainstorming and the like, we find our attention span is constantly distracted, and we never seem to produce anything worthwhile as a result.  So we face each new window of opportunity for innovation with an ever growing, soul-sucking impression of dread or, at the least, resignation.

What we’re learning now is that we’re actually training our brains to deliver this depressing result.  These hurried, captured moments of precious time for innovation yield paltry results because our brains just can’t turn on the magic for such short, unsustainable periods of time. Because we don’t have balance between the mundane and the creative, we can’t achieve creativity even if we give ourselves those fleeting thirty minutes a week to do so.  We must change our routines so that we give our brains more time to marinate in innovative thinking or expression and increase the frequency of those marinades.  Like any muscle, the creative function in our brains requires exercise in order to improve, but as importantly, to be receptive to create in the first place.

The point is not that we denude all traditional routine from our organisations;  we need some of that.  But the hundreds of companies that I’ve worked with usually operate at a ratio of about ninety-nine percent business as usual to one percent creative time…on a good week!  So if you’re feeling uncomfortable that I might be suggesting something like a fifty-fifty balance, I’m not necessarily saying that.  But the better ratio surely has to be closer to eighty-twenty at least? I’m merely entreating us to ask ourselves honestly, ‘Is the balance right?’

____________________________

For more on my thinking on this topic, please see my book, Sparking Success: Why every leader needs to develop a creative mindset [Kogan Page, 2023].  

i. Mr. Holland’s Opus, directed by Stephen Herek (1995; Burbank, CA: Hollywood Pictures).

ii. Bilal Gokpinar, ‘Driving Efficiency Gains Starts with Frontline Employee Innovation,’ UCL School of Management, 21 July, 2021, https://www.mgmt.ucl.ac.uk/news/driving-efficiency-gains-starts-frontline-employee-innovation.

Beach scene

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

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
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How art and play can benefit organisations

HR lessons on creativity from LEGO and Pixar

by 

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.

Images

How art and play can benefit organisations

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