Tag Archive for: Development

Two pandas, one eating bamboo, the other looking confused.

Opening the Door to Inspiration

December 7, 2024/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

By Adam Kingl

Very early on in my experience teaching and consulting to creative companies, and then to organisations in all industries, I identified a three-part structure 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 my teams well.

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 may be 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 organizations 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!

2. 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’ 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 they 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.

3. 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 means 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.

Adam Kingl is the author of Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset (Kogan Page, 2023), shortlisted for the Business Book of the Year Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category. He has also written Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020). Adam is an educator, keynote speaker and consultant. He is an adjunct faculty member at the UCL School of Management and Hult International Business School (Ashridge). You can find more of his media at www.adamkingl.com.

An Abridged Improv Playbook for Brainstorming

November 5, 2024/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

Here is a playbook, if you will, that you can run with your teams to challenge, adjust and improve team creativity, comfort with change and explore when we don’t have the answer.

What’s in the box?

This is a brainstorming technique that rewards volume over quality or judgement. Explain to the team that we’re going to identify as many solutions to a problem or opportunity as possible. Put the team in pairs. The pair should be standing up. You propose the question for the team to work on, such as:

· How might we attract more customers to our store?

· How do we reduce our energy costs?

· What other flavours of doughnut should we make?

In each pair, the first person’s job is to invent as many solutions to the question as possible. With each answer, they reach down into an invisible box and pull out the solution. Physically reaching for the answer helps the brain to come up with the next answer on cue and reduces the instinct to pause and think, repressing the creative flow.

The other person’s job is to write down what the other person says and encourage them, always encourage them: ‘Amazing idea! What else do you have? Oh, brilliant! Can we think of more?’ This is actually a tough job too because this colleague has to write down what they’re hearing and respond with encouragement at the same time.

The facilitator should set and announce a time limit, such as two to three minutes, then ask the pairs to switch roles and repeat the exercise. Collect everyone’s lists, and you will be amazed how many ideas you will have to explore in more detail.

And even better…

This is a game of escalation that is a good option if you want to brainstorm more elaborated, new solutions. It’s a variation of ‘yes, and’ and is usually played in groups of two to four. Questions could include topics such as:

· What would happen if we opened an office in Germany?

· What if we allowed customers to make up their own cocktail recipes at the bar?

Pose your question and the first person will start to invent a scenario. Let them speak for about fifteen seconds. Then cue the second person, who needs to continue where the first person left off. They should start their explanation by saying ‘And even better…’ Because of that prefacing statement, the scenario quickly escalates. Within five to eight speakers, you typically will have either achieved world peace or solved world hunger! But if you then look back to two or three statements before that final conclusion, you might have uncovered some advantages or implications that you hadn’t considered previously and might make the idea much more intriguing and worth exploring further.

If I were…

In this exercise, you do not explore an idea through the lens of your own organization or context but through another which you deeply admire. For example, instead of asking, ‘How should we launch this soft drink brand in Amsterdam?’ you might ask, ‘If I were Richard Branson, how would I launch this drink brand in Amsterdam?’ Now you’ve unlocked the restrictions the unconscious places around you. You might now brainstorm as if possessed:

· We’ll create a surf machine in an Amsterdam canal, and the surfers will be drinking the soda and wearing branded bathing suits!

· During a warm summer week, we’ll give all the Amsterdam street musicians a bucket of our sodas on ice, which will encourage pedestrians to stop, enjoy a free drink, listen to the music and pay the performer.

· We’ll give away branded beverage holders to Amsterdam bicycle owners, which is basically everyone!

Brainstorming through the perspective of another person or company frees your creativity, unburdened with your or your organization’s assumptions about ‘how we do things around here’. All of a sudden, you find yourself considering ideas or actions that you would never have entertained before.

How Are We Creative? The Realm of Neuroscience

September 22, 2024/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

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.

Humanising leadership through the arts: part II

August 24, 2024/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

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.

On Perfection and Innovation

June 17, 2024/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

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.

Is your organization ready for ‘Generation Blizzard’?

April 22, 2024/in Articles/by Adam Kingl

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.

Managing Creativity and Risk

March 25, 2024/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

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).

Humanising leadership through the arts: part 2

January 2, 2024/in Articles/by Adam Kingl

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

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.

“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.

Making Time for Creativity

November 27, 2023/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

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.

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

July 17, 2023/in Articles/by Adam Kingl

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.

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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Humanising leadership through the arts: part II

Creative capacity inverted

Catalysing shifts in mindset

Nurturing adaptability, creativity and inspiration

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Further reading:

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?’

Adam Kingl