Tag Archive for: Organizational Behavior

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

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

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

By Adam Kingl July 3, 2023

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

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

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

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Kingl
Adam Kingl

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

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How art and play can benefit organisations

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HR lessons on creativity from LEGO and Pixar

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

5th Jul 2023

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

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

Our organisations typically suffer from little creativity.

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

Why is this so?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe undoubtedly we can.

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

Implementing new habits for success

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

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

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

Let’s explore these habits one by one.

1. Learning from LEGO

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

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

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

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

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

2. A new phrase from Pixar

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

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

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

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

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

Replace ‘Yes, but…’ with ‘Yes, and…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A small word makes a big difference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How art and play can benefit organisations

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How art and play can benefit organisations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art as metaphor

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

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

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

Reference

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

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

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

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

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

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

the science of management and more from the art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A three-part framework to ignite team creativity

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A three-part framework to ignite team creativity

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

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

  1. Ideate

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

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

 

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

  1. Evaluate

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

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

  1. Select

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

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

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

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

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Creativity: A key skill for the future

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

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

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

Adam Kingl tells UNLEASH more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How Regular Breaks Can Increase Productivity

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HOW REGULAR BREAKS CAN INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY

WRITER Adam Kingl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to spark creativity when it comes to learning at work

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How to spark creativity when it comes to learning at work
Adam Kingl shares three activities that HR and managers can action with their employees to encourage innovative ideas and excitement around learning

by Adam Kingl 12 May 2023

Improvisation is an often overlooked skill which even a company in a so-called ‘traditional’ industry could find to be invaluable in the dramatic shifts in its people’s creative capabilities. Corporations are fond of touting their adaptability skills, but when we dig down, we usually find these same company leaders have massive blocks when it comes to their own agility.

And it makes sense. We’ve been conditioned to value experience, precedent and wisdom in our leaders. Of course, those are wonderful attributes to possess, but they can become weaknesses when those same leaders are confronted with challenges and dynamics – be they internal or external – that they have never encountered before.

In which case, we ought to seek competencies, such as comfort with ambiguity, the ability to embrace not knowing, and intense listening from our leaders today. Improvisation techniques both welcome and develop these translatable abilities for us, no matter our industry or function.

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 15 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 organisation 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 can begin to brainstorm:

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 organisation’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.

Adam Kingl is a future of work keynote speaker and author of Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset

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Do you ever feel stuck when it comes to generating new ideas?

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Whether you’re working on a project, trying to solve a problem or just looking to infuse more creativity into your daily life, check out these three habits to help you enhance your personal creativity, by Adam Kingl.

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Sparking Success: LinkedIn Book Club

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We know intuitively, however, that without failure, we’re unlikely ever to experience dramatic success. And if we don’t share failure, our colleagues are more likely to make the same mistakes. Read more on how to move a team’s attitude toward failure in the #LinkedinBookClub excerpt from my new book, Sparking Success. To shift a team’s attitude toward failure requires fostering an environment of vulnerability, where colleagues are comfortable, eager even, to share their learning from every experiment they attempt. One way to do this is for the leader to host a failure party. I hear you guffaw but hear me out. One of the many reasons that Pixar’s mantra is always to ‘Display’ is to invite critique, sharing, building on ideas and socialising what isn’t working. A failure party is simply to celebrate that spirit of Display. Colleagues become more comfortable as psychological safety grows to push the boundaries of what they think is possible, knowing that their personal reputation does not depend on inauthentically trying to communicate an aura of omniscience. In the failure party, each person in the team who has explored a new avenue, experimented with a hypothesis, tested a prototype or interviewed a stakeholder or customer, and it did not go to plan, would share their activity, the result and, most importantly, the learning. Colleagues may ask questions, can build on the ideas and even pursue avenues that the speaker had not. The one thing that no one must do is belittle or criticise the speaker. Each dialogue ends with the conversation ‘what we learned here’. Some leaders of failure parties even toast every speaker when they finish with a ritual, be it ringing a bell or everyone shouting ‘Huzzah!!’ The speaker’s candour, vulnerability and creativity are acknowledged. The ‘party’ element, which can simply involve refreshment and an informal environment, is proposed in order to put people at ease as quickly as possible. The failure party is also a tremendous opportunity for the leader to share directly and obliquely what the boundaries are of acceptable risk. Over time, the team understands explicitly and implicitly what they can try right away and what they need to share first before trying.  For more on my book ‘Sparking Success: Why every leaders needs to develop a creative mindset’: https://lnkd.in/eKUyD4kF