Quotes and studies abound supporting the notion that creativity is an important component in a business context. Take this one from Business News Daily….

A study by Adobe and Forrester Consulting found that 82 percent of companies believe there is a strong connection between creativity and business results. In fact, companies that actively foster creative thinking outperform their rivals in revenue growth, market share and competitive leadership, according to the report.

There’s also an IBM study from 2010 ( I know, light years ago, right?) that leads with…

Global CEO Study: Creativity Selected as Most Crucial Factor for Future Success

The list is endless, and I’m not questioning the research or critiquing the papers I’ve quoted above.

I’m just not convinced that I’ve met more than a handful of companies (outside of obvious creative companies) who authentically encourage the creative development of human beings within their organisation. They do pay lip service to the idea, and they may even, from time to time, invite creative humans in from the outside, but as for practically demonstrating that increasing creativity is valuable pursuit, not so much.

I’ve seen the inside of quite a number of companies, and I’ve spoken to my fair share of people working inside of those companies. I’ve attended their conferences, sat in on their training, and I’ve listened to their leaders speak about the things that are important. What I don’t see or hear much of is creativity. What I mostly see or hear are things like ‘back to basics’, and ‘the three things’ and ‘discipline’ and the ‘[company name] Way’. These all strongly point to getting into line, and doing things the one way we’re pretty sure it will work. However, these things also speak to ‘don’t think’, ‘don’t imagine’, ‘don’t try anything that’s not within the narrow boundaries we’ve set for you to work within’.

The Poster Child

Of course the poster child at the moment for my view is Vodacom. That they still haven’t found a settlement with Please Call Me inventor, Nkosana Makate, speaks straight into the ‘creativity in our people isn’t valued’ paradigm. You can imagine the message they’re sending to their current employees. How many Vodacom employees do you imagine are rushing to tell their boss about the incredible idea they came up with today, knowing that they’ll be fairly rewarded for their effort? (but all that for another post)

10 Quick Yes/No Questions on Creativity

If you’ve got 2 minutes, I’d love to know how you feel / what you think about creativity within your world and you organisation? I don’t need to know who you are, or what company you work in. Below are 10 simple and mostly yes/no questions to answer. It’d be great if you’d answer them. Results will be posted back on this blog in a few weeks time.

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My fear and avoidance of boredom comes from the multitude of apparently well meaning adults I was surrounded by, while growing up. I don’t think I’m alone in this? I imagine if you paused a little while and reflected on the advice dished out to you as a child, you’ll clearly remember at least this phrase being repeated over and over, at every opportunity boredom may have had to present itself….

An idle mind is the devil’s playground

It must have started early on, because if I’d heard it for the first time as a teenager, I would have rushed in to embrace boredom and stayed for a while. What teenager doesn’t want to dance with the devil a little, and if bored was all you had to be, then you know you were going to go there. By teenagerhood you were already brainwashed. Boredom was something that must be avoided at all costs.

This thinking survives today. A quick search of Google Images quickly confirms this view of ‘boredom’ via these and other similar memes …

Boredom is the Beginning of the Beginning

But what if it isn’t so? What if boredom isn’t the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the beginning? What if boredom is a gateway to incredible worlds inside of your imagination? What if boredom, as a gift for embracing nothingness for a while, gives up creativity?

My thanks to Kathleen Davis for placing this thought into my brain while reading her article in Fast Company exploring the impact of Smartphones in our lives. Somewhere in the middle of her writing, she makes a point about the link between boredom and creativity and the fact that Smartphones (to our detriment) have filled up all the empty space we used to have.

Perhaps the most detrimental effect is that we longer know how to be bored. Boredom is a gift to creative ideas; it’s time when your mind can wander and make new connections. But the easy distraction that smartphones offer kills the empty moments that make life what it is.

Journey to Find Boredom

And so I began a journey to find, embrace and explore boredom. It’s early on in the journey, but as I’ve thought about it, all that boredom is, at it’s simplest, is a space in time where you find yourself with nothing to do. No distractions, no activity, no hope of getting anything done. I smile at this because I know many spiritual people who pay good money to visit Monasteries built into mountains in countries like Bhutan, to spend weeks and months in silence, with no distractions, no activity, no hope of getting anything done. When nothingness is called ‘Meditation’, it’s a spiritual pursuit, but as soon as you call it ‘boredom’ it’s an invitation to the devil.

However, this is not a discussion on semantics, it’s an important conversation we must be having. We know that creativity is the application of knowledge. It’s taking thoughts and transforming them into a different state, a physical state if you like. Into something that takes up space in the physical world we inhabit. Be it as a business idea, or a painting, or a dance, or a new sport, or a fresh campaign.

In order to do this we must create a space for our minds to explore, discover, investigate, play, etc. Our minds need to take a multitude of different thoughts and ideas and put them together to see what might happen if you could successfully do so? And for our minds to begin that pursuit they must be emptied of the noise that fills them in our day to day existence of repetitive and structured behaviour.

Boredom is that kick start. Boredom is the act of emptying our minds. It’s why it’s so painful for us to be bored. Boredom scares us, not because it’s an invitation for the devil, boredom scares us because it’s the beginning of creation, and in creation everything is up for grabs. There’s a well known and quoted quote from Marianne Williamson that I’m certain she must have written having recently come out of a very empty space in her world…

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

The Alternatives to Creation are too Ghastly to Imagine

You didn’t think that great creativity was going to be easy did you? That you’d be walking down the road and a spark of genius that makes Einstein look positively pedestrian, would suddenly pop into your brain. Creation takes work. Hard work. Long hours. To take thoughts and transform them into something tangible and meaningful in the real world is not for the faint hearted. But we must do it. The alternatives are too ghastly to imagine. A world in which creation dies is a world in which we slip into a repetitive existence of 9-5 (or 8-4), Monday to Friday, doing the same tasks every day, over and over again. We wear the same ‘uniform’, conform to the wishes of untouchable and unknowable bosses and masters. We’ll sit in traffic for hours wondering why nobody spends any time finding a solution for our mundane and almost meaningless lives? We’ll train our children in institutions so that they too will one day live a life like we do, where everything seems the same, day in and day out. They too will live for weekends and 15 working days of leave each year, as together we go on leave with our colleagues and cram together onto beaches in similar places, or share dirt roads in the same Parks and climb mountains together, before returning to do it all over again.

If being bored is the beginning then bored I will be. I will embrace it, learn to love it and live there

By the way, all is not lost. On that same Google Images page I referred to above, with memes of warning, I discovered glimpses of what I have written above. People, who out of their boredom have discovered the beginning of the beginning

Photo by Julian Myles on Unsplash

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Chief executives believe that — more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision — successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity

From an article in FastCompany back in 2010, here’s the picture of most important qualities from the 2010 IBM study….

By 2012 ‘creativity’ had slipped down to 3rd place on the IBM CEO Global Study

The 2015 IBM Global CEO Study seems to have shifted what it’s looking for from CEO’s. But looking at the quotes that are used in one of the papers to come out of it, from a variety of CEO’s, it seems obvious that creativity must be pretty high up the list of priorities, because I’m not sure how else they’ll get through successfully without a very big dose of it?

SHOULD YOU PAY A PREMIUM FOR CREATIVITY?

As I pointed out in my post last week, creativity has been on the decline since at least 1984 in some countries. That means that people entering the workplace from around the end of the 90’s are less creative than their older counterparts. With no sign of a reversal in the ‘creative quotient’ it seems to me that there should be a premium paid for anyone with above average creativity in the workplace?

The world is a complex and unpredictable place to do business in, and rightly, CEO’s globally know that creativity is a critical skill and attribute to have inside of their organisations. There is an enormous need to pay attention to increasing the levels of creativity, from our children in school all the way through to the most senior levels of organisations, companies and government.

The post Is Creativity The Most Important Leadership Skill? appeared first on Calidascope.

From 1990 to 2008 there has been a steady decline in creativity in the US, according to research conducted by Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary. While I couldn’t find any similar South African data, a Newsweek article from 2010 suggests that it may be an America only phenomena:

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority

I’m not sure I buy that view? As Kim points out in a paper in the Creativity Research Journal in 2011,

Countries such as China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have modeled their educational systems after the American education system because of America’s previous success in encouraging creativity in children

It seems to me that one could quite easily conclude that creativity growth prospects, around the world, aren’t looking very healthy at all. And for those of you who prefer pictures…

It’s wasn’t the pictures that scared me as much as the conclusions that Kim draws from her research (included analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults)…

Thus, it can be concluded younger children’s ability to produce statistically infrequent, unique, and unusual ideas has significantly decreased after 1990. 

and….

The significant decrease of Strengths scores since 1990 indicates that over the last 20 years, children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle. It could be speculated children are learning to interact in more impersonal ways, as they are more dependent on current technologies to communicate, perhaps because these technologies lack person to person, verbal and other interpersonal communicative signals. Technologies can enhance creativity and are useful tools for the creative process; however, some aspects of technologies may hinder the development of a child’s creative personality. The decrease in Elaboration scores which persists since 1984 indicates that over the last 30 years, 1) people of all ages, kindergartners through adults, have been steadily losing their ability to elaborate upon ideas and detailed and reflective thinking; 2) people are less motivated to be creative; and 3) creativity is less encouraged by home, school, and society overall.

and….

The results indicate younger children are becoming less capable of the critical thinking processes of synthesis and organization and less capable of capturing the essence of problems.

and….

The results indicate younger children are tending to grow up more narrow-minded, less intellectually curious, and less open to new experiences.

I don’t know about you, but it’s at this point I’m hoping like hell that this is just an American problem. My gut, sadly, tells me otherwise. While I don’t have any data, my own anecdotal observations quite easily match some of these conclusions in the world I inhabit. I’d be more than happy to be proved incorrect.

Does It Matter?

Of course it matters. At a macroeconomic level it counts.The health of an economy relies heavily on the creativity and innovation of scientists, engineers, business people, farmers, miners, and any person who contributes towards it, to employ more people, build more things that other countries want to buy, produce more food from the same piece of land, improve our national health, secure our borders, etc, etc. And we have to do it better than before. We can’t just do what we did last year, and the year before. We’ve got to find new and improved ways to do everything, all the time. Cheaper, better, faster and more of it.

On a microeconomic level you can take that thinking and run it through almost every single part of an economy. Provinces want all that, cities want it too, and so do businesses, and sports teams, and farmers and miners, and families and you. Even Mother Nature is hoping we’ll find better ways to treat our planet and everything that lives on it.

At a personal level it matters. Creativity breathes life into an otherwise mundane and boring existence. I don’t know if you’ve ever considered a life in which you had no access to creativity inside of yourself? A life without the skill set of creativity leaves you doing what when you get home from a day in the office where you followed instructions all day? It leaves you doing what on the weekend when you wake up on Saturday morning yearning to do something different? Well actually there’ll be no yearning. Creativity is that yearning to do something different, something unusual, something adventurous.

Here Come The Machines

I’ve always held onto the view that the one thing machines / robots will never do better than humans is ‘creativity’. When it comes to repetitive functional tasks they’re already replacing us and showing they do those jobs far better. But creativity, I don’t think so. That’s our domain. It’s what makes us human. The ability to not only desire to find another way, but to also take disconnected bits and pieces, and thoughts and ideas and put them together in a way that changes the world. I often say to my peer group of parents, don’t let your children study anything a machine might be able to replace, because a machine will replace it. Encourage your children to pick something, anything, that has an element of creativity at it’s centre and they’ll never have to complete with a machine or a robot. Not ever.

But if we’re going to let our creativity levels slide into the toilet, it’s not going to be a case of machines catching up to our creativity level, we’re just gonna hand it over to them on a plate, as we slide on by, towards a world of grey (no shades, just grey).

The Magic That Is Creativity

We’ve become so fixated on getting smarter in our heads, that we’ve missed the magic that is creativity. Do any Google search on ‘Einstein quotes’ (I’ll make it easy for you) and you’ll see him speaking of imagination and creativity over and over again. Academic genius without creativity and imagination is nothing. It’s a machine. It’s a robot. Robots have that kind of smarts. They know lots of things in one dimension. They can apply those things in that one dimension faster than any human. Creativity and imagination unlock the potential of knowledge, because if you can’t apply knowledge it’s not worth having.

It was at 16, while Einstein was imagining what it would be like to ride next to a beam of light that the first thoughts of what was to become the Theory of Relativity was born. He was imagining long before he had the brainpower to solve the question he was asking.

I can’t say if this slide in creativity is happening here in South Africa or not? I can say, that if it is we need to do more than just pay attention. We need to stop the slide, turn it around and send it on it’s way into space where our children, all of them, have imagination power to think about things like riding next to light beams, and then we can be assured that all this academic information we’re feeding them will be put to great use, and maybe even change the world.

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How do you foster innovation across a continent of 54 countries, where more than 2,000 languages are spoken by a billion people?

Great question. And yes, how do you indeed, I thought to myself? The answer to a question like that is worth zillions in any currency of your choice. It’s a similar question to one that’s lived with me for the longest time.

I’ve watched companies I’ve worked with, read about companies I haven’t, and I’ve had hours long conversations about companies who spend much resource, time, energy and currency ensuring they design and execute the best innovation processes possible. There’s much pride to be had in announcing to the world, that you’ve got the ultimate innovation process on the planet.

Garbage In Garbage Out

However, building the galaxy’s ultimate innovation process is only one part of the solution. There’s a true-ism in the world of technology, often represented by an acronym…. GIGO. It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. Google defines it like so…

used to express the idea that in computing and other fields, incorrect or poor-quality input will produce faulty output

It isn’t difficult to understand. If you don’t have great quality creativity and thinking going into your innovation process, then you can’t expect to get great quality innovation, thoughts and ideas coming out of the other side. It puzzles me that the majority of innovation initiatives I’ve seen and read about, never speak of, nor do they pay attention to increasing the quality of the input. It’s almost as if they’ve been convinced by whomever is selling the innovation process (there’s definitely a consultant involved) that the process will magically produce the goods they’re hoping for.

I suppose that may be true for the first round. There’s a chance that there are some good ideas floating around that are looking for someone to grab hold of and execute. But what happens when you repeat the process in year two? Where is the next crop of great innovation coming from? You’ve used up whatever good quality thinking might have been inside your organisation during the first execution?

Building Your Creative Muscle

You improve the input of any innovation process by improving the creative quality of your people. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to become an artist or a painter or a dancer. Improving creativity doesn’t require everyone to become a creative. Back to Google for a definition of ‘creativity’:

the use of imagination or original ideas to create something

Creativity is a muscle. It’s something you can develop when you practice using it. And to practice using it requires you to engage your imagination more often. This of course is the challenge business has. Business doesn’t like imagination much. Business likes cold hard facts and figures. They like things you can measure, things you can manage, things you can tweak and make more efficient. Imagination doesn’t deliver on those requirements very easily.

How Measurement Gets In The Way

I remember once having an opportunity to sell a process, to improve general creativity, to a large Insurance Company. I even brought props along for the panel to test out and try. I admit, I was a little naive in my expectation that they’d obviously ‘get it’ if they could experience what I was talking about. I knew I was not going to be successful when they began to ask about measurement and outcomes. How does one accurately measure the improved use of imagination? Very simply, one does not.

This is why companies spend money building innovation processes that have a start, an end and a bunch of points in between…. because they can measure them, and write reports and when people ask what they spent the money on, they have numbers to justify the expense. Jobs are safe, even though innovation is a little disappointing, but there’s always next year.

Improving the quality of someone’s creativity and imagination doesn’t offer those same benefits of measure. It’s less about measurement and more about trusting that when people engage their imagination the only possible outcome is improved creativity. What else can it be?

Business has a way to go in the area of improved creativity within their organisations. Mindsets will need to shift. What is measured and why, must be re-worked. Better quality input must be seen as more important than a well structured process.

By the way, the answer to the question at the beginning of this post, the question posed by the article I said I’d read?

How do you foster innovation across a continent of 54 countries, where more than 2,000 languages are spoken by a billion people?

Apparently it’s as easy as,

Well, you put together a partnership between a leading business school and an unusual telecommunications company. Then run a competition for the best new business idea using digital technology, and bring the finalists together at a reclaimed industrial site in a township outside Cape Town.

Who knew innovation across a continent was that easy? Like I said, business has a long way to go.

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