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Unlocking Your Creativity!
By Ken Lizotte
As most of my clients sketched furiously, swirling bright-colored magic markers across poster-sized white sheets of paper, my eyes locked on Rhonda who kneeled on the floor in the middle of the seminar room, unmoving. Body still, eyes staring distantly beyond the sheet of poster paper spread out before her on the floor, she looked like she was refusing to participate. She’d been somewhat resistant to the process all day, so it wasn’t an extreme thought. Was she simply refusing to do what I’d asked?
In my seminar called “Unlocking Your Creativity,” Rhonda would have appeared to be the last person to resist. She was, after all, a talented fine artist skilled in many mediums, unlike most of the more logical, “left-brained” management professionals who attended my seminars. So why was she unwilling to give the exercise a chance?
I asked for volunteers when everyone else had finished. “Who’d like to share their vision of the future?’” A financial executive named George raised his hand.
“Here’s a boat on the ocean,” George said, standing and holding up his “vision poster.” “I’d love to retire one day and just sail away! I love sailing. A dream life for me would be to get out every day on the water and just feel the breeze.”
We asked a few questions, offered encouraging comments, then gave George a round of applause. Marcie got up next, announcing she’d love to spend more time with her kids. A self-portrait showed her standing with three small children, next to a house, snow-capped mountains, the beach, even a supermarket. “It would be just lovely to spend more time with them than I can right now,” she said. “Maybe I could work toward that.”
Again, we asked questions, offered encouragement, and acknowledged Marcie with applause. The intent of this exercise was to get everyone believing that anything is possible. So often we get bogged down trying to solve problems with our “logical” minds, searching for “realistic” solutions, and in the process shutting down our creative thinking. By so doing, ideas for solutions stop coming and we give up trying to resolve many problems, tabling them, and letting hopes, wishes and dreams fade away.
By expressing ourselves in unfamiliar media, however, such as illustrating our thoughts in colors, acting them out in a skit, musing about problems while listening to music or doing chores or communing with nature, lesser-used parts of our brain rev up, stimulating us to “breakthrough” ideas. There have been many incidents in history, especially business history, of this theory working. Velcro, for example, came about when a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral recognized a connection between the burrs that stuck on his pants when he hiked through the woods and a new way to fasten things.
Similarly, the plate glass industry was revolutionized after Albert Pilkington observed grease forming in the dishwater as he was doing dishes. Something about the image led him to invent a process for making glass, for the first time, perfectly smooth. Other products originated in unfamiliar or “off-the-wall” environments or media include Polaroid film, Post-It notes, tires for cars and trucks, and pocket calculators. Creativity experts like myself also believe in such methods because time and time again we have seen them work with our own eyes.
By now, four or five participants had shared their posters. To my surprise, Rhonda raised a hand to go next, her pure, untouched poster paper still stretched out ominously on the floor.
“Here’s a vision of MY life in the future,” she said, picking up the blank sheet of paper. “It’s a clean slate. By leaving it blank I give myself freedom. Instead of coloring it in, I want to live my life spontaneously from now on, no more worrying and being ‘practical’ all the time. I’ll draw on the poster and insert things as I go along.”
Creative thinking today is often referred to as thinking “out of the box,” that is, beyond the conditioned boundaries of our mental assumptions and preconceptions. By drawing absolutely nothing on her paper yet still defining it as a “poster,” Rhonda, a skilled artist who could have dazzled us all with brilliant shapes and images, really drove my lesson home. Ignoring both shoulds and “spozed-to’s,” she’d reached a completely different place, stimulating her thinking dramatically and locating for her the right answer.
In a high-speed global marketplace that reverberates daily with quick-shifting customer expectations and demands from the marketplace to immediately respond, companies may no longer rest on their laurels or keep doing things the way they’ve traditionally been done. The smartest, most successful companies, for example, take pains to pursue not only present customer desires but anticipated, as-yet unexpressed, customers needs and desires in the future. Such projections require both research and imagination.Take Toyota, for example, perennially ranked among the top five sellers of cars and trucks in the US. Its management tinkers constantly with fresh ideas for customizing its vehicles to meet customer desires, each year introducing more models, lighter weight materials, faster cruising speeds, even a first-of-its-kind hybrid engine utilizing electric as well as gas fuel sources. Toyota managers search round-the-clock for ways to do things better and different.
“The companies who are innovative ask totally different questions from those who are not,” says Jack Ricchiuto, a creativity consultant based in Cleveland and author of Collaborative Creativity: Unleashing the Power of Shared Thinking (Oakhill Press). “A traditional set of management questions begins with ‘How can we listen to our market better?’ and ‘How can we meet customers’ requirements?’ But creative companies like Toyota ask ‘How can we SURPRISE our market?’ Answering that one requires a high level of commitment to management creativity.”
For such reasons, creative companies and managers continually re-evaluate, re-tool and revise what they’re doing. They’re forever gazing beyond the horizon, eager to glimpse what’s to come. Their transition from traditional to creative rarely proceeds easily, however, especially with managers and everyone else conditioned since grade one to tow the line and think of themselves as LACKING creativity.
Research in this area reveals, for example, that differences in creative behavior between adults and children represents a very wide gap indeed. One study found that only 2% of adults of any age level can be accurately classified as “highly creative” while over 90% of children five years old or younger can be classified this way. The huge drop-off begins at ages 6 and 7 (only 10% in these age groups were found to be considered “highly creative”) and at age 8, adult levels begin. Only 2% of children aged 8 and above test out as highly creative and this figure will not rise again for any age group thereafter.
The researchers directing this study naturally concluded that repeated instructions throughout our school years on how to do things “right,” and years of hearing such admonitions as “no,” “bad,” “wrong,” and “incorrect” take their toll. Educational authorities’ negative signals sear little minds with an impression that there’s only one way to do things and that if we disagree, we’re deficient.
With society officially downgrading the idea of creativity so strongly, then, it becomes problematic for businesses to get their managers and other employees thinking truly freely and “out of the box.” Also, genuine creativity, by definition, subverts the status quo as it faces down long-held assumptions and uncorks new ways of doing things. Thus, both employees and management together may resist attempts to uproot established company traditions and begin fiddling with untried, risky procedures. Their responses to creativity initiatives may in fact take shape vigorously, adamantly and fearfully.
“I always ask my clients what they’re experimenting with,” says Ricchiuto. “The scariest response I hear is, ‘We don’t like to experiment—it’s messy and we don’t like to fail.’ Of course that’s just kidding yourself. Innovative companies understand that you’ve got to put up with ‘messiness’ and failure in order to succeed.
”The truth is if you want to learn to do it better, you’ve got to try a lot of things, many of which won’t work. Most artists I interviewed for my book told me the biggest item in their studios was their dumpster. A leading design firm uses the motto ‘Fail often to succeed sooner.’ That’s how successful companies and individuals truly employing their natural creativity think.”
Rick Harriman, President of Synectics Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, perhaps the world’s leading creativity consulting firm, agrees, especially when it comes to managers who believe their company can survive in today’s climate without ongoing, abundant creative thinking in its ranks. “It’s a very dangerous thing for companies to feel they’re sitting pretty the way things are happening today,” he explains. “Our clients’ perspective is that when you’re faced with the kind of continual market and product changes we see today, you’ve got to get ahead of the curve. That demands utilizing creativity.”
Harriman’s firm reaches all over the world to train managers in innovative thinking skills. In fact, it was the first such firm to do so, some 40 years ago. But change need not signal crisis, he insists, as “non-creative” managers might suppose. Instead, it could be just as readily viewed as opportunity. “Not long ago there were separate industries for computers, telecommunications and electronics, whereas today we speculate across all those areas since the rapidity of change has caused all three to overlap. To stay ahead today, you look for opportunities not previously available and you do this by keeping your mind open and recognizing that since factors are constantly changing, so must you.”
Harriman points to research conducted by Synectics surveying 700 senior managers from 150 companies in 1993. Its report found “a powerful and consistent connection between a company’s commitment to innovation and its success in the marketplace.” Synectics admits its study could not conclude definitively that creativity CAUSES success, but it does suggest a correlation, pinpointing high-performing companies it calls “Stars” that outshone companies in two other categories, called “Seekers” and “Spectators.” With success defined as increasing revenues and profits, retaining employees, maintaining high morale, and consistently producing high-quality products and services, the Stars led in all categories. Their numbers for market share, volume of sales, employee morale and retention, and outside ratings of product or service quality were all higher than those of the less creative Seekers and the steadfastly traditional Spectators. Synectics contends, of course, the Stars come out on top by committing themselves to infrastructures, policies and practices that promote creativity and innovation.
It’s a wise move, then, for a company to consider injecting innovative thinking and action into its corporate atmosphere. However, taking into account that creativity, by definition, knows no bounds, there’s no absolute or guaranteed formula for making the switch. However, creativity experts do agree on a number of vital tenets that must be observed. Here are four:
Let “ideas” flow. Our schools and workplaces have fostered for centuries intellect-dependent relationships. “Right” answers are those in the minds of a teacher or boss, the thinking goes, “wrong” answers are in the heads of everyone else. Variations of course play themselves out in the workplace every day, especially during meetings, i.e., someone volunteers an idea, then is quickly dismissed by the manager, moderator or someone else at the table. Naturally, the effect will be that all such volunteering soon stops.
Managers thus must resist a temptation to blurt out, “No, no, that would never work!” The essence of brainstorming, for example, is to let ALL ideas fly, no matter how wild, impractical or outrageous. First spend a few minutes scribbling everyone’s ideas down on a topic before analyzing them for practicality. Even putting up totally wacky ideas on a white board or flip chart, where all can see them, could end up inspiring, by the end of the meeting, the most workable solution.
Make failure OK. Many companies pay lip service to the idea that it’s OK to fail, make mistakes, get things wrong. But then, whenever something really does go wrong, KA-BOOM! Yelling, recriminations, weeping, wailing, probation and parole.
Instead,
truly creative managers invite open discussion of mistakes and failures
on the theory there’s always a lesson to be learned from them.
Risk-taking, after all, by definition, means sometimes you win
and sometimes you lose. Failure
is understood as one possible outcome in the overall game.
Don’t try playing without it!
When creative managers truly understand this, they exhibit their support of it in extraordinary ways. One of Henry Ford’s VPs once made a colossal inventory error, for example, that cost the pioneering car company over one million dollars, a lot of bread back in 1920. Assuming he would be fired anyway, the VP wrote up his resignation and handed it over to his boss.
Henry Ford the First looked at the piece of paper, then tore it up on the spot. “Do you think I would fire you after what just happened?” he asked. “My boy, I’ve just invested one million dollars in your education. Now get back to work!”
Mix
in color and music. The
first things to go when budgets get tight in our schools, it seems, are
“non-essentials” like art and music.
Yet much brain research in the last twenty years has concluded
that creativity amplifies with such traditionally “peripheral”
educational activities. Along
with drawing, painting, singing and dancing, brain scientists also tout
the high value of taking breaks, relaxing, meditating, playing games (recess!)
and daydreaming.
Thus, creative companies find ways to add music to the office or factory air, maintain colorful decors, sponsor company (fun) events and reimburse for programs or seminars that allow employees to (as Covey says) “sharpen the saw.”
Travel down roads rarely taken. If a company intends to truly transform itself into one that routinely practices high creativity, it must take risks as a culture by choosing unknown directions, attempting grand experiments, leaping off cliffs!
Has an ages-old marketing approach been failing to produce results lately? Try something dramatic, different, looney. A salesman I once knew named Jed, for example, had terrible time getting a prospect to look at his marketing materials. Every time he made his follow-up call, the prospect insisted he just wasn’t interested in Jed’s service, so why should he look at Jed’s stuff?
One day, out of frustration, Jed did the total opposite of what he’d learned back in sales training class by packing all his marketing materials in a big cardboard box and writing over it warnings like, “Do NOT open this!” and “Do NOT look inside!” and “Whatever you do, keep this sealed!” Then he mailed the box to his prospect, with no return address.
You can guess what happened: The prospect couldn’t help looking inside, thus immediately encountering Jed’s lively marketing materials and before long he has read them all, called Jed up and gave him his business. By taking a rarely traveled road-- actually, a NEVER-traveled road, in this case! -- Jed’s pursuit of his prospect finally succeeded.An ability to be highly creative resides within us all. Despite pressures and suggestions to the contrary, it arrived into the world the day we did and, even if rarely used since that time, has never left. It can be reactivated surprisingly quickly and managers who understand this truth can employ their companies’ creative abilities to extraordinary competitive advantage. It may take time, it may take patience, it may take newly-acquired skill but indeed it can be done. Smart companies, then, the winners, the leaders, the “Stars,” will make a firm commitment to do so, and bravely march along.
THINGS TO SAY TO KILL A CREATIVE IDEA
“We tried that before”“It’s a good idea, but we really don’t have time to implement it”
“You’re joking, of course”“That’s all very well in theory but practically speaking…”
“Top management will never go for it”
“But we’ve never it done it that way before”“Has anyone else ever tried it?”
“We should form a committee and study this idea further”
THINGS TO SAY TO INSPIRE CREATIVITY
Compiled by The Synectics Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts
“Imagination is more important than knowledge” (Albert Einstein)“In the long history of humankind (and animalkind too), those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed” (Charles Darwin)
“If you can dream it, you can do it” (Walt Disney)
“Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creations’” (E.M. Forster)
“A problem is a chance for you to do your best” (Duke Ellington)
(George Bernard Shaw)