creativity

The power of silence

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Insights come more reliably to an undistracted mind. Have you noticed a little magic in the otherwise purgatorial time you spend with the cabin doors closed, approved electronic devices off, between pull back and take-off? Have you noticed that you had a few moments to think?  That few minutes is a blessing–it’s time you are given to spend un-distracted by the interruption of your digital daily life. Embrace it!

Yet most of us work intently to optimize our distractions: fine-tuning i-devices with apps and connections, so that we might encounter information all the time. Mobile digital life guarantees that you can have something to distract yourself whereever you go, whatever you are doing. Your thoughts are under siege.

You can even listen to music or the radio while swimming or showering. You can take in NPR or a book on tape while walking your dog or doing yard work. But don’t!

  • Turn the radio off when you drive, sometimes
  • Leave the iPod home when you walk the dog, sometimes
  • Don’t use a shower radio, each time
  • Clear some time with your thoughts, all the time

You get the picture.

How does this apply to foresight? Thinking about the future is a tough mental game. To effectively explore and understand it, you need to do think about a lot of things at once. You have to think altogether new thoughts. This is equally true for effective analysis and writing.

There are new connections to be made, insights that need time to germinate and ground to sprout in. “A ha!” moments need to break through, from your subconscious. Must they contend with the latest on the Jets or J-Lo? The Dow or the Dodgers? The boss’s memo? It seems they must, until we reach for the “off” switch, or put down the i-thing for a little while. And when you write, don’t always stop to look things up, consult other sources. Sometimes let the ideas flow, the writing come out. Fact check later.

To have some success thinking about the future, you really need to think about it. That includes time away from distractions, absolutely, but it even includes time away from the facts and finds that you may be using to try to understand your future. If you don’t stop taking in information long enough to think about it, you won’t quite get there.

Image: saturn ?, via Flickr, CC attribution license.

 

Can you build an intersection?

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Intersections can be dangerous or wonderful places. A downtown traffic intersection may just be too busy and inefficient if you are driving, or waiting to cross the street, but think of the power of places where thoughts, and skills, and points of view intersect.
 
In The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation, Frans Johansson (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2006) [Free download] explores the potential for the intersections where ideas come together. Those are the kind of intersections we need in exploring the future. Those intersections add to our awareness, give us new points of view and new ways of looking at things.
 
Sports Cafe (Peter's), Horta, AzoresJohansson’s book argues that innovation happens at “the intersection” of different fields, ways of thinking, etc. A great introductory story is about Peter’s Café in the Azores (see picture, at right), where boaters from around the world meet, and share ideas, seemingly effortlessly, just by a natural intersection of ways of thinking, willingness to share, etc. Peter’s is an accident—it just happens to be a convenient café where people from all over happen to spend time. What can we expect if we build places like that in our organizations?
 
The deliberate mixing of disciplines has historically yielded great discoveries. Think tanks, universities, and the most innovative companies set out to do this on purpose. In history, creative people like Leonardo and Franklin did this in their own minds, ranging in their learning and thought over diverse disciplines. We’re not all capable of doing that, but we can try to open up our thinking and improve our chances of new discoveries by trying to create and spend time at, intersections.
 
There are lots of places to find good how to advice on fostering creativity, triggering new thinking, brainstorming, etc. This post is not about tools and techniques, but rather is about nurturing a culture and habits of thought that can help make your organization more creative. It’s the ability to break down barriers in thinking that helps a team or an organization be more effective at foresight.
 
For most us, the team we’ve got is the team we must work with. So how can we get the most out of them, the greatest “Medici effect”? It’s critical as a first step to embrace the differences and variety in the group, and not let different perspectives and views get submerged by the organizational culture and the organization’s conventional wisdom. It is also critical not to let alternate views lose out to those of the boss or of the strongest voice. So take the time to ask for, listen to, and validate others’ points of view. Otherwise, why should they share them?
 
If you get the chance to add new people to your team, make sure you think of people who bring a fresh point of view or a different life’s experience. [It’s also valuable to have a team that mixes different cognitive styles. See prior post] If you can’t add to your team, you can still use interviews or one-time visits by others to add fresh thoughts to the problem you are working on. If all else fails, it can be powerful to role play as you and your colleagues work on a problem or explore change. One way or another, try to enrich the discussion you can have, and be sure lots of points of views are included. This is critical in any creative process, and exploring the future is just that–it needs your best creative thinking.
 
 
A special thanks to my futurist colleague Lauren Albert, who told me about The Medici Effect
 
Image: Sports Cafe (Peter’s), Horta, Azores, Portugal, by Jsome1, via Flickr

Quick thought: Write to learn, write to understand

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Pen and paperIn our often frenzied, multi-tasking lives, it’s hard to get quality thinking done. I recommend using writing as a way to learn, to think, and to figure things out. The act of writing (more than a couple of paragraphs) requires you to think something through, frame your thoughts in new ways, and figure out relationships among ideas. You may discover in writing that you learned something new, something that might never have come fully formed to mind. 

Nurturing the habit of writing to explore and understand means doing more writing. And, since exploring the future is open-ended, everything is important and relevant to the future–you need to capture your thinking, nearly anytime, anyplace. Having a commonplace book or journal–whether it’s handwritten or electronic–is a great way to seize the moment and get something written down. You can always return later to see if what you wrote is worth developing further. but get it written down or you may lose the thought altogether.

 
Image: Boa-sorte&Careca, via Flickr, cc license

 

Know your type, or, Stop beating your head against a brick wall

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Myers Briggs TypesI am a strong believer in the power and value of understanding personality and cognitive styles as a part of effective work in exploring the future. That’s true even if you are working alone–you need to know your own mind in doing futures work. Are you a black and white thinker, or do you see lots of grey areas? Do you like to use logic or focus on how you feel emotionally about things? Knowing about your cognitive styles and others’ is extremely valuable if you are part of a team that needs to confront change and build strategies for dealing with it. If you’ve found doing that work hard, maybe you don’t know enough about the personalities and cognitive styles on your team.

Most organizational executives have heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and at one time knew their Myers-Briggs Type. Mine is I/ENTP, the I/E indicates that I rated about evenly between extroversion and introversion. The N means intuiting, the T, thinking, and the P, perceiving. I first took the test about 20 years ago. It helped me clarify things about my work style and my personal interactions with others.

If you never have known, or have long since forgotten your Myers-Briggs Type, you should go back and take the test. There are several versions free, online. One can be found here, and another here. The online tests are not perfect–they tend to try to find a type with fewer questions than the longer printed versions, but give one a try.

A less-well-known, but particularly useful indiactor is the Kirton Adaptation Innovation Inventory [Link]. It is based on a theory of cognitive style that says everyone is creative, but that there are distinctly different styles of creativity that fall on a continuum from adaptive creative–people who create "inside the box" and innovative creative–those who see no boundaries on their creative ideas. Knowing your place and your colleagues’ place on the continuum can help you understand how you and they will explore choices and potential innovations together.

Unfortunately, the Kirton Centre, which controls the KAI, does not make a do-it-yourself test available, and they believe firmly that you should be tested under the guidance of a certified KAI consultant. No KAI type is inherently good or bad, but as with the Myers Briggs, knowing more about yourself is inherently good–it can make it possible to be more effective and less uncertain in work, dealing with others. 

In my work as a futurist and in collaborating with others in foresight, it has been valuable to know my personality type and cognitive style, and those of my colleagues. It has been clear over the years that some people are not comfortable with conjecture–a critical part of futures work, and some are not instinctive about looking at grey areas, which is also critical in exploring future possibilities. It’s possible to clarify those things in exploring personality and cognitive styles. In almost any setting, having multiple cognitive or personality styles on the team is a good thing. But not understanding the different styles is not a good thing, and can destroy any benefit you might get from variety.

If you are pretty well convinced that one or another colleague is crazy, or that they are of limited mental ability, you may be reacting to their personality type or cognitive style. Surely they are not crazy or stupid, just different. And maybe they’ve got the missing piece you need, if only you could see it and know how to fit it with what you can do.

Foresight is difficult enough without adding layers of misunderstanding and opposition to the effort. Try to understand who you are and who your colleagues are, how they think and react. Your chances of success are much greater if you do. Don’t beat your head against a brick wall.

How to succeed in foresight with your otherness

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Being a black sheep is goodDoes a persona of “different” help you drive more foresight in an organization? It can. Chances are, if you’ve been pressing your colleagues to open their minds to new ideas, if you’ve been rethinking things, reframing how you talk about them, reconsidering the conventional wisdom, you’ve already gotten personally branded for your “otherness”. If that’s so, go with it. Make the most of it. Be different.

Over my years working as a consulting futurist, I’ve met some amazing people who are on the front lines of foresight, working inside big organizations to get futures thinking through to more people. I remember some of them especially for their “otherness” which they wore with pride, or which at least came to define them for their colleagues.
 
One I remember well, Charlie Prather, worked at DuPont in the R&D Center. Over time, he found himself increasingly feeling and being seen as different from his R&D colleagues and the company culture. He came, just like many of his colleagues, out of chemical engineering or another technical specialty. But he found his talents really flowered when he worked internally as a consultant on creativity. By the time I knew him, he’d built an “idea room” at R&D headquarters, near the cafeteria. It was a small room, chock full of ideas on big post-its. He even re-did his business card, making it distinct from the normal ones in the company. It had bursts of color, the word “creativity” and what I saw as an overall creative joy. This was in the 1980s, and that was a distinctly “other” message. He could drive new kinds of creativity in his organization by being different. These days, Charlie leads an innovation consultancy, Bottom Line Innovation.
 
Eva Niewiadomski is a remarkable woman I met at the Catalyst Ranch, a creative meeting space in Chicago. Eva had had a similar experience to Charlie’s when she was at Quaker Oats. Over time, her office became a distinct space, full of whimsy and mind-stirring objects, colors, and images. She brought those touches to meetings she planned. Everyone kept asking her to help them plan more creative, inspiring meetings and workshops. Her otherness helped her be more valuable to her company. Unfortunately for them, before too long, she spun herself off, and now runs the Catalyst Ranch, where organizations can come and break down some mental habits of their own.
 
I also remember distinctly meeting a guy pulled back from retirement to join a small innovation team at an industrial company. My client there explained each of the roles on the small team. One was a “bean counter” who knew how to make things happen, and how to work the bureaucracy. Another chosen for the team was a “new grad” a newly-hired employee, they wanted because he was not yet caught up in the company’s way of thinking about things.
 
What I remember best, however, was the guy they brought back from retirement for the team. As they cast around to decide who might join this innovation team, people kept remembering this old colleague who, they said, “was always different, never really fit in, but we loved him anyway.” He rounded out the team—they needed different—they needed otherness.
 
Each of these people was an insider and an outsider in their companies. They discovered in themselves, and cultivated, aspects of who they were that were distinct from the corporate culture, and made being different a success in their companies. Their “otherness” was an asset.
 
As an outsider (I am a consulting futurist), I have the luxury of being separate from the corporate culture, and no one expects otherwise. In my work, I try very hard to understand (but not adopt) the culture and worldview inside the organizations I serve.
 
People who do what I do from the inside have to balance their otherness with fitting in, at least to a point. But I urge those of you in that position to let yourself be the one with a different take on the situation. Nurture in yourself the ability to take a fresh and distinct look at things. If you need reassurance, find a few allies in the organization, or find some on the outside, who are in a similar situation. Share your “otherness” stories with them.
 
This quote my friend and fellow futurist Cindy Frewen Wuellner shared with me celebrate the spirit of otherness:
 
“But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”  –Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957
 
I recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s November 10, 2008 New Yorker piece “The Uses of Adversity” which explores some similar thoughts on outsiderness. In that piece, Gladwell shares a quote from Anthropologist Brian Foster about commerce in Thailand:
 
“A trader who was subject to the traditional social obligations and constraints would find it very difficult to run a viable business. If, for example, he were fully part of the village society and subject to the constraints of the society, he would be expected to be generous in the traditional way to those in need. It would be difficult for him to refuse credit, and it would not be possible to collect debts … The inherent conflict of interest in a face-to-face market transaction would make proper etiquette impossible or would at least strain it severely, which is an important factor in Thai social relations.”

Image: pasotraspaso, via Flickr, cc: attribution license. 

Creative apartheid, and other organizational sins

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Avoiding silos in the organizationThe blog Innovation Weblog cited Gary Hamel’s book The Future of Management a few months ago, and I’ve meant to share its key points on impediments to innovation. Here they are along with my interpretations:

Creative apartheid–The long-held notion that creativity is a gift few have and that creative things should, and perhaps can only come from the “creative types” in the organization, or, perhaps, only from outside consultants. We need everyone’s creativity to be nurtured and set free.

The drag of old mental models–Organizations get stuck in modes of thought and conventional views that endure and hold fresh thinking at bay. They need to be able to change the way they think.

No slack–Cost cutting and lean practices leave little room for the free thinking and experimentation that might lead to innovative practices, new products, and new business models. Innovation needs slack.

To these, I’d like to add what I’ve observed over and over again in groups I’ve worked with. Too many companies have a mental template and an obsession, that has them looking at market share and bottom line growth as not just critical measures of success, but, sometimes, the only measures. They demand that a new idea deliver $50 million to the bottom line in year 2. They insist that changes not cost more, even if there might be a long-term payoff.

Better foresight and habitual longer-range thinking can make a big difference across this range of chronic organizational disabilities. If only by modeling longer-term good outcomes, the tools and habits of foresight can help organizations get beyond this barriers to innovation.

Image: my-aim-is-true via Flickr, cc license

As long as you do what’s conventional, you won’t be accused of a blunder

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A lot my after-hours life is centered on baseball this time of year, so allow me to look for a strong lesson for the business world from my favorite sport.

Baseball today is much the same game that was played over 100 years ago. It has deeply-rooted conventions and established ways of doing things. [link] And it’s slow to change. There are tremendous pressures not to break the bounds of common practice in baseball. A ruled error for a player in baseball means not achieving something that, conventionally played, should have been doable. In fact, sometimes a fielder who misses a ball gets no error because he doesn’t try to make a tough play.

As baseball stats guru Bill James has noted, “A blunder by a manager is a move that is A) unconventional, B) doesn’t work and C) occurs at a moment of focus in the game. If you put those three things together, you have a blunder. As long as you do what’s conventional, you won’t be accused of a blunder.”

The disincentive to innovation in baseball, like in so many areas of life, is powerful. That means a lot of potentially-successful and innovative approaches to the game will not even get a tryout.

For example, conventional practice has the best pitchers go in as starting pitchers, at the beginning of the game. Late game, a series of relievers come in to finish the pitching. Some innovative thinkers in baseball management would love to try starting the aces in the third or fourth inning, using the one-inning talent first. The potential in that is great for having the best arms hold on to a win or help the team come from behind. But starting the aces late would be odd and unconventional, and no one wants to try it (and fail).

The few baseball managers who show a tendency to “think outside the box” are the exceptions that prove the rule. For example, in April 2008, Bobby Cox, the Atlanta Braves manager, temporarily moved his pitcher to left field so he could bring him back to the mound later. The Braves lost, but fortunately Bobby Cox has the status in baseball to avoid his unconventional move being seen as a terrible blunder. Still, the baseball bloggers and other commentators reacted as if a crazy-like-a-fox manager had done something truly odd. But what he did was logical, legal, sensible, and could have worked.

We need the leaders in organizations to feel empowered to buck convention, to try new things, and to fail sometimes. Baseball managers, with their ancient game of traditions, are starting to wake up to new ideas. Are business people caught in their old trap of sticking to convention?

Many are. We need to do some careful reflection on how much that’s true and get conversations going about it. If more people are aware of how traditions and conventions in their game might be inhibiting them, we’ll have a clearer shot at making the changes that need making, and maybe we can win more games.

Image: bobbychuck24 via Flickr, cc license

Permissive parenting and the innovative organization

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While at home the other morning, I walked by my 9-year-old’s microscope left on the kitchen counter. Normally, clutter and forgotten belongings plague me at home, but I had the thought, what kind of Dad would tell his curious son, “put your damn microscope away!”? Wouldn’t that be like Louis Armstrong’s Mom saying “stop playing that confounded horn!” or Albert Einstein’s Dad saying “quit your endless daydreaming and come down to dinner!”?

I think in the US, at least, we’ve unintentionally been stifling curiosity, even for our children. This may be particularly true in a lot of organizations.

How often are people in organizations pressured to quit daydreaming? Is thinking about the future even ok in the corporation? There can’t be too many places where foresight is against the organization’s rules, but there are lots of places where people can just tell it’s not ok to speculate, think visionary thoughts, and in general take their focus off the here and now.

Executives are often rewarded for their expertise and focus on their jobs. That makes it harder and less likely that they will try out new ideas. They won’t feel like they have the right to put their best mental energy on new things, yet that’s the very thing we need them to do.

Organizations are unlikely to have effective, innovative, foresight-oriented cultures if their leaders don’t shape climates where it’s ok to think, explore, wander, experiment, and leave your damn microscope out on the counter.

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