Creative Streak

How Not To Be Creative

Some days, it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed. The work on the desk is uninteresting and uninspiring. Every word from your colleagues is a red-hot knitting needle poking against your eardrums. Friday is as far off as that promotion. The last thing you want to do is be creative.

This post is a tribute to all those people who’ve had that momentary (or lifelong!) desire to strangle the creative process to its lethal end. It's understandable, really. Good ideas do nothing but ruffle up the status quo. Change means disruption which means not going home at 5.01 pm. Territories are necessary to keep people in their place. In the end, a culture of ideas just sets people up for failure.

So for Pete’s sake, it's time to nip all that ugliness in the bud. Trust me, try any or all of the tactics below, and I’ll guarantee that you’ll never have another good idea in your organisation every again. Andiamo!

1. Tell people exactly how to do their jobs. In person, by e-mail. Preferably by shouting.

2. Pretend to listen to people. Frankly, the only opinions which count are yours.

3. Keep your circle of contacts small. Relationships are exhausting. Outside perspectives can’t be as relevant to what you already know.

How to Tap Employee Ideas

A great article from Inc.com entitled "How To Tap Employee Ideas."

"Encouraging your employees' creativity can not only create an engaging work environment, but create new business. Seven experts share their tips on getting employees to share their ideas."

 

Is Pret A Manger the new Zappos?

In case you didn't see it over the weekend, a profile in the New York Times on the restaurant chain Pret a Manger entitled "Would You Like a Smile With That?" It's a great case study on teamwork and customer service.

When I lived in London for a month in March, the £24 charge for breakfast drove me out to the nearest Pret every morning. The food and service were impeccable, and I can't wait for them to land in Chicago.

Here's their US website. The food photography alone gets a big thumbs-up.

Ken Robinson On The Principles Of Creative Leadership

Always someone worth listening to:  a Fast Company article featuring Sir Ken Robinson speaking about the importance of creativity.

There's a lot to love - more so, lots to repeat.  But this paragraph has stuck with me.

"The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it's to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they're valued. So it's much more about creating climates. I think it's a big shift for a lot of people."

Indeed, this big shift hasn't happened. I heard for myself in the past few weeks. I've visited five different companies - all as potential clients. On the plus side, the common denominator was the senior person's desire to create a culture where ideas could flourish. You could hear the passion in their voices when they spoke. I'm sure if I would have shared Robinson's paragraph, they would have absolutely agreed with his POV.

Brainstorming in a Digital World, Part 2

Part #1 is here.

When I began leading brainstorms as a full-time activity, one of the first strange experiences was running an ideation session with a group of people who weren't even in the same room. Or continent. It was me on a bad squawk box in Chicago. Two people arguing in New York. A woman in Miami with a radio playing in the background, and a half-asleep person listening in Beijing.

Despite its revolutionary brillaance, the Digital World still needs the human brain to come up with ideas. The key is finding ways to use its tools to bring disparate people - by space, by geography, by ideology - together mentally to facilitate their creative skills. The good news is that the tools improve every day, and will only get better.

I have my own preferences: love some, hate others. If we compared our lists, I'm sure we'd clash. Here's where we should agree: the ground-rules of remote brainstorming, whichever tools you choose to use.

Personal Innovation Lifestyle

Sometimes modern technology gives us phrases which at the same time ring true but sound hilariously pretentious. Exhibit A: Personal Innovation Lifestyle.

It’s easy to give PIL a glossy iStylized definition, but here's one in plain English: a desire to learn new things, about yourself and/or the world around you. (Haha, do you know how hard it was to write a definition and not use the words “evolve”, "personal brand", “transcend”, and “higher power”? Add those words in somehow and you'll get a more exact meaning of PIL)

Before the digital world revolutionized everything, learning something new (like a language) or something more in depth (like gardening) was “a hobby” – which in itself was something you did when you weren’t at work, taking care of the kids, and had some time and a bit of leftover cash.  Now, thanks to Mark Zuckerburg’s desire to learn Chinese, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s display of jumping from acting to singing to cookbook writing, we now have PIL.

Creativity and Conflict: Collaborating (5 of 5)

This is the fifth and last in a series of five posts about the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), developed by Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann as part of their research in the 1970s.  My interest here is two-fold: to understand how conflict affects teams, and to reflect how creativity may help to manage conflict. The introduction to these posts is here, which includes links to the other modes, as well as information about how to take the TKI assessment, either individually or among your team.

Collaborating is the fifth mode of conflict, when a person chooses to be assertive (they satisfy their own concerns), and cooperative (they satisfy the other person’s concerns). Of all five modes, this is the only one that is truly a win-win situation because both parties fully realise their concerns and find an integrative solution.

Bits & Bytes, May 29

Again, some miscellanea from around the Internet.

Adults, Play and Creativity

Two posts on ‘play’ for adults, particularly in business. On one hand, it’s fairly well-known that play is an important ingredient for adults, both in creative thinking and in learning. On the other, I know there's real hesitation from the Regular Person who doesn't understand what we often mean by that statement. A random search on Google has some questionable suggestions by creative experts, such as “Learn to cut loose, even at work!” or “When you’re writing your next report, think like a child!”

I'm not sure this is a good example of playing at work, but a few weeks ago, at a workshop for a financial services company in Melbourne, an executive and I were analysing how to improve her 78-page slide presentation for an upcoming meeting of the Board of Directors. Her immediate supervisor demanded she put all of his slides in the presentation, but then said "But feel free to make it your own." (Talk about Creative Paradoxes, see below.)

After getting our heads around the complex topic, we began to joke about how we might turn the presentation into something playful. “What would the Board of Directors never expect?” And, "What would make her presentation a surprise?” Or, “What if the Board were in control of the presentation, instead of her?”

Innovator vs. Pseudo-Innovator

 A cold, wet wintry day in Sydney is perfect for going through old stuff ... namely 11 boxes (I kid you not) of old articles on communications, creativity and innovation I've kept since I got my first job in 1984. I'm always amazed how some of the principles remain true after 25 years, others perhaps not so much.

One stand-out from this morning's gleaning is entitled "The Innovator vs. the Pseudo-Innovator", from the January 1980 edition of Executive Skills, an old newsletter from the American Management Association. It's interesting to me because the traits of an innovator have a natural affinity to the characteristics of a creative person. I cringe every now and then because I read a trait I don't follow consistently (so it's a good list, sort of like an Eighteen Commandments of Creativity). I'm not 100% sure I agree. For instance, "... prefers complexity." Personally, I prefer ideas which are simple, although I also understand the joy (among us INTPs) to reduce complexity to simplicity.

Anyway, an interesting read nonetheless. Any thoughts? Any others you'd add? HTML

The Traits of an Innovator vs. Those of the Pseudo-Innovator

The Innovator: ... is intellectually curious

   The Pseudo-Innovator ... is cynically curious

I ...is constructively critical

   P-I ...is corrosively critical

I ...seeks to improve the operation

   P-I ...seeks to impress others

I ...has firm convictions but listens to the ideas of others

Creative Jolt: Breaking Habits

The inspiration for this post comes from a well-known quote by American actor Alan Alda: “Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself."

Part of out of curiosity, I did a quick survey of (non-creative) friends and colleagues and found a decidedly non-startling fact: most people come and go to work the same way, every time. It's efficient, said one. It saves time, said another. I don't even think about it, said a third. In fact, one person offered a day organised entirely by rote. Same route to work, same coffee shop, same order, same routine at her desk, same place for lunch, etc.

"I'm going to get a lecture now on not being creative, aren't I?" she laughed.