Creative Streak

The Attributes of the Creative Individual

In his 1996 book, Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, said that “Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives.”

He reasons that creativity is one of the central tenets of our lives. “Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity,” he writes.

But what of the person who doesn’t believe they’re creative? I think of Allen, a friend of mine, who has never considered himself creative – even when you explain there are two types of creativity: 1) aesthetic/artistic, or 2) solution finding/problem solving. In his mind, Allen is a master implementer, not a creator. He is brilliant at doing what someone else tells him to do, but he doesn't believe he could ever be able to create the idea to implement.

His belief matches what many people think, that a person’s creativity is a natural extension of their personality, a talent they’ve  unconsciously nurtured since birth. My friend Greg is the opposite of Allen. Greg is one of the most creative people I know, who once told me that “(Creativity) is like breathing to me.”

So can a person really improve their creativity? For every Allen and Greg, I think of Marilyn. I believe she’s an extraordinary artist, but she only believes she’s become an artist through intense hard work, discipline and consistency. Her opinion is that some of the world’s greatest artists had to learn how to hold a brush, mix paints, apply it with different strokes to a canvas. They’ve taught themselves the relevant skills, and only through practice and diligence have they improved and excelled at their creativity.

Two Articles on Creativity from Psychology Today

One of the nice things about the holidays have been the chance to catch-up on my reading. Among many, here's two of the best, both written by leading experts on creative thinking, and both published in Psychology Today.

Appearing last month (December 2011), the first is Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking, by Michael Michalko.

1. You are creative.
2. Creative thinking is work.
3. You must go through the motions of being creative.
4. Your brain is not a computer.
5. There is no one right answer.
6. Never stop with your first good idea.
7. Expect the experts to be negative.
8. Trust your instincts.
9. There is no such thing as failure.
10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are.
11. Always approach a problem on its own terms.
12. Learn to think unconventionally.

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 Take Critique Positively

I’m preparing a presentation for next Monday in Scotland, and a colleague at lunch today asked me an interesting question. “What’s the worst thing you can do to your audience?”

My immediate answers. Be irrelevant. Be dull or boring. Make the environment uncomfortable, either literally or figuratively. Insult them. Perhaps worst of all? Criticise them.

I’m not sure those were the answers my friend wanted to hear, but it sparked a conversation in my own head about the power of feedback and performance evaluation.  Later I came across a great article on the same topic, so I knew something Aquarian was going on.

There's an art to listening to criticism. I can’t speak for all of you, but when I knew performance evaluation time was coming, I’d try – esp during the meeting itself – to be professional and gracious. But it’s as easy to forget how when you feel like you don’t have the upper hand. In fact, you do have the upper hand – it’s always your choice to decide what to do with that information. Although given the economic times, you may not feel like you have as many choices as you may have in the past. It’s also possible to mis-understand what you hear, especially when the evaluation feels more like you’re being attacked than it feels like something productive.

What If They Say It's Not Creative?

In the last post (here), I listed the five most common responses I get when presenting idea - but left out the most difficult client response to answer:  "That's not creative."

How do you refute a response based entirely on the abstract? Unlike flour, blood pressure, earthquakes, synesthesia and waist lines, there's no known measurement of creativity.

Yet, people understand that every idea has some level of creativity, but it's difficult – perhaps impossible – to quantify how much or how little.

A different solution to presenting ideas is to show several ideas together, putting them in context from one another with a tool I call the Creative Speedometer.

Ideas are placed on a spectrum from simple and safe on the left side, to wild and heart-stopping and on the right side.

Before you unveil any specific idea, show your client the Speedometer and explain the creative continuum from mild to wild. Then, ask the client to select any idea among all positioned in the Speedometer. It not only suggests a range of creativity, it's a great psychological tool, because you learn a lot about your client by which idea they select first.

The tool's also is infinitely adaptable. For a pitch to a global restaurant chain, we changed the Speedometer to an oven dial. When he presented publicity ideas to launch a new hair dye for women, it became the broadness of her husband's smile. For a government tender, we used the size of a crowd - their constituents - who turned up to vote.

What are some other ideas you've used to address someone's response that "It's not creative"?

Defining the Audience, Part 2 (Values)

I just sat through a brainstorm where the sponsors unloaded volume after volume of tree-killing reports – each bursting at the seams with statistical data about their audiences. But among all this PowerPoint plethora, there was not a shred of information about the audience's values.

Understanding the primary audience's values are extremely helpful in idea generation: they are the ultimate tools to connect your product or service to your key audiences. While advertising has always used values as an integral part of its campaigns, most people in communications rarely consider them – that is, if they have any notion of what they are.

By definition: Values are deeply rooted principles or standards which are universally accepted among the target audience, and which explicitly guide what they believe, their attitude toward a specific topic, and ultimately, how they behave. They are created in all of us by a wide-ranging number of influences during our lifetime, such as (and certainly not limited to) family, culture, society, race, gender, education and socio-economic background. Because they are so ingrained in our psyche, they are – not surprisingly – the most powerful of motivators.

While values are unique to the individual, there are also 'universal values,' which Sir Isaiah Berlin defined as “values that a great many human beings in the vast majority of places and situations, at almost all times, do in fact hold in common, whether consciously and explicitly or as expressed in their behaviour.”

With a trace of irony, there is no agreement on a universal values list. Shalom Schwartz developed the first list of universal values at the University of Michigan in the 1980s. Since then, others have expanded the list to more than 100 values, others to as few as 15. I generally consult a list of 22 values – originally developed by Wirthlin International – which I’ve included in a separate posting.

So why are values – more so, universal values – important to creativity?

Universal values are helpful when trying to define an audience by its attitudes or behaviour, specifically to identify what values they may use or tap into when making a decision about a subject, issue, product or service. If you can somehow translate the persuasive value into the idea, it makes the idea that much more compelling and engaging for the audiences.

For example, if you look back to the post on 15 July 2009, you’ll see our original team identified – through focus groups – that our primary audience (Australian wine drinkers) connected to premium wines through two primary values. The dominant value was “accomplishment” – that is, “the wine I serve says everything about me.” The sub-dominant value was “belonging and acceptance,” – that is, “I want to be seen as knowledgeable, so I can impress my friends.”

These values helped us create ideas, they helped to set the tone and style for the campaign, and we used wording in the campaign messages which leveraged these themes to reinforce them to our audiences.

The only way to determine another’s person value is to ask them directly or, less so, indirectly. A focus group is probably the most common method in business, although there are many other effective methods such as questionnaires, surveys, voting and polling.

What you should never do is assume.

Understanding the Audience

Once the objective or purpose of the idea has been articulated (Seven Creative Steps and Smart Objectives), the second step of the creative process is to learn and discover something about ...

• the topic or subject itself
• the environment in which the idea will come alive, and most important,
• the audiences who will connect with the potential ideas

The goal of this step is to thoroughly understand these elements – the topic, the environment and the audience – so that a key insight might be isolated and transformed into a compelling idea. (Definition of an insight: “The ability to understand the true or core nature of something.”) While it’s possible the key insight might be about the topic or its environment, more often than not, the insight is about the audience – even more specifically, about their psychographics, or "how they behave."

Creative Crumbs

Some recent reading.

Social Notworking: There Goes Our People Skills

By Nick Galvin, from the Sydney Morning Herald on 12 May 2009. Are social networking sites destroying how people communicate in real-world situations? Probably yes and probably no. For every person I meet in my workshops who under-estimates the complexity of communications, I’ll show you another who has found relevant and compelling ways to communicate using social media. If you're curious, you can see the hilarious video of the Idiots of Ants skewering Facebook here.

Sixteen Habits of Highly Creative People

By Shalu Wasu, from his blog Ticked By Life, on 26 August 2008. Yes, this is an old post – perhaps you’ve seen it already – but there’s a wealth of interesting points here on the attributes of creative people. I constantly get e-mails – some quite nasty – berating me for believing creative skills can be taught. For the record, I believe YES the principles of creativity can be taught – and should be taught – in schools.  I can only dream of being as eloquent as Ken Robinson on this subject.  Read his short white paper from Principle Voices here.

What Kind of Genius Are You?

By Daniel H. Pink, from Wired, Issue 14.7, July 2006. A long but interesting article, Pink writes about senior economist David Galenson who theorised that there are two types of genius – the “Conceptual Innovator” who do break-through work while they’re young, and the “Experimental Innovators” who do their important work later in life. Much of Galenson’s work focused on artistic creativity, but I think there are parallels to and key learnings for business creativity as well. How do you manage a “conceptual innovator” in your team? Is there any way to nourish and inspire the “experimental innovators” so they contribute sooner than later?  And, at any point reading the article, I dare you not to think: "Sweet Jesus, I hope I'm in the latter category."

Left side or right side?

 

This test explains and demonstrates how you use your left and right brains, and more important, how you might improve your creative thinking.

Step 1: Read the words above. It's easy, isn't it? (Well, easy if you know how to read English.) Reading is primarily a left-brain activity.

Step 2: Read the colour of the word instead of the word itself. For many people, it’s not so easy. Recognising colours is primarily a right-brain activity.

If you can read either the word or the colour of the word, you are adept at using both left brain and right brain thinking.

If you find reading the colour of the word difficult, don’t worry. Try doing it again, or reading it from bottom to top. It gets easier each time you try, doesn’t it? Like every other skill you’ve been interested in learning in your life, creative thinking can be improved with repeated practice.

This exericse is officially known as "The Stroop Effect," named after J. Ridley Stroop's ground-breaking research in experimental psychology ("Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions") at George Peabody College in 1935. After research instant scientific prominence, he abandoned any further research in 1938 to pursue a life devoted to teaching, preaching and writing about the bible.