Creativity powering innovation

What’s in a word?

Take innovation and creativity. Take a sample of FTSE100 companies and their annual reports and strategies and you’ll see the word innovation appear several times.  

These strategies will power our ability to innovate

Our innovative product has achieved great success

Trust in us as the leading innovators in our sector

Boardrooms come alive with the word innovation.  And sitting in its shadow is lesser cousin creativity.  You may be thinking – it’s just a word what difference does it make?  Hopefully I’ll persuade you today there is a world of difference between creativity and innovation and once you understand this as a leader you’ll know exactly where to start in being a more creative leader yourself.

IN PURSUIT OF INNOVATION WE MISUNDERSTAND CREATIVITY

In their excellent book The creative mindset Jeff and Staney McGraff point out that every year corporations spend millions of dollars every year trying to get their employees to innovate. We have innovation labs, innovation studios, innovation directors and a whole language to support it.

Creativity however is often misunderstood as something ethereal and artful. Innovation is bold masculine and tangible whereas creativity floats between ideas that may or may not lead to anywhere in particular. 

"Innovation is about return on investment"

"Creativity is ideas without purpose."  

Except it's not true. And yet lots of organisations persist in ignoring creativity in favour of innovation. Look at your own organisation structure for a moment and count the number of people with innovation in their job or department title and those with creativity and I bet it’ll look somewhat one sided.

Innovation is also something organisations will happily see as being something everyone needs to undertake and a minimum expectation of everyone in the boardroom.  We expect everyone to be innovative. Creativity by contrast is often something that gets delegated, to the marketing department which only serves to underscore the misunderstanding that creativity is something solely to do with arts, or colours, or playful without purpose.

Who knows why? Maybe it just is this way. But understand this. Without creativity there can be no innovation. And you can make substantial gains with what you already hold through creativity without spending a penny on building something brand new through innovation. Sometimes someone else's old way is better cheaper and faster than your new way. Sometimes taking someone's idea that's out there and adapting it to your own circumstance is sensible. That's good business. Sometimes believing the only way to improve things is through inventing something new, that's wasteful and not good business.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

I don't like to make things complicated. So here goes. The creativity of individuals is the driver of innovation.  The creativity of individuals is the driver of innovation. That’s it.

Ok so that’s not quite it but I pause for dramatic effect because many organisations get things the wrong way round. Creativity is the space that individuals occupy between their personal lives and their lives as employees. Creativity is something that people practice whether in work or outside work. Creativity is the way people notice difference, act curiously, wonder how things could possibly be. And most critically for organisations, creativity happens spontaneously and is never contrived.

YOU, EVEN YOU, WERE ONCE CREATIVE

And it gets better. Everyone including you, can be creative. We once were creative and we can choose to re-engage with creativity. Doubt me? Try this. When you were young, very young you were an experimenter.  

Like all children until around the age of eight you were forming your opinion of the world through experimentation. You tried to stand up, you fell down, you saw this thing that you didn’t know the name of that you could lean on that helped you become more stable that allowed you to get going on your first toddle. These days you know it as a wall, back then it didn’t matter what it was called it was just part of the mix of trying to stand up and walk. When you were less than nine years old you were bold, fearless of the consequence, trying new things, figuring out what worked and what didn’t work and creating new options and pathways every day. See those building blocks - you were figuring out and experimenting with physics before you said your first words. Incredible you.

As language developed and you could hear and understand more of the adult voices around you, you started to learn how the world worked, what was right and what was wrong from those voices around you.  There was less need to learn just by trying because the adults told you the answer and sometimes even if you were up for still experimenting, an adult might even tell you not to bother, they already know the answer. Learning through experimentation was still possible but the voices of adults telling you what was right and wrong became louder.

As you moved into middle school and eventually into high school so you took on more instructional learning with marking structures telling you very clearly what was right and what was wrong. Even in science when someone talked about an experiment, the “right” answer was already set out in the book, you started to learn to conform to the right answer.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s the typical right of passage for many young people transiting from pre-school into adulthood. I’m not critiquing the British or US school system but we all have to admit it’s hard to switch on creativity if the world around you is asking you to conform to their way of doing things. It’s hard to feel confident in expressing alternate positions if someone sets out which positions are acceptable, and which are not.

I’d like to imagine that’s school and there are very good reasons for demanding conformance and once in the working world everything will turn out just fine. But for many people the thinking pattern of conformance meets a corporate culture that advocates conformance and this is not the fertile ground for creativity or innovation to prosper.

When organisations set themselves up in such a way that the creatives are siphoned off into a little team of their own, we inadvertently reinforce the notion that some people are creative and others are not. This is what David Burkis calls the creator myth – that our creativity is gifted to us by God or whoever you believe in, that some people are born creative and others are not.  

THE GENETIC CODE OF CREATIVITY

In 1973 Marvin Reznikoff and co-researchers set out to examine the genetic code of creativity. Surely if creativity comes from our genes rather than from our upbringing and experiences and how we conceive the world and our place in it, then what we need to do is look at this through the lens of people who share the same genes – and these are twins. And that’s what Reznikoff set off to do, you can read the research here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01070219 but if you don’t have time to read then I’ll give you the spoiler. In testing identical and fraternal twins for creativity, there was no evidence to support the theory that creativity stems from genetic traits. One twin could be seen as creative and another not.

CREATIVITY IS BUILT ON DEEP EXPERTISE AND PROFESSIONALISM

Often the biggest barrier to accepting our potential to be creative is misunderstanding the word and what it means. Creativity, as Natalie Nixon puts it, is an output of wonder and rigour.  Wonder is our interest in the world around us, our interest and instinct in noticing things that are different, seeing contrast in things and life, why things work a certain way and some things don’t and asking the question “I wonder if”.   Creatives notice difference and question why. Not so stupid now.

The creator myth purports a lightening bolt comes from the sky and plants an idea in your head - it just came to me from the skies above. But this ignores the fact that creativity is built upon deep expertise and years of experience, not out of nowehere. Jazz is a great example to break the creator myth. Listen carefully to the work of Duke Ellington and the improvisation that makes his jazz so utterly brilliant comes from a deep understanding of musicality and the instruments he could play.  The basis for creativity was not a lightening bolt from the sky but deep expertise in a specific area that helped him to tease out and play in the boundaries of his knowledge and skill.  Just as Picasso couldn’t impress us without a deep technical understanding of painting of Michelangelo with understanding the density, porosity and reaction of stone to chisels under pressure. Technical skill and expertise was the foundation for their creativity.

In a certain way you need a certain amount of knowing, to know what you don't know so you know what you're seeking to know. Huh?!

BECOMING A LEADER OF CREATIVITY

As a leader this is great news for you because you’re likely to have lots of people who have lots of expertise in specific and given subjects. They may not inhabit your innovation floor or building or even campus but that’s down to you creating an unhelpful construct. Being pretty knowledgeable in their field means they have the perfect springboard for identifying what’s great and what could be improved or made better. 

They once were experimenters until they were taught possibly at school and likely in corporate life to respect their place and position. Your task as leader is to change the permission space, increase people’s curiosity and enthusiastically with all your energy encourage people to come out of their shells and notice difference and wonder if. This will take time. It doesn’t take a maelstrom of wild unfocussed ideas and post it notes, it starts with encouraging a gentle curiosity about how things are and could be.

Many new leaders arriving in organisations have figured out how to do their grand tour – visiting different departments and asking open questions to find out what works and what doesn’t. It’s great for forming a strategy but you’re just mining for insight and missing the opportunity to spark creativity.   Get curious and inspire curiosity not just for yourself but in others. It's a subtle art.

GET OUT THERE AND BE CREATIVE

Creativity is about seeing the gap or problem and asking why.  So here are some things to try with your teams:

-       Practice Curiosity.  You need to master the art of language here as there is a delicate balance between inquiry and inquisition.  Asking someone “why is that” can elicit transactional or defensive response.  But expanding your repertoire to things like “have you ever noticed something our competitors are doing that you think we should take note of” and “I wonder what do you think might happen if we changed this up a bit”, “what do you think” are all great ways to coach in creativity within your teams

-       Develop a wider-view. If you’re new to the company then you’ll have some advantages of seeing difference but people who have been with a firm for some time may bring you deep knowledge of your organisation and be light on perspective. So give them the opportunity to gain perspective. Da Vinci’s helicopter concept came not from sitting in a darkened room but noticing the spiral fall of an acorn leaf.  So make it your company policy for everyone to go on safari, consider structured secondments across teams and other devices you can deploy so that people get to see a bigger broader world and then bring back all those observations and ideas.

-       Make creativity everyone’s concern – it doesn’t always have to be the brand new but sometimes the best creativity is exercised in the here and now of daily problem solving but resist the urge to silo creativity off to a specific team and signify this is an exclusive capability that only a few possess – you miss the power and potential of the crowd as a price of exclusivity and you make life harder for yourself as leader by placing more emphasis on you personally to come up with all the bright ideas.

It all takes time but encouraging your people to bring their outside observations in – past experience, experiences as customers, experiences of leading elsewhere, experiences of working with different groups of people is a rich source of comparable insight to generate curiosity and wonder.  We were all once creative and we can be again if we choose.