Tag: creativity

psychologysystems thinking

Smart goals or better systems?

on July 19, 2017

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If you’re working toward some sort of collective goals — as an organization, network or even as an individual — you’ve most likely been asked to use SMART goal setting to frame your task. While SMART is a popular tool for management consultants and scholars, does it make sense when you’re looking to make inroads on complex, unique or highly volatile problems or is the answer in the systems we create to advance goals in the first place?  

Goal setting is nearly everywhere.

Globally we had the UN-backed Millennium Development Goals and now have the Sustainable Development Goals and a look at the missions and visions of most corporations, non-profits, government departments and universities and you will see language that is framed in terms of goals, either explicitly or implicitly.

A goal for this purposes is:

goal |ɡōl| noun:  the object of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim or desired result • the destination of a journey

Goal setting is the process of determining what it is that you seek to achieve and usually combined with mapping some form of strategy to achieve the goal. Goals can be challenging on their own when a single person is determining what it is that they want, need or feel compelled to do, even more so when aggregated to the level of the organization or a network.

How do you keep people focused on the same thing?

A look at the literature finds a visible presence of one approach: setting SMART goals. SMART goals reflect an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound (or Timely in some examples). The origin of SMART has been traced back to an article in the 1981 issue of the AMA’s journal Management Review by George Doran (PDF). In that piece, Doran comments how unpleasant it is to set objectives and that this is one of the reasons organizations resist it. Yet, in an age where accountability is held in high regard the role of the goal is not only strategic, but operationally critical to attracting and maintaining resources.

SMART goals are part of a larger process called performance management, which is a means by enhancing collective focus and alignment of individuals within an organization . Dartmouth College has a clearly articulated explanation of how goals are framed within the context of performance management:

” Performance goals enable employees to plan and organize their work in accordance with achieving predetermined results or outcomes. By setting and completing effective performance goals, employees are better able to:

  • Develop job knowledge and skills that help them thrive in their work, take on additional responsibilities, or pursue their career aspirations;
  • Support or advance the organization’s vision, mission, values, principles, strategies, and goals;
  • Collaborate with their colleagues with greater transparency and mutual understanding;
  • Plan and implement successful projects and initiatives; and
  • Remain resilient when roadblocks arise and learn from these setbacks.”

Heading somewhere, destination unknown

Evaluation professionals and managers alike love SMART goals and performance measurement. What’s not to like about something that specifically outlines what is to be done in detail, the date its required by, and in a manner that is achievable? It’s like checking off all the boxes in your management performance chart all at once! Alas, the problems with this approach are many.

Specific is pretty safe, so we won’t touch that. It’s good to know what you’re trying to achieve.

But what about measurable? This is what evaluators love, but what does it mean in practice? Metrics and measures reflect a certain type of evaluative approach and require the kind of questions, data collection tools and data to work effectively. If the problem being addressed isn’t something that lends itself to quantification using measures or data that can easily define a part of an issue, then measurement becomes inconclusive at best, useless at worst.

What if you don’t know what is achievable? This might be because you’ve never tried something before or maybe the problem set has never existed before now.

How do you know what realistic is? This is tricky because, as George Bernard Shaw wrote in Man and Superman:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

This issue of reasonableness is an important one because innovation, adaptation and discovery are not able reason, but aspiration and hope. Were it for reasonableness, we might have never achieved much of what we’ve set out to accomplish in terms of being innovative, adaptive or creative.

Reasonableness is also the most dangerous for those seeking to make real change and do true innovation. Innovation is not often reasonable, nor are the asks ‘reasonable.’ Most social transformations were not because of reasonable. Women’s rights to vote  or The rights of African Americans to be recognized and treated as human beings in the United States are but two examples from the 20th century that are able lack of ‘reasonableness’.

Lastly, what if you have no idea what the timeline for success is? If you’ve not tackled this before, are working on a dynamic problem, or have uncertain or unstable resources it might be impossible to say how long something will take to solve.

Rethinking goals and their evaluation

One of the better discussions on goals, goal setting and the hard truths associated with what it means to pursue a goal is from James Clear, who draws on some of the research on strategy and decision making to build his list of recommendations. Clear’s summary pulls together a variety of findings that show how individuals construct goals and seek to achieve them and the results suggest that the problem is less about the strategy used to reach a goal, but more on the goals themselves.

What is most relevant for organizations is the concept of ‘rudders and oars‘, which is about creating systems and processes for action and less on the goal itself. In complex systems, our ability to exercise control is highly variable and constrained and goals provide an illusory sense that we have control. So either we fail to achieve our goals or we set goals that we can achieve, which may not be the most important thing we aim for. We essentially rig our system to achieve something that might be achievable, but utterly not important.

Drawing on this work, we are left to re-think goals and commit to the following:

  1. Commit to a process, not a goal
  2. Release the need for immediate results
  3. Build feedback loops
  4. Build better systems, not better goals

To realize this requires an adaptive approach to strategy and evaluation where the two go hand-in-hand and are used systemically. It means pushing aside and rejecting more traditional performance measurement models for individuals and organizations and developing more fine-tuned, custom evaluative approaches that link data to decisions and decisions to actions in an ongoing manner.

It means thinking in systems, about systems and designing for ways to do both on an ongoing, not episodic manner.

The irony is, by minimizing or rejecting the use of goals, you might better achieve a goal of a more impactful, innovative, responsive and creative organization with a real mission for positive change.

 

 

Image credit: Author

 

innovationpsychologysystems thinking

Decoupling creators from their creations

on June 1, 2017

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The world is transformed by creators — the artists, the innovators, the leaders — and their creations are what propel change and stand in the way of it. Change can be hard and its made all the more so when we fail to decouple the creator from the created, inviting resistance rather than enticing better creations. 

If you want to find the hotspot for action or inaction in a human system, look at what is made in that system. Human beings defend, promote and attend to what they made more than anything. Just watch.

Children will rush to show you what they made: a sandcastle, a picture, a sculpture, a…whatever it is they are handing you. Adults don’t grow out of that: we are just big kids. Adults are just more subtle in how we promote and share what we do, but we still place an enormous amount of psychological energy on our creations. Sometimes its our kids, our spouses (which is a relationship we created), our ideas, our way of life, our programs, policies or businesses. Even something like a consumer purchase is, in some ways, a reflection of us in that we are making an identity or statement with it.

Social media can feel like one big echo-chamber sometimes, but it’s that way because we often are so busy sharing our opinions that we’re not listening — focusing on what we made, not what others made. Social media can be so harsh because when we attack ideas — our 140 character creations sometimes — we feel as if we are being attacked. This is one of the reasons we are having such traumatized, distorted discourse in the public domain.

Creations vs creators

The problem with any type of change is that we often end up challenging both the creator and the creation at the same time. It’s saying that the creation needs to change and that can hurt the creator, even if done unintentionally.

The interest in failure in recent years is something I’ve been critical of, but a positive feature of it is that people are now talking more openly about what it means to not succeed and that is healthy. There are lots of flaws in the failure talk out there, mostly notably because it fails (no pun — even a bad one, intended… but let’s go with it) to decouple the creator from the creation.  In many respects, creators and their creations are intimately tied together as one is the raw material and vehicle for the other.

But when we need to apologize for, make amends because, or defend our creations constantly we are using a lot of energy. In organizational environments there is an inordinate amount of time strategizing, evaluating and re-visiting innovation initiatives, but the simple truth is that — as we will see below — it doesn’t make a lick of difference because we are confusing the creators with the creations and the systems in which they are creating.

Sometimes we need to view the creator and creation separately and that is all a matter of trust – and reality.

 

A matter of trust, a matter of reality

If you are part of a team that has been tasked with addressing an issue and given a mandate to find and possibly create a solution, why should it matter what you produce? That seems like an odd question or statement.

At first it seems obvious: for accountability, right?

But consider this a little further.

If a team has been given a charge, it presumably is the best group that is available given the time and resources available. Maybe there are others more suited or talented to the job, perhaps there is a world expert out there who could help, but because of time, money, logistics or some combination of reasons in a given situation that isn’t possible. We are now dealing with what is, not what we wish to be. This is sometimes called the real world. 

If that team does not have the skills or talent to do it, why is it tasked with the problem? If those talents and skills are unknown and there is no time, energy or commitment  — or means — to assess that in practice then you are in a truly innovative space: let’s see what happens.

In this case, accountability is simply a means of exploring how something is made, what is learned along the way, and assessing what kind of products are produced from that, knowing that there is no real way to determine it’s comparative merit, significance or worth — the hallmark tenets of evaluation. It’s experimental and there is no way to fail, except to fail to attend and learn from it.

This is a matter of trust. It’s about trusting that you’re going to do something useful with what you have and that’s all. The right / wrong debate makes no sense because, if you’re dealing with reality as we discussed above there are no other options aside from not doing something. So why does failure have to come into it?

This is about trusting creators to create. It has nothing to do with what they create because, if you’ve selected a group to do something that only they are able to do, for reasons mentioned above, it has nothing to do with their creation.

Failing at innovation

The real failure we speak of might be failing to grasp reality, failing to support creative engagement in the workplace, and failing to truly innovate. These are products of what happens when we task individuals, groups, units or some other entity within our organizations, match them with systems that have no known means forward and provide them with no preparation, tools, or intelligence about the problem to support doing what they are tasked with. The not knowing part of the problem is not uncommon, particularly in innovative spaces. It’s nothing to sneer at, rather something that is a true learning opportunity. But we need to call it as it is, not what we want it or pretend it to be.

My colleague Hallie Preskill from FSG is big on learning and is not averse to rolling her eyes when people speak of it, because it’s often used so flippantly and without thought. True learning means paying attention, giving time and focus to what material — experience, data, reflections, goals and contexts — is available, and in . Learning has a cost and it has many myths attached to it. It’s difficulty is why many simply don’t do it. In truth, many are not as serious about really learning, but talking about learning. This is what Hallie sees a lot.

The material for learning is what these innovators, these creators, are producing so if we are valuing creation and innovation we need to pay attention to this and entice creators to continue to generate more quality ‘content’ for us to learn from and worry less about what these creators produce when we task them with innovation missions that have no chance to ‘succeed’ just as they have no chance to ‘fail’

A poor question leads us to poor answers.

Consider what we ask of our innovators and innovation and you’ll see that, if we want more and better creators and if we want more and better creations we need to see them in a new light and create the culture that sees them both for what they are, not what we want them to be.

Image credit: Author

art & designcomplexitysocial systemssystems thinking

A Beautiful Idea

on April 10, 2017

MakeSomethingBeautiful_Snapseed

Is what you do, where you work, or how you organize, beautiful? Among the many words used to describe our work lives the most neglected and maybe necessary might be described that one word: it’s time to take it seriously. 

For those working in design one of the biggest challenges is getting people to understand that good design isn’t just about making things pretty, but making them better, more useful, more responsive, sustainable, and impactful. Good design is too often seen as a ‘nice to have’ than a ‘must have’ and is thus invested in accordingly.

‘Beautiful’ as a concept has it even worse. In my entire working career I’ve never heard the word uttered even once on a matter of professional importance by others. That’s a shame and it speaks loudly to our present situation where innovation is hard to come by, organizations struggle to attract and retain good people, and the battle for attention — of the market and our workforce — is maybe the biggest one of them all.

But beauty is worth a look, particularly because it is, well, beautiful.

A beautiful term

What is beautiful? Consider the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition.

beautiful |ˈbyo͞odəfəl| adjective

pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically: beautiful poetry | a beautiful young woman | the mountains were calm and beautiful.

• of a very high standard; excellent: the house had been left in beautiful order | she spoke in beautiful English.

Note two key features of this definition: pleasing the senses or mind and high standards. The first part might sound a bit hedonistic (PDF), but when you consider what motivates us at the most base level of existence: it’s pleasure and pain. We are attracted to people, experiences, objects and environments that generate pleasure. In an environment described above when attracting talent, eyeballs — attention — is so hard to come by, why would we not amplify beauty?

The second term is high standards. It’s not enough to attract attention, we need to hold it and to inspire action, loyalty and persistence if we wish to succeed on most counts. Quality is a competitive advantage in many environments, particularly in human services where the complexity associated with poor quality decisions, processes and management are potentially catastrophic. (Enron, anyone?).

An associated term to this is aesthetics, which is defined as:

aesthetic |esˈTHedik| (also esthetic) adjective

concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty: the pictures give great aesthetic pleasure.

• giving or designed to give pleasure through beauty; of pleasing appearance.

Aesthetics is the more active appreciation of beauty — the application of it in the world. Organizational aesthetics is an emergent area of scholarship and practice that seeks to understand the role of beauty in the organization and its implications. Steven Taylor describes organizational aesthetics through storytelling, outlining the way he came to know something through connecting his work with his senses. His story points to different ways in which organizational aesthetics is experienced and understood, but ultimately how its sensed. It’s that attention to the senses that really sets this field apart, but also how practical it is.

Practical beauty

Organizational aesthetics are about practical realities of organizational life, brought to bear through our five senses, not just the mind. Strange that so much of what is produced in the literature and scholarship is so cognitive and devoid of discussion of any other sensory experiences. Yet, we are sensuous beings and most healthy when we are in touch (literally!) with our senses in our lives. Consider the cortical homunculus and you’ll know that we feel through a lot more than we often use in our work lives.

Organizational aesthetics is about using methods that tap into these senses and the qualities of physical, social, psychological spaces where they can be used more fully to contribute to more impactful, healthier and happier environments for humans to work and thrive. This approach is rooted in design and the hypothesis that, as human created (thus designed) constructs, the modern organization can design in beauty as much as it can design beauty away. Like design itself, organizational aesthetics is practical, above all.

Citing earlier work from Roozenberg & Eekles (1995) on the topic of design causality, Steven De Groot, from the Eindhoven University of Technology, points to the way in which design is a responsive means to helping an organization adapt.

By fulfilling functions a design satisfies needs, and gives people the possibility to realize one or more values. Transferring these fundamentals, the design of the organization needs to change as a consequence of changing roles and needs of the employees in this case.

Roozenberg and Eekles assert that form follows value and thus, as De Groot sought to explore, explicit value of beauty can produce beautiful organizations. The reasoning for this research comes from earlier studies that show that when organizations value and nurture beauty within them, employees are happier, their commitment increases and the organizational function is improved.

Dispelling beautiful myths

Despite the reams of research that has emerged from a variety of disciplines showing the connections between beauty and positive outcomes and experiences in organizations, there will be many who are still troubled by the idea of integrating the word ‘beautiful’ into the serious world of work. It may be tempted to rely on a few myths to deny its utility so let’s dispel those right away.

  1. Promotion of beauty is not denial of the ugly. Ugly is everywhere: in the news, on social media (spent time on Facebook lately?), and embedded in many of our global, social challenges. Embracing the beautiful is not about denying ugly, but drawing our focus to areas where we can create change. As I discussed in a previous post, good design is increasingly about reducing information overload and focusing on areas we can influence by creating positive attractors, not negative ones. It’s based on attention and human nature. We stop and remark on fresh cut flowers. We comment on a colleagues’ attractive new outfit or clothing item (“I love your new socks!”). We see something that is well designed and we admire it, covet it or just enjoy it. Beauty captures something of the most rarest of commodities in the modern age: attention. We won’t change the world by yelling louder, we’ll change it by speaking beautifully, better.
  2. There’s no single definition of beauty. Beauty is truly subjective. What I might find particularly beautiful is different than what someone else will, yet there is much evidence that there is also a shared sense of the beautiful. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on taste and taste-making (PDF) points to the social means in which we — fair or not — share perspectives to elevate ideas, concepts and artifacts. We are social and thus share social rules, tastes and ideas and that this might be done across cultures, within ‘tribes’ or tied to specific settings or groups, but there is always something shared.
  3. There are shared principles of beauty. What makes for a shared cultural experience is something that we refer to as simple rules in complexity studies. These are rules that may be explicit, unconscious or tacit that guide collective actions and shared experiences. It, combined with history (and something we call path dependence – a driver of stability and stasis in a system), is what allows us to have some collective appreciation of the beautiful. It’s why natural elements (e.g., plants) or use of certain colours can create a positive atmosphere and psychological experience within a setting even if those plants or colours are universally loved.
  4. There is plenty of evidence to support the case for making changes based on beauty. This ‘absence of evidence’ myth will take a while to dispel as people will see (or not see) what they want to. All I would suggest is that you take a long hard look at some of the research — in particular Steven de Groot’s doctoral work — and put that up against any other theory or program of research and explain how it’s less than — particularly given how young of a field it is. There is an entire academic journal devoted to this topic (and, like in any journal, not all the evidence is top-notch, but there’s good work in there and throughout the literature). Consider how management theory, a well-established area of scholarship, is already becoming ‘a compendium of dead ideas‘ given the paucity of solid research behind it and yet something like organizational aesthetics hasn’t taken hold? The battle is long, but adoption of some new, beautiful thinking is one that will pay off. I’ve not even started getting into the arguments for environmental and organizational psychology or design.

Change in a complex system is about creating, finding and amplifying positive attractors and dampening and eliminating negative ones (and in complex systems positive isn’t always good and negative bad, it’s about what the goals are in the system — what you wish to achieve within that system. In society, these are almost always socially negotiated, somewhat contested).

Attracting attention, ideas, and energy is one of our biggest social challenges at the moment and a huge barrier to change.

Everyone’s looking for a way to capture attention and hold it when there is a beautiful solution right under their noses.

“Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike” – John Muir, 1869

Image Credit: Author

design thinkingevaluationsocial innovation

The Ecology of Innovation: Part 1 – Ideas

on December 5, 2014
Innovation Ecology

Innovation Ecology

There is a tendency when looking at innovation to focus on the end result of a process of creation rather than as one node in a larger body of activity, yet expanding our frame of reference to see these connections innovation starts to look look much more like an ecosystem than a simple outcome. This first in a series examines innovation ecology from the place of ideas.

Ideas are the kindling that fuels innovation. Without good ideas, bold ideas, and ideas that have the potential to move our thinking, actions and products further we are left with the status quo: what is, rather than what might be.

What is often missed in the discussion of ideas is the backstory and connections between thoughts that lead to the ideas that may eventually lead to something that becomes an innovation*. This inattention to (or unawareness of) this back story might contribute to reasons why many think they are uncreative or believe they have low innovation potential. Drawing greater attention to these connections and framing that as part of an ecosystem has the potential to not only free people from the tyrrany of having to create the best ideas, but also exposes the wealth of knowledge generated in pursuit of those ideas.

Drawing Connections

Connections  is the title of a book by science historian James Burke that draws on his successful British science documentary series that first aired in the 1970’s and was later recreated in the mid 1990’s. The premise of the book and series is to show how ideas link to one another and build on one another to yield the scientific insights that we see. By viewing ideas in a collective realm, we see how they can and do connect, weaving together a tapestry of knowledge that is far more than the sum of the parts within it.

Too often we see the celebration of innovation as focused on the parts – the products. This is the iPhone, the One World Futbol, the waterless toilet, the intermittent windshield wiper or a process like the Lean system for quality improvement or the use of checklists in medical care. These are the ideas that survive.

The challenge with this perspective on ideas is that it appears to be all-or-nothing: either the idea is good and works or it is not and doesn’t work.

This latter means of thinking imposes judgement on the end result, yet is strangely at odds with innovation itself. It is akin to judging flour, salt, sugar or butter to be bad because a baker’s cake didn’t turn out. Ideas are the building blocks – the DNA if you will — of innovations. But, like DNA (and RNA), it is only in their ability to connect, form and multiply that we really see innovation yield true benefit at a system level. Just like the bakers’ ingredient list, ideas can serve different purposes to different effects in different contexts and the key is knowing (or uncovering) what that looks like and learning what effect it has.

From ideas to ecologies

An alternative to the idea-as-product perspective is to view it as part of a wider system. This takes James Burke’s connections to a new level and actually views ideas as part of a symbiont, interactive, dynamic set of relations. Just like the above example of DNA, there is a lot of perceived ‘junk’ in the collection that may have no obvious benefit, yet by its existence enables the non-junk to reveal and produce its value.

This biological analogy can extend further to the realm of systems. The term ecosystem embodies this thinking:

ecosystem |ˈekōˌsistəm, ˈēkō-| {noun}

Ecology

a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.

• (in general use) a complex network or interconnected system: Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ecosystem | the entire ecosystem of movie and video production will eventually go digital.

Within this perspective on biological systems, is the concept of ecology:

ecology |iˈkäləjē| {noun}

1 the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings.

2 (also Ecology) the political movement that seeks to protect the environment, especially from pollution.

What is interesting about the definitions above, drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary, is that they focus on biology, the discipline where it first was explored and studied. The definition of biology used in the Wikipedia entry on the topic states:

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy.[1]

Biologists do not look at ecosystems and decide which animals, plants, environments are good or bad and proceed to discount them, rather they look at what each brings to the whole, their role and their relationships. Biology is not without evaluative elements as judgement is still applied to these ‘parts’ of the system as there are certain species, environments and contexts that are more or less beneficial for certain goals or actors/agents in the system than others, but judgement is always contextualized.

Designing for better idea ecologies

Contextual learning is part of sustainable innovation. Unlike natural systems, which function according to hidden rules (“the laws of nature”) that govern ecosystems, human systems are created and intentional; designed. Many of these systems are designed poorly or with little thought to their implications, but because they are designed we can re-design them. Our political systems, social systems, living environments and workplaces are all examples of human systems. Even families are designed systems given the social roles, hierarchies, expectations and membership ‘rules’ that they each follow.

If humans create designed systems we can do the same for the innovation systems we form. By viewing ideas within an ecosystem as part of an innovation ecosystem we offer an opportunity to do more with what we create. Rather than lead a social Darwinian push towards the ‘best’ ideas, an idea ecosystem creates the space for ideas to be repurposed, built upon and revised over time. Thus, our brainstorming doesn’t have to end with whatever we come up with at the end (and may hate anyway), rather it is ongoing.

This commitment to ongoing ideation, sensemaking and innovation (and the knowledge translation, exchange and integration) is what distinguishes a true innovation ecosystem from a good idea done well. In future posts, we’ll look at this concept of the ecosystem in more detail.

Brainstorming Folly

Brainstorming Folly

Tips and Tricks:

Consider recording your ideas and revisiting them over time. Scheduling a brief moment to revisit your notebooks and content periodically and regularly keeps ideas alive. Consider the effort in brainstorming and bringing people together as investments that can yield returns over time, not just a single moment. Shared Evernote notebooks, Google Docs, building (searchable) libraries of artifacts or regular revisiting of project memos can be a simple, low-cost and high-yield way to draw on your collective intellectual investment over time.

* An innovation for this purpose is a new idea realized for benefit.

Image Credits: Top: Evolving ecology of the book (mindmap) by Artefatica used under Creative Commons License from Flickr.

Bottom: Brainstorming Ideas from Tom Fishburne (Marketoonist) used under commercial license.

art & designdesign thinkinginnovation

Creativity and Craft, Myth and Muscle

on March 24, 2014
Applying Creative Muscle

Applying Creative Muscle

Creativity is a word shrouded in myth that has been held up as this elusive, seductive object that will reveal the true secrets of innovation if ever reached. Creativity is something we all have, but not all of us are craftspeople and knowing where these two are separate and meet is the difference between myth and the muscles needed to turn creativity into innovations.  

A tour of blogs, journals, and magazines that cover innovation from Inc, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Entrepreneur and all the way to Brain Pickings will find one topic more visible than most: creativity.

Creativity is one of those terms that everyone knows, many use, has multiple meanings and is highly dependent on person and context. It’s also something that many of us feel we lack. This is not surprising given the way we set our schools and workplaces up as Sir Ken Robinson has discussed throughout his career.

Robinson has delivered perhaps one of the best and certainly most viewed talks on this at TED a few years ago illustrating the ways creativity gets ‘schooled’ out of us early on:

Accessing creativity

A look at the evidence base — which is enormous, unstructured, and varied in quality and scope — finds that creativity is hardly the mythical thing it gets made out to be and, following Sir Ken’s points raised in his TED talk, something we all have in us that may simply be hidden. More than anyone, Dr Keith Sawyer knows this having put together perhaps the strongest collection of evidence for the application of creativity in his books Explaining Creativity and, more recently, Zig Zag. (Both books are highly recommended).

Sawyer dispels such myths of the creative genius or the “flash of insight” as a linear process, rather pointing to creativity as often the cultivation of practices and habits that people go through to generate insights and products. This ‘zig zag’ represents metaphorically taking switchbacks to climb a mountain rather than going straight uphill. As you engage in creative thinking and action you build a deeper knowledge base, hone and acquire skills, and simply become more creative. “Creative people” are those that engage in these practices, build the habits of mind of creativity, and persist through each zig and zag along the way.

Design and design thinking is often associated with creativity because it is, in part, about creatively finding, framing and addressing problems through a structured process of inquiry, prototyping and revision. David and Tom Kelley in their recent book Creative Confidence point to design thinking as a layered foundation that is what much creativity is built upon. The disciplined, guided process that design thinking (well applied) offers is a vehicle for building creative confidence in those who might not feel very creative in what they do.

The process of design thinking — illustrated in the CENSE model of innovation development below — fits with Sawyer’s assertion of how creativity unfolds.

The design and innovation cycle

The CENSE design and innovation corkscrew model

The role of craft

What Robinson, Sawyer, the Kelley brothers and others have done is dispelled the myths that creativity is some otherworldly trait and shown that its something for all of us. What can get lost in the blind adoption of this way of thinking is attention to craft.

Craft is the technical skill of applying creativity to a problem or task and that is something that is quite varied. The debate over whether or not the term designer belongs to everyone who applies creativity to solving problems or those with formal design training largely is one of craft.

Craft is the thing that brings wisdom from experience and technical skill in transforming creative ideas into quality products, not just interesting ones.

In our efforts to free people from the shackles of their education and a social world that told them they weren’t creative we’ve put aside discussion of craft in the hopes that we simply get people moving and creating. That is so very important to unlocking creative confidence and ensuring that our efforts to develop social innovations are truly social and engage the widest possible numbers of participants. However, it will be craft that ensures these solutions don’t turn into what George Carlin referred to as (great) ideas that suck. 

Building design practice in the everyday

The habits of creativity are just that, habits. And if design is the way of applying creativity to problems then building a design practice is key. This means bringing elements of design into the way you operate your enterprise. Spend a lot of time finding the right problems is a start (as discussed in a previous post). Discover, inquire and be curious. Visualize, prototype, create small ‘safe-fail’ experiments, and ensure that there is a learning mechanism through the evaluation to allow your enterprise to adapt.

This is all easier said than done. It can be easy to be satisfied with being creative, but to be excellent involves craft and that requires something beyond creativity alone. It may involve training (formal or otherwise), it most certainly involves mindful attention to the work (which is what underlies the ‘10,000 hour rule’ of practice that make someone an expert), but it also requires skill. Many will find their creative talents in art, management, leadership, or service, but not all will be remarkable in exercising that skill.

To put it another way; it’s like a muscle. Everyone can work their muscles and develop them with training, nutrition, rest, and attention, but some will respond to this differently for a variety of reasons due to how all of those activities come together. This is what helps contribute to reasons why someone might be better adept at long-distance running, while others are good at bulking up and still others are far more flexible on the yoga mat.

We are all creative. We are all designers, too. But not all of us are stellar designers for all things and its important to build our collective design literacy, which includes knowing when and how to cultivate, hire and retail craftspeople and not just assume we can design think our way through everything. This last point is what will ensure that design thinking doesn’t fade away as a fad after it “didn’t produce results” because people have confused creativity with craft, myth with muscle.

References: 

Kelley, T., & Kelley, D. (2013). Creative confidence: unleashing the creative potential within us all. New York, N.Y.: Crown Publishers.

Sawyer, R. K. (2012). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation (2nd Edition.). Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

Sawyer, R. K. (2013). Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

innovationpsychologysocial systemssystems thinking

Reading Innovation and the New Economy

on December 17, 2013
Runnymede Theatre / Chapters

Runnymede Theatre / Chapters

Economic changes are transforming business and work itself in ways that are having consequences well beyond supply chains and jobs, but the way employment spurs learning. A look at a recent change at a Toronto bookstore hints at a future that suggests we may want to think about what kind of economy we want not just the one we have. 

I recently learned that the Chapters bookstore occupying the former Runnymede Theatre in Toronto will be shuttering as its lease is taken over by a major drug store chain.

The bookstore, pictured above and below, is among the most beautiful you will find anywhere. It is also a meeting place for parents (mostly moms) and children, offering one of the few spaces for young families to gather in the neighbourhood.

The loss of Chapters has caused an uproar in the community, ironically just as it did when it came into the once abandoned heritage building. Reporting on the story in the Toronto Star, business reporter Francine Kopun highlights some of the losses that are expected to the community:

“It’s a real loss for the neighbourhood,” said Jill Zelmanovits, 41, a mother of two children, ages seven and four.

“I would say my children have been there every week their whole lives.”

She said staff at the store greet her by name and it is a gathering place for new moms with kids in tow.

The story goes on to add:  “Schools and community groups hold fundraiser events in the space, said Ward 13 Councillor Sarah Doucette (Parkdale-High Park). Her office was inundated with calls from residents after the news broke. “We had an uproar like this when Chapters went in,” she said.”

The change from a theatre to a bookstore was disruptive just as the next change will be as Shoppers Drug Mart moves in. However, it is worth considering from the perspective of social systems and economies what this change will mean beyond the shift in products and services being offered at the home of the Runnymede Theatre.

Systems thinking change

Stroller Parking

Will the new drug store have stroller parking?

While we see retail change all the time, this particular move was more emblematic of a larger systems trend that is worth noting. If one is to look at the origin of the Runnymede Theatre and what it did, one starts to see some aspects of an economic shift that might be worth paying attention to.

When the theatre started as a vaudeville stage, the skill-sets required to run and grow the theatre were complex and portable. One needed to know about storytelling, performance, marketing, hospitality, logistics, and how to maintain a connection to the community to create the kind of shows that people wanted to pay for. These are skills that could easily be transferred into other contexts beyond the theatre, which made it an ideal place for engendering talent that could have transferrable benefit beyond one context. And as researchers like Keith Sawyer have noted, the benefits of theatre on creativity and group collaboration are significant.

The bookstore is a step down from that. The roles are fewer, the jobs are simpler, but at least the product is something that inspires learning and there are still benefits for the customers beyond products (much like the inspiration that theatre-goers received). Bookstore staff are best when they read and share what they read with their customers; it makes them better salespeople and stock clerks. The inclusion of a children’s space with related programming for moms and kids adds a community benefit as well as requiring and providing additional skills to the bookstore staff. These might not be as comprehensive as those gained from theatre, but as a system the bookstore still confers benefits beyond just selling books.

The next stage of the theatre is set for a drug store. If we take out the pharmacy (which is a minor part of the modern drug store’s revenue stream and purpose)  the remaining aspects of a drug store require little skill to operate. Stocking shelves, directing people to products, and ringing through purchases (if the self-checkout option isn’t available) requires little knowledge or skill and confers little benefit beyond pay. Fewer jobs are full-time and fewer skills are needed so the pay is likely lower for each staff member as one would expect from this. None of this is intended to dismiss the workers themselves or drug stores, but it’s difficult to imagine many supplemental benefits beyond raw product and pay garnered by having a drug store in the building; no group collaboration skills, no meeting place for families, no knowledge of current affairs, no storylines.

Designing economies

The story of the Runnymede Theatre is not about picking on the drug store, nor is it about being nostalgic for days gone by. It is about considering what kind of employment, community experiences, skills, and outcomes we get when we change our economy. As citizens and consumers we grow what we sow. Being mindful of what kind of things we ‘plant’ and the kind of experiences we pay for, demand, seek and design in our enterprises matters at a system level. Some might say that the market changed and that the theatre and its lease-holders are simply responding to that market, which is partly true. There is no one group that can or should be responsible for governing such shifts, but they are worth paying attention to. If we don’t, no one will.

No better place to pay attention to is Seattle, Washington and the home of Amazon. As the annual consumerist sprint that starts at Thanksgiving in the United States began, viewers of the news program 60 Minutes were treated to a look at Amazon’s prototype plan for drone-powered package delivery. Once again, we were seeing Amazon do what it has done time and again: innovate the business of retail.  Two weeks later, Canada Post announced that it was going to phase out home delivery in urban centres. (Soon, all mail will go to post office stations in centralized locations much like in rural communities).

Amazon is seeking to revolutionize the way products are shopped for, ordered and delivered from books to groceries and more. In an interview earlier in 2013 with Fast Company, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos outlined a bold plan for transforming the way products are ordered, promising the possibility of same day, even 2-hour delivery on anything a person needs. This is innovation at its clearest, yet are we innovating the systems that wrap around these new technologies and processes?

If drones are delivering our books, robots picking them from shelves, and computer programs taking the order in the first place, who is working? Yes, some computer programmers will be employed, but the world isn’t full of or needs billions of programs or apps. What does the future of work look like? What are our choices in this? What kind of systems do we want and are we prepared to shape them?

Greg Van Alstyne and Bob Logan defined design as “creation for reproduction” in a paper published in Artifact in 2007 (an earlier version is available here). Bezos and Amazon are designing the economy by creating tools, processes and ideas that are emergent and potentially self-replicating if spread. They are not the only ones with a say in the matter and every time we buy something, look at something and engage with a product or service we are voting with our wallet, consciousness and attention for what we want.

It is worth considering how we design for the emergence of an economy we want, not just what is delivered at the drug store or by drone.

psychology

Tips to Maximize Creativity at Work

on July 23, 2013

How to maximize the creative potential of what you do? Becoming good at something is a huge start. But what if getting good at being a generalist is what you aspire towards? It’s an interesting challenge for those who see value in those with the kind of cross-disciplinary, multi-faceted sets of skills often needed to thrive in complex social systems, but resist specialization. What do you think?

The Creativity Guru

 

These tips, from Scientific American Mind, are all also found in the book Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:

  • Become an expert. You need a solid knowledge base. (Zig Zag Chapter 2: LEARN)
  • Observe. Carefully study how people use what they currently have, and what problems they face. (Zig Zag Chapter 3: LOOK)
  • Know your audience. Walk in the shoes of the intended consumer. (Again, LOOK)
  • Step out of your comfort zone. Seek activities outside your field of expertise. (LOOK again)
  • Be willing to work alone. Balance group time with alone time.
  • Talk to outsiders about your work. This helps with novel perspectives. (Research on how to balance solitary and group time is in my book Group Genius)
  • Have fun. A good mood helps! (Zig Zag Chapter 4: PLAY)
  • Take a nap or let…

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