Creativity for everyone
I’m so pleased to bring season 2 to you with thirteen episodes of insight and wisdom to help you lead with energy wherever you are.
In season 1 we focussed on core energy; the way you think and feel and show up each day that influences the personal energy we have and bring to your team.
Season 2 is focussing on the second out of four dimensions of leading with energy and that’s creativity.
Creativity is often overlooked as a leadership essential and hugely under-rated. This first episode and blog of a brand new season is all about why creativity is a must-have for all leaders who want to bring energy to their work and their teams.
It’s not just me saying this.
In LinkedIn’s 2019 survey of its entire membership they asked what is the core skill essential for all leaders and the answer came back resoundingly – it’s creativity. Before the pandemic we were living in a world that was changing fast, with different generations in the workplace, increasing amounts of data on customers, competitors being able to bridge international boundaries facilitated by technology that is changing by the minute. Stand still to blink and you’ll miss the change before your very eyes.
In the same year the World Economic Forum debated the key skills that modern day leaders will need in order to forge ahead in the next decade. It’s not data science, artificial intelligence or cloud computing – these are important skills for sure but the key skill for all leaders to seize the opportunities of AI and cloud is – creativity.
Nine in ten leaders say businesses that invest in creativity are likely to increase employee productivity, foster innovation and result in happier and more contented customers. That sounds like an interesting and desirable result to me.
And Adobe’s survey of leaders, parents, students and workers has around 85% of people saying 85% of people saying creativity makes people better. Yet only 5 in 10 people describe themselves as being creative.
I happen to think that’s not true. In the sense that many more people are much more creative than they allow themselves to believe. And that’s a good things because creativity can be learned, released from hidden depths and allowed to flourish if we choose to see it that way. And creativity is one of those skills that spreads across boundaries – if we’re creative in spirit then regardless of whether we’re at home, work or play, our friend creativity will be working with and for us.
So why is creativity so important and yet only 5 in 10 people feel confident enough to declare they’re any good at it? Over the series we’ll be exploring this question in more depth but here are a few thoughts to get you started.
We’re often scared and intimidated by creativity. It’s easy to think that it’s a gift that’s awarded to some people and not to others. It’s easy to think of it as for artistic types who can imagine and conjour ideas from a blank sheet of paper and not for those who like certainty and data, it’s easy to think of it as something appealing to extroverts. All these stereotypes are just what they are – stereotypes and they are wrong – creativity lies within everyone and most often it’s our own doubt and insecurity and resistance to see it as an every day essential that are the main blockers from expressing ourselves this way.
But what exactly is creativity itself and how does it contribute so much relevance to leadership. Let’s explore a bit further.
Mark Vernooij and Robert Wolfe, describe creative leadership as being able to create and realise innovative solutions, particularly when faced with complex and volatile changing environments. As we hopefully come out the back end of a global pandemic, being able to thrive in a volatile changing environment sounds kind of useful.
Creative leaders when the chips are down, when everything is changing around them and the pathway ahead is unclear, unknown and untrodden, can still create clarity of purpose for their team. They can navigate and even harness unpredictability and they can create impacts that are bigger than themselves, bigger than their organisations and beneficial to society.
Dan Palotta, writing in Harvard Business Review describes creative leaders as ones who can give hope and optimism. By introducing something new or proving the impossible is now possible, they can ignite the energies of others and change people’s perceptions around what they can achieve.
As the world continues to present us with ever complex and ever-changing challenges, we live in a world of ambiguity, uncertainty and where the right way forward isn’t always clear. We’ve moved on from a world where leaders on the top floor of a building could pull a policy lever and be assured the way this would cascade all the way down to the mailroom. We also live in an information and education rich world where many of today’s hires are the experts in their field more so than the organisation’s leaders. Great ideas can come from anywhere and leaders who cultivate a culture of creativity optimise their organisations to grab and nurture these ideas from where ever they spring.
Often leaders misinterpret creativity as being the generation of ideas. That’s an output of creativity but it isn’t where things start. Creativity rests in our ability as leaders to sense the need and the opportunity to change from the environment around you. The spark comes from a restlessness with how things area and acute observations skills of the world around that allows good questions to be asked. To be creatively oriented as a leader you don’t need to generate all the ideas for yourself but you do need to be willing to look at your organisation and imagine things could be done differently and better.
And the stakes are high. Take Eastman Kodak for example. I’ve had the privilege of visiting the George Eastman Museum in Rochester and it chronicles the life of George Eastman and what led to the creation of Kodak as one of the United States’ leading companies. At its height, its creativity in both product design and marketing power made it a household everyday essential. In 1999 it was one of the oldest, strongest and most established companies in the world valued at $200 billion. Yet within twelve very short years, that value had collapsed by a staggering 99% until the company eventually filed for bankruptcy. As an addendum to this story to prove all is never lost with creativity, the city of Rochester is now a leading centre in the science of light and photonics which has huge industrial potential and could be considered an adjacent skill to its original mission of forming images onto film.
This is the pace of change leaders face. Nothing can be taken for granted. Being alive to a complex and every changing world with subtle nuance, sensing the ebb and flow of the tide and judging the timing to jump on and ride the wave? That takes a special kind of creative leadership. It’s not for the ordinary or faint-hearted.
Some of our doubts around our own creativity stem from a misunderstanding of what creativity in the adult world really means. When we use the word, our imaginations tend to take us back to elementary and primary school where we imagine crayons and colours, artistry and visualisation.
As we step into adult leadership we’re sometimes tempted to dismiss these child like notions and yet if I replace your primary school toolkit with new words such as visioning, prototyping, hypothesis, customer journey mapping and innovation, you’ll be seeing and likely accepting creativity at work in the adult world. If we hold doubts around creativity those doubts are sometimes linked to our childhood comprehension. Many companies for example will claim a desire to be more innovative or a place of innovative thinking, yet innovation is the manifestation of creativity – without creativity there can be no innovation.
Here’s a quote from Natalie Nixon, from her book The Creativity Leap
“Creativity requires critical thinking and complex problem-solving—so we essentially have creativity leading the pack in important job skills for the future of work.”
The leap signifies the fact that creativity is always working with the ambiguous and a degree of the unknown. If there are no unknowns then we have no need for creativity, yet without creativity we will end up solely recreating largely what we have today. To help with this process Nixon describes a wonder-rigour model.
Wonder, is our ability to observe, question and form a critical understanding of our surroundings and it comes from asking great questions but also develop a sense of noticing difference. Rigour instead is our capacity to be disciplined and have the diligence to realise our ideas. Wonder and rigour are co-dependent, one can’t exist without the other. Wonder produces the questions and rigour supports the experimentation that produces answers and vice versa.
You need both to be ultimately successful. Rigour without wonder produces no change at all and sucks the life out of companies who are so entrenched in understanding themselves that they are completely surprised when someone approaches to take them over and mould and shape them into something they never saw coming. But wonder without rigour can be costly, aimless and ultimately frustrating for those involved who never see the fruits of their labour.
Every leader can be creative. Every leader who wants to see their company thrive and grow needs to be creative. It’s time to ditch the misconceptions and knuckle down to mastering one of the key skills you need to be a thriving productive and creative leader.
Nine in ten leaders say businesses that invest in creativity are likely to increase employee productivity, foster innovation and result in happier and more contented customers and yet
only five in ten of us think we're creative.
