The myth of the lone creator
We’ve all been there. On those training sessions where we all sit round in a circle and we’re asked to call out our name and something unusual about ourselves. The intent is to find a bond and settle the team. Hands up anyone who has ever felt this way. Usually my brain is not really listening to anything anyone else is saying. Instead it is doing just two things.
“Quick find something about yourself that sounds interesting and is truthful”. Full disclosure I learned this from once attending a course where I was wearing a T shirt that happened to have some kind of mountain and hiking imagery and the trainer asked which mountains I’d climbed – forcing me to say “it’s just a T shirt and I liked the logo”.
“Quick half listen to what everyone else is saying and hope to goodness that the person next to you doesn’t say your thing. Actually I don’t really know who they are and I didn’t give them a good look when I came in the room. Is it possible to give them a little side-ways glance so I can see if they’re likely to come up with my idea? Will they notice or think it’s odd.”
In short you don’t want me on your training course. But I doubt I am alone.
In this article I wanted to look at a few ways you can get your team ready for one of those rare post covid meetings that has everyone’s brains fired up to be creative but without some of the forced awkwardness that comes with these things. As ever because of our egos and vanity, when it comes to getting people geared up to be creatively open it pays to get them thinking about things rather than about themselves and their own insecurities which is why the “tell me how boring a life you lead” tends not to work as an opener.
My favourite that I was taught a little while ago is Asset Based Community Development It helps this condenses to ABCD. It’s been used to help rural communities around the world look more closely at the resources they have available and what can be done with those limited resources, particularly through resource sharing. There are various ways you can run this simulation, I’ll outline just one way but by its very nature this can be mixed up endlessly.
Start with good old post it notes and hand ten post it notes to each member of your team. Ask them to fill in each post it note with a sharpie outlining a skill they have. This is your round one.
Then issue a further ten post it notes to each person and this time write a skill that you can get hold of from someone you know outside the room who would give it for free, without payment or barter.
In total you now have 25 post it notes from every person in the room. Assuming you have a wall you can use ask people to put their post it notes over the wall wherever they can find space. Once that’s done visualise groups of ten post it notes that are nearby each other, take those ten down and put them in their own special area.
Do this is as often as you need for groups of three or four people so that each group has ten post it notes. Some will be their own, that’s OK.
Now each team has a set amount of time, eight minutes is ideal, to make a list of as many things they could achieve with the skills they see in their toolkit. The trick is not to challenge feasibility, try and do a cost-benefit analysis or fit for your company. What we’re doing is practicing a specific craft in creativity which is additive thinking.
The second warm up to creativity involves getting a pile of magazine, ideally from disconnected topics. Rip out the pages and ask everyone in the team to select and cut out ten images with no further guidance except to stay clear of words. So they can cut out a whole image or they can cut out a single object from a picture it doesn’t matter at this point in time.
Once they are done, put all the images mixed up in the middle of the table and ask everyone to grab five of those images randomly, no further instructions. Then assemble in groups of three of four and pool the images together so you have fifteen or twenty images.
Turn all the images over to their reverse sides and then turn one image over to its correct side. This is your starting image. Now the team take it in turns within a circle to tell a story based on what they see. Each image can represent a sentence or two and you can do this at pace so there’s no real need to analyse each element of the story just push the idea along.
As you reach the end of this game, ask a spokesperson from each group to show the starting image, give a quick summary of the story and the final image in the story as it comes to an end. What you have in front of you is pure additive invention at work. Prior to the exercise the number of stories that existed was precisely zero and yet a few cut out pages from a magazine was sufficient stimulation to create lots of different stories and if the images had come up in a different order, it’s highly likely the story would have changed too.
Both these exercises in their own way are about demonstrating the power of additive thinking in creativity.
Often when we think of the great creatives it is easy to imagine that they acted alone, had a single genius idea that came from the skies and they alone figured it out. In reality most of our great inventions and creative acts didn’t happen that way. They happened incrementally through additive thinking.
Edison for example wasn’t sitting entirely within darkness huddled over a candle and suddenly conceived of a light bulb. In fact there were many people trying to create a light bulb that was reliable, affordable and didn’t have the specific downside of setting fire to the house or blowing up every few moments. By studying the failures of his predecessors, Edison focussed specifically on the filament elements that made the design unique (and there’s much to say he was better at marketing than designing but that’s another story).
Apple, much regarded as being of course the go-to organisation for creativity had already seen the Lisa computer in action and an embryonic version of windows. Apple saw a world where computing was reserved for those who really had the knowledge of power and programming and since that community was small, growth could only come from breaking that mould. Apple could have conceived of something entirely brand new and never seen before. But additive thinking, noticing what could be improved rather than starting with a blank sheet of paper, created the experience that arguably changed personal computing and for Apple devotees, still does today.
The lone creator myth as outlined by David Burkus limits our thinking. It tempts us to belief that creativity is a blank sheet of paper, an empty white room that we step in to and divine our greatest ideas. Twyla Tharp, faced with what I think is a pretty awesome challenge of creating a new dance show advocates collecting a pile of things into a box and taking the box into the room. The combination of things in the box, the way they can be seen and used, creates that spark of wonderment and curiosity which is the start point for creativity and innovation.
The lone creator myth also tempts us to believe that creativity has to be entirely original. Yet this is clearly not true. Whether its helicopters conceived from acorn leaves or my favourite one – Velcro – conceived by watching how thistle burrs stuck to a dog whilst out walking, nature provides countless examples that we can springboard from. We know from studying classical artists how one sculptor was influenced from being under the tutelage of an older master. We don’t see the new piece of work as copying or criticise its lack of lone creativity. We accept the influence of ideas that have gone before and we recognise creativity through the iteration of the idea into its new incarnation.
Once we accept and allow ourselves to indulge in additive thinking, we have the whole world of inspiration to draw upon and a whole world of others’ perspectives available to incorporate. See those little post it notes and how quick just ten notes mushroomed to hundred of combinations? As a leader, change the rules and expectations of the game and harness all the power of the team in front of you.
