Nurturing Individual and Organizational Creativity
By: Aditya Batra
Tags: Creative Confidence, Productivity, Work From Home, Loonshots, Creativity

Picture Credits — HBR

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous I don’t know,” said the poet Wislawa Szymborska in her Nobel acceptance speech. Having sat around in a school that laurels itself on the creativity of its students, I am inspired by the creative depth some of my friends have displayed in both their professional and personal spaces. Watching the stunning presentations & creative writing to well-designed work environments and bedrooms, I have often found myself thinking the question — Am I creative? If yes, what is my creative output?

There are two interesting books I came across recently when trying to learn about this elusive superpower — Creative Confidence by Tom Kelly and David Kelly and Loonshots by Safi Bahcall. Both are of the bestseller creed and impart essential lessons on nurturing a creative curiosity as an individual and preserving the creative edge in organizations which tends to fade as the teams grow and expand.

I’m confident that you’re familiar with most of these ideas and my objective would only be to reinforce them, and help with a realization if not an epiphany that you are well on to the road of creativity and need a push.

Creative Confidence

Tom and David Kelly, the authors, are brothers and founders of the design thinking pioneers — IDEO and Stanford’s d.School.

There are many ways to convince oneself of the mind’s creative limitations — no training or exposure, and in some cases, people blame it onto their genes. I can easily say that the last one is false — one of my favourite music artists, John Mayer, has parents who were both school teachers.

Then what’s the way to become creative and achieve creative confidence?

Guided Mastery

Coined by psychologist Albert Bandura, the process of ‘Guided Mastery draws on the power of the first-hand experience to remove false beliefs.’ Bandura designed this process to help people with their phobias in a stepwise and guided manner where they gradually moved closer to the object of their aversion — say a snake. The idea here is to avoid diving right into the expectations of creating your magnum opus but identifying the right steps to lead towards a tangible goal.

Bandura’s research shows that once people overcame one challenge, they ‘undertook tougher challenges, persevered longer and became resilient in the face of obstacles and failure.’

There are a bunch of insights you can act on:

1. Failure is okay

Early failure is almost always crucial to innovation. Many terms identify this phenomenon such as iterative adaption where failure and experimentation lead to new ideas and subsequent experiments. Discovery of some of the most critical drugs has come through failure and iterative adaptation. Even the Wright Brothers before making their ‘first flight’ practised at locations that would draw less media attention to their attempts.

2. Develop ‘Action Bias’, or cultivate a ‘Creative Spark’

All achievements are first actions. One great analogy of this comes from the Venture Capital industry. The industry funds a few ideas but is insistent on going through many pitches before deciding on which one to invest. They call it the ‘deal flow’ — how many startups get funded amongst those who pitched? The greater the deal flow, the more are the chances of making successful investments. Similarly, people should increase their ‘idea flow’ — thinking or exposing to more ideas will lead to acting on more ideas.

3. Use constraints for motivation:

Every team likes one more resource or more time or budget to complete a project. Tim Harford talks about this story of Keith Jarrett, once made to play on a piano that was ‘unplayable’, since the only other options were to find another piano or cancel the concert. The recording of that performance has become the best-selling piano album of all time. Constraints, in most cases, fuel creativity rather than stifle it, and it is always worth rethinking what the real constraints are and how they impact performance and execution.

4. Create an environment for yourself

‘The muses can be fickle.’

As much as we sometimes want to work on our passion projects, there are way too many hindrances that come in the way, procrastination being one. It is therefore vital to be conscious and motivated for your projects which you can do by feeding some natural stimulators in your environment or building a creative support network. At one of the IDEO offices is a floor-to-ceiling chalkboard in a restroom which acts as an informal forum of new ideas. Whiteboards and reminders are some of the ways you can use for yourself, and there are new productivity applications which are based on great insights to keep you on track.

Loonshots

The long list of non-fiction greats that begin with Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis eventually leads to Safi Bahcall. In Loonshots, Bahcall analyses the tendency of organizations to dismiss projects and its champions. While much literature talks about organization culture for either nurturing or stifling innovation and creativity, little is known about how structure plays an important role. Military, for example, is not an organization that is known for experimentation and encouraging its workforce to come up with new ideas and spend time on passion projects. At the same time, startups, on the other end, thrive on the supply of new thinking.

Broadly, people in the organization are either artists and soldiers and both groups have their importance, strengths, and weaknesses. In Steve Jobs’ second stint at Apple, he brought in Jony Ivy, the Artist and Tim Cook, the Soldier for their vastly contrasting strengths and he acted as the bridge between the two.

While individual creativity and innovation are essential, large organizations need several other skills to achieve the desired objectives. For example, a small group of researchers and doctors develop a drug, it requires different capabilities to take the medicine to the consumer, i.e. manufacturing, marketing, distribution etc.

These two short examples also explain the crux of the book.

There are three crucial rules in regulating your organizations to be the best mix of creativity and efficiency:

1.Separation of Phases

The artists need to function separately from the soldiers and not be affected by the culture of the other group. The organization also needs to watch its blind side and not lean on any one of the two while nurturing both equally.

2. Create Dynamic Equilibrium

The leadership needs to love both groups, of artists and soldiers equally. It must only manage the transfer and interaction between the two groups and not the object, i.e. technology, product etc. As the organization grows, the leadership should train and appoint champions to bridge the divide.

3. Spread a System Mindset

The organization needs to keep asking itself on the ‘why’ of the decisions and choices it makes and ‘how’ it can improve the decision-making process. Once the organization becomes consistent in answering these questions, it will find ways to improve.

It is a tragedy that most startups don’t succeed; the number of organizations that scale in India is also not particularly heartening

(there is a public policy case to be made there as well, but I’ll wait for some other day) due to the way they are structured.

I recommend both of these not only because of the hoard of insights they are, but the amount of trivia they throw at the reader along the way — pure joy.