Creativity Management for the 22nd Century

I. Creativity: Problem for the Ages

1.???????When Socrates relented his lifelong objection to poetry, he granted that poetic thought produced unique insights.

2.???????Socrates’ historic gesture toward this artform acknowledged poetic thought as a legitimate mode of thinking alongside his vaulted logic.

3.???????Socrates’ objection to poetry was that since divine inspiration generated the gift, the source was the gods’ not human mind/reason/logic.

4.???????While creation remained the domain of the gods, analytical insight and conceptual generativity were accepted human capacities.

5.???????Techné, the Greek word for human generativity, is, simply put, craft. Like logic, it’s acquired through praxis.

6.???????The word ‘creativity’ didn’t enter popular usage until 1950, when the American Psychological Association declared it a research priority.

7.???????Think about this: Human creativity wasn’t even a thing for 3000 years! The bias against creativity was persistent and pervasive.

8.???????The United Nations now considers creativity such a global imperative that it named 2021 as the Year of Creativity.

II. The Genius Obsession

9.???????Genius and creativity are two entirely different but long-associated phenomena. Genius is a glorified metric. Creativity is generative ability.

10.????A genius is marked by an IQ of 140 or higher. But the research consensus is that creativity is marked by an IQ in the 120s to 130s.

11.????Ironically, according to the research, creativity actually decreases as IQ rises beyond 140. The cause of this is overspecialization.

12.????Einstein was a genius but not a very good mathematician. He was surrounded by colleagues who shared his passion for physics-math.

13.????Think of creativity as horizonal thinking while genius is vertical thinking. The more one specializes the narrower the scope of thought.?

14.????Great creative minds are more often than not polymaths: people with breadth and depth in multiple fields or areas of knowledge.

15.????Thinking of creative greatness, names that most often come to mind include: Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Buckminster Fuller.

16.????da Vinci is known as the most gifted creative mind of the Renaissance. His many talents included anatomy, engineering, painting and weaponry.

17.????Edison, the famed inventor, said invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. He was prolific, not a genius per se.

18.????Fuller invented the geodesic dome. He said we need more multitalented ‘comprehensivists’ not merely more overspecialized technicians.?

III. Creativity Beyond Genius

19.????The difference between genius and creativity is like the difference between the mind and body. Creativity is felt not simply thought.

20.????The idea of a body-mind not just a mental-mind is a radical thought. But it is one embraced by psychology, immunology and neuroscience.

21.????It might be easier to think of body-mind as the emotional mind. Emotions are bodily experiences. Creativity is like that.

22.????The mind cannot see everything inside a person. It is useful to consider trauma in this regard. Trauma is a kind of internal blindness.

23.????Trauma survivors work with special psychotherapists to re-experience their wound and to manage the uncontrolled feelings it drives.

24.????Creativity is similarly blind. No one ever sees it coming. No one controls it. Everyone feels creativity’s onset. The jolt of insight.

25.????The idea of creativity’s physiological nature is new, but it explains why some people are incredibly creative, others incredibly smart.

IV. Creative Confusion

26.????It’s confusing. Creativity isn’t genius. They aren’t synonymous. But we’re caught up in what Andrew Robinson calls the “enduring cult” of genius.

27.????Even renowned creativity researcher Robert Root-Bernstein describes the thinking tools of creativity in terms of genius.?

28.????Brain scientist Nancy Andreasen does the same thing: she writes about the creative brain and creativity but refers to this as the science of genius.

29.????Yet creativity colleagues like Howard Gardner are very “clear that psychometric creativity is independent of psychometric intelligence.”

30.????The confusion is rife. Having creative ability is not the same as judging creativeness. Being creative is not the same as being a genius.

31.????Fran Leibowitz put a finger on it: The one thing, the only thing that creative people need is talent. But it’s infuriating to people…

32.????…Talent is maddeningly randomly distributed…you can’t buy it, learn it, herd it. It’s not genetic. Only talent leads to creative success.

33.????Creativity is a continuum from Big C to little c. Groundbreaking novelty is high-end Big C, while everyday problem solving is the stuff of little c.

34.????When Leibowitz refers to talent she is talking about Big C creativity. Everyone has little c creativity. A minority have the true Big C kind.

V. What Creativity Isn’t

35.????Creativity has a lot of synonyms. But none of them equals creativity. In sum, they put fence posts around what creativity is.

36.????Educational researcher Melvin Rhodes found 40 different “definitions” of creativity. Following are several commonly used proxies for creativity.

37.????“Imagination” is envisioning via association, metaphor, fantasy, play, or wandering.

38.????“Innovation” is incremental improvement or change that is disposable by design.

39.????“Discovery” is incidental or accidental finding of the previously unnoticed but present.

40.????“Instinct” is a sense of knowing acquired from extensive prior experience.

41.????“Ingenuity” is cleverness, a qualitative characteristic of a person or an intended solution.

42.????“Invention” is tinkering until something works, based on a process of trial and error.

43.????“Ideation” is the surfacing of alternatives via guided or unrestrained free association.

44.????“Improvisation” is extended, spontaneous inflection off the germ of a given theme.

45.????“Experimentation” is iterative albeit systematic testing, but hit or miss in nature.

46.????“Investigation” is contingent study to expose what is there and render insight about it.

47.????“Examination” is observation driven by structured protocol to produce a diagnosis.

48.????The synonyms of creativity start to describe creativity’s shades of expression – but in aggregate they do not amount to a definition.

VI. About Ideation

49.????Ideation is not creativity, but deserves special attention, because it is a widely used across fields, disciplines, and specializations.

50.????Ideation is a formal methodology – a structured process – used to extract (hopefully) useful thoughts from groups of people.

51.????Ideation is a technique that everyone can participate in and that can enhance the short-term generativity of an individual, team, or group.?

52.????Design thinking is an increasingly popular form of ideation created by David Kelly, the founder of the consultancy IDEO (said: eye-dee-oh).?

53.????These methods are teachable and learnable: IDEO offers a continuing education Design Thinking Certification from its IDEO U arm.?

54.????California College of the Arts takes this a major level higher with its offering of a specially-tailored MBA in Design Strategy (called DMBA).

55.????Ideation is conducted under the guidance and supervision of a specially-trained facilitator who polices the ground rules of ideation.

56.????Ground rules include: no idea is bad; no dominating discussions; no premature judgments; equal allocation of tokens to vote on items.

57.????Ideation can temporarily improve the generativity of teams and individual participants but doesn’t produce a lasting effect.

58.????Ideating with Hi-C groups can return great results. A former, specially-trained, rotating panel called Creative Consumers succeeded at this.

VII. What Creativity Is

59.????Creativity is the phenomenon that separates humans from all other sentient beings on the planet. Creativity is what makes us human!

60.????Everything, literally everything, that humanity has accomplished is because of the extraordinary generativity of the human being.

61.????Generativity is the only one-word definition of creativity. The only synonym that defines creativity. To be creative is to generate.

62.????Bucky Fuller described nature as the technology of the universe. A human corollary of this is that creativity is a kind of technology.

63.????Creativity is the organic technology of humanity. We inherently generate, make. Creativity is the technology that generates all others.

64.????Being creative is having and using the ability to generate new ideas and make new things successively on an ongoing basis.

65.????Not everyone is highly creative. It takes a specially-talented person to continually generate newness, whether in the arts or commerce.

66.????Creativity is not a process; it’s an innate aptitude, a unique ability to generate new ideas, solutions, things, or new problems to solve, challenges to mount, ways to be.

VIII. Creative Misconceptions

67.????Creativity enhances the application of technology. Technology does not enhance creativity. Technology is often mistaken for creativity because of the effects it can produce.

68.????As Marshall McLuhan said, the content of any medium is always another medium. The content of technology is code. Technology and coding are media – they are tools.

69.????People use tools – sometimes differently than intended – to do new or different things. Tools can only do what people make them do.

70.????A new tool that does new things does not make people more creative. It’s the other way around! People use tools – use all technology – more creatively.

71.????“Creative technology” and “technological creativity” are both oxymorons. Technology is a tool. Technology is a utility. Technology is a creative output.

72.????Technology without a human creator, designer, or operator is inanimate physically or digitality. Technology that produces things automatically is not creative; it’s mechanical, not generative.

73.????Tech, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, can only produce according to the parameters it is designed or programmed with or overseen by a human being.

74.????Technologies doing things faster, more efficiently, more accurately and at greater scale are not creative; they are industrial.

75.????Sometimes technology functions unexpectedly. Unexpected function occurs only because something unrecognized was built in upfront – including coding errors.

76.????The fluke of incremental function is an accident of creativity not of technology. Designing in something unrecognized is a human accident not a technological one.

77.????As Buckminster Fuller would put it, creativity is the emergent property of the organic human system. Creativity is a net extra emergence of the holistic system of the human body.

IX. Creative Reception

78.????To manage creativity, it is important to know how it is perceived, particularly in today’s workplace environments. It isn’t pretty.

79.????People perceived as creative stand out. Their difference is they’re so generative. They put different perspectives and ideas out there.

80.????“Out There” is one of myriad terms pinned on highly creative people. Others include: Space Cadet, Emotional, Hard to Manage, Maverick.?

81.????It goes on: Touchy, Unconventional, Resistant, Complicated, Trippy, and even Inventive ( ! ) read: Ridiculous. All perceived negatively.

82.????Being called creative translates to Weird, Rogue, Outlier. If you ever hear it, in context it will definitely make you cringe.

83.????One of the worst things to hear about yourself in a square, work setting is that you’re creative. Because it signals “Not Normal”.

84.????Every one of the words listed above is pejorative. To feel that “Creative types aren’t like others” is to exclude them. Creative = Undesirable.

85.????Goes both ways: Just as “Creative” pins otherness on someone, highly creative people see the rest of us as zombies who “Don’t Get It”.

86.????So long as the subject of the prized ability is treated like an object of curiosity to be tolerated, creativity is unmanageable. A person is an agent not an object.?

X. Creative Disruption

87.????“Extraordinary audacity”: how physicist Gino Segré described the creativity of two polymath scientists he called Ordinary Geniuses.

88.????“Disturbing polymaths” is how Andrew Robinson described those highly creative folks who confront the still pervasive genius cult.

89.????How is anyone supposed to manage the “extraordinary audacity” of “disturbing polymaths” upon their reception by the cult of genius?

90.????These are euphemisms for disruptive influence in conventional, hierarchical, command and control organizations.

91.????Hence Segré’s extraordinarily audacious sci-duo never received formal recognition from their profession for their groundbreaking work.

92.????This is not the reception one would want for the extraordinary creative talent every organization is supposedly desperate to hire today.

93.????So, then, how does one deal with it? You begin by accounting for what robs talent of their ability, desire or space to create.

XI. Creativity Challenge

94.????Management is accountable for the organizational environment it creates and for the conduct of its ranks – leaders and staff alike.

95.????The leadership is liable for corrective inaction. This is not to absolve individual employee conduct that is creatively debilitating.

96.????With creativity an imperative, management shoulders a fiduciary burden to ensure the environment is calibrated to foster creativity.

97.????If beauty to an organization is the product of a well-ordered, functioning cosmos, then creativity is the product of a disorganized, disruptive chaosmos.

98.????This is precisely the way, for example, modern art played out and integrated into the fabric of the world we occupy and move through.

99.????The French painter/draftsman Jean-Auguste Ingres moved art to toward super-realism with his lifelike 19th c. portraiture.

100.?WWI disrupted the 19th c. cosmos, gave rise to subversive Dada, and birthed Surrealism: it reshaped the way we still see the world today.

101.?This is the challenge of creating a creativity-enabled organization. A well-oiled machine doesn’t appreciate stray parts.

102.?Chaos ushered in Surrealism, which instantaneously reordered the presentation of reality and was absorbed into advertising in real time.

103.?The entire way we see reality presented in media today remains formally Surrealist at its core in many ways.?

104.?As Fran Leibowitz also said, talent and its possession are absolutely randomly distributed. Sprinkled like sand throughout the world.?

105.?Perception: sand causes machines to seize. Reality: Creativity should have the opposite effect, freeing the creative engine of friction.

XII. Reality Check

106.?A key aspect of creativity is that it comes from anywhere – solo players, grassroots, archives, old products, faded institutional memory.

107.?The only law of corporate creativity is that anyone with decision-making discretion can empower and stifle creativity.

108.?Letting people exercise their decision-making power will effect changes large and small throughout the organization.?

109.?Not everyone in an organization possesses or will manifest the kind of creative talent that will generate incremental new value.

110.?But the fact that a minority of the whole will generate the majority of the incremental value should not be seen as devaluing the majority.

111.?While empowering talent, key to any creativity strategy is to not denigrate the majority, who are accountable for the organization’s smooth, sustainable operation.

112.?The majority will produce the new offering, take it to market, fold it in, and maintain it, while the cycle of creativity goes on.

113.?Creativity can wash through organizations. Innovations – small-large, structural-cultural, departmental-divisional – come from anywhere.

114.?The Pareto Principle is a good starting place. It is an oft-repeated lore within organizations that 20% of the staff generates 80% of its value.

115.?This is a misnomer, of course. That 80% of headcount isn’t dead weight. It constitutes the backbone of a machine that mints ongoing value.

116.?The organization cannot work without all its stakeholders engaged in ensuring the health and longevity of the enterprise.

117.?It’s that 20% minority that generates the incremental new value: the turquoise in the value-laden vein of silver. They don’t self-anoint.

118.?However, there is a variable upper limit to how much creativity an organization can ingest. Too much of anything can overload any system.

119.?An organization insufficiently prepared and re/calibrated to handle successive creative throughput risks collapse from overconsumption.

120.?Too much creativity too soon could easily displace limited resource allocations and disrupt logistics underpinning going operations.

121.?Cisco’s certification division creatively applied the Pareto ratio to its reseller channel. The logic: 80% revenue from 20% distribution.

122.?There was no plan to make up the foregone revenue. Flawed logic left the unit with a 20% revenue shortfall and sans its top two leaders.

123.?Creativity is synonymous with neither foolhardiness nor wholesale disregard of risk, compounded by a fundamental lack of oversight.

124.?Creativity demands careful stewardship by people who know how to cultivate, manage, and implement it.

XIII. Cultivating Creativity Pipeline

125.?Having an aptitude does not mean it will express itself. Similarly, testing for Hi-C to screen candidates is no guarantee either way.

126.?Ford R&D recently hired its 1st-ever high-school-grad intern. This non-engineer’s 1-year residency generated Ford a new patent.

127.?Cisco proudly touts its own high schooler, who through self-study earned 3 of its 4 levels of IT certification. An amazing achievement.

128.?With 6 months of mentoring and experiential learning post HS, the same kid earned Cisco’s coveted 4th level: elite CCIE certification.

129.?With HS diplomates producing industrial patents and elite certifications, creativity cultivation is radically different than believed.?

130.?Workforce ability is deeper than appreciated and leveraged. Much of this is due to educational-hiring bias. The talent base is evolving.

131.?Micro-skill credentials and a proliferation of unstandardized certifications muddy the qualification waters.

132.?Composer Hector Berlioz said insufficient inexperience is an impediment to creativity because you have to work outside constraints.

133.?Unawareness of or disregard for constraint is crucial to creativity for rule-blindness is one of the key elements of creativity.?

134.?Gatekeeping inexperience may be a mistake when it comes to identifying and acquiring truly creative talent. We need a new way to judge.?

135.?If we want to increase the potential for creativity widely, then the effort should begin with K-12 education.

XIV. Common Core & the 4-Cs

136.?The introduction of Common Core Curriculum is producing a vastly more sophisticated talent pool with the skills industry has begged for.

137.?CCC stresses the 4-Cs of communication, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration – exactly what industry is seeking but won’t hire.

138.?How is this possible? Youth and the bachelor’s degree are the barriers to infusing organizations with new, richly creative lifeblood.

139.?Forbes reported “surprising” results from CCC: better learner achievement and better teacher performance.

140.?To ensure talent availability everywhere, business needs to push Common Core to carry the 4-Cs to full implementation nationally.

141.?Common Core is wrongly attributed to federal meddling. In fact, its development arose from the governors and educational leaders of 48 states.

142.?4-Cs produces better entry level workforce and better higher education performance. It works at both ends of the educational scale.

143.?If Fortune 100s like Ford and Cisco are in any way indicative, then the bias toward 4-year higher education is no longer entirely justified.

XV. Talent Management for Creativity

144.?Let’s face it: organizations hire more like they already have, like themselves, who they can work with comfortably. Not the job-description.

145.?Talent Management is all over the map. How often is creative contribution to/at the enterprise level recognized let alone considered? Never.?

146.?The C-suite, board and shareholders only look for consistent bottom line yield. They never evaluate contribution to the macro-organization.

147.?Jack Welch was a cult figure. Despite his management creativity, he was an average performing GE CEO. Yet GE made him famous and rich.

148.?The actual designers of the original Macintosh computer got their names embossed inside the housing. But Steve Jobs was the famed billionaire.?

149.?Testing for CQ – creativity quotient – will yield a cadre with significantly above average IQ. But CQ can’t guarantee quality like QC (quality control) can.

150.?There is no Six Sigma for creativity. As Leibowitz keeps reminding us: Either you’ve got talent (read: Hi-Creativity) or you don’t.

151.?The Hi-C threshold is a 120 IQ. So, Hi-C should be cultivated at educational levels when IQ is most malleable, i.e., the earlier the better.

152.?The incidence of true Hi-C is both unpredictable and uncontrollable and thus demands a different way of looking at and managing it.

153.?By the same token, the value-add that Hi-C performance brings to the bottom line needs to be assessed and rewarded in new ways.?

154.?Whichever P&L component Hi-C impacts most visibly: Peg rewards there so senior leadership acknowledges real skin-in-the-game value-add.

155.?If you want to incentivize creativity, get real about its contribution. If an idea grosses $1.0B then give its creator a net $1.0M bonus!

XVI. The Creativity Era

156.?Japan’s Nomura Institute calls the present age the Creative Era. But they really mean the IT Era. IT is a utility not creativity!

157.?All organizations are creative hotbeds. The real difference among them is: some are good at cultivating their creative assets and some aren’t.

158.?Creativity lies latent until mined. Mining techniques can differ markedly but always involve entertaining dissonance, contention, and passion.?

159.?Pursuing enterprise strategies to enhance organizational creativity is not carte blanche to run amok as Cisco channel training did.

160.?Mastercard exercised due caution when a creative solution for its US debit division produced extremely positive research results.

161.?Mastercard beat its #1 rival in head-on testing for the first time in 20 years – by a 20% margin. Leadership insisted on a research redo.

162.?The new results returned even stronger, with an incremental bump to 25%. 60 million new cards went into distribution in the next 3 years.

163.?Healthy skepticism and tolerance of costly reconfirmation produced an exponential result that fulfilled a #1 global priority.?

164.?This is the kind of impact creativity can unleash on an organization. A dying division can turn into a market leader with alacrity.

165.?University of California’s Extension in Silicon Valley produced a similar outcome by going to market like, horrors, a hungry retailer.

166.?UCSC’s Silicon Valley Extension grew enrollment by 20% in one year, saving a revered, 40-year-old institution from imminent shutdown.

167.?If creativity can have this kind of impact on two disparate industrial sectors, it will work in any. But creativity isn’t a panacea.

168.?Creativity is an exceptional resource that’s already more deeply penetrated in every organization than is understood and leveraged.

169.?Creativity is every organization’s secret weapon, just not realized. It’s already sitting in every dusty arsenal ready-n-rearing to go.