Myths and legends of creativity

What skills are essential in a leader?

It’s a curious thing that in many organisations there are certain traits of leaders that are seen as essential and indispensable and others that are more desirable and nice-to-have and if you don’t have them then supplement your team by hiring people who do.

Few organisations would support the notion of having a CEO who cannot manage strategy, cannot read a balance sheet, cannot structure resources, cannot attract or retain talent, cannot communicate with stakeholders.?

Yet when it comes to creativity, many organisations choose to structure themselves in a way in which the creatives are a body of people who largely inhabit specific corners of the organisation such as the marketing and promotions team.??Creativity, conjuring images of our childhood box of crayons and art-work tends to find itself delegated away into silos.??This allows the mythology that creativity is something some of us are born with and others are not to be perpetuated.?It is the first mistaken belief held by a leader about creativity that permeates a whole organisation starting from the top.

The creativity silo

This mistaken belief maybe comes from these childhood notions of creativity as being an artistic expression and therefore locked into a particular part of organisations, often the marketing department.?Creativity is not about “having the great idea”.?That’s the output and not the start point.?Creativity starts with observation skills, noticing how what you have is comparing to what’s around you and noticing the difference, noticing something is out of place, noticing gaps and starting to ask the question why.

For creativity to have purpose it should be grounded in what is and what could be.?It is the start point of a corporate vision, it’s the baseline of your new strategy and essence of making thousands of small incremental beneficial improvements to where you are and of self-awareness, it’s the expression of self-improvement.??Now how do we feel about only five in ten workers opting out of creativity or hiving this off to the marketing team?

David Burkus has looked at how creativity has evolved through the ages and why we hold some of these strange attitudes to creativity.?It’s not a modern phenomenon and he argues we can trace some of our attitudes to creativity back through cultures as far back as the ancient greeks.

Creativity as a gift from God

Myths are stories that are passed down over time.?They evolve through man’s imagination and often in story form to explain away the unexplainable.?The ancient Greeks created the muses as a means to explain why certain people appeared to hold innate talents and aptitudes towards things and some people did not.??The ancient Greeks believed all creative and artistic talent came from the muses, they built shrines to them and fervently held that entering into favour with the muses would grant the gifts of creativity and conversely if you upset the muses then creativity would be with-held from you.

In one story Thamyris, a gifted singer, boasted to the muses about his talents.?He challenged the muses to a singing competition.?The muses indulged and he lost.?As a punishment, they blinded him, forever robbing him of his ability to play the lyre and exhibit his skill.?

Cross the muses and bad things happen.?In other words, a higher power decides whether you’re going to be creative or not creative.

The consequence of this is that successive religions and cultural texts have reinforced the notion that creativity is bestowed upon some and not others.?In middle age Christianity, creativity was believed to be a gift from God and therefore any songs, writings or artistic endeavour was a manifestation of creativity not from the individuals themselves by from divine intervention.?For those blessed in this way came the duty to honour the responsibility of creative expression in art, music, sculpture etc.?For those not blessed I guess it was just take in the wonder of someone else’s fortune.

Building myths upon myths - the complex mythology of creativity

These myths then extended over time to create other myths.?Of which one of my favourites is the?Eureka Myth – that holds that ideas just arrived within a flash from some unknown location, possibly divine intervention we know not what.

Or the Originality Myth that ideas come to us in isolation, out of nowhere, that are unique, individual and absolutely not a consequential build on either our personal experiences or other people’s discoveries.

David Burkus proposes that although there’s no precise or concise definition of creativity it is largely seen as the process of developing ideas that are novel and useful.??Ideas that are novel is most easily recognised as creativity at work.?But useful is also important.?Countless patents have been filed over the years that are certainly novel, but never really attracted attention from people for their practical usefulness.??Remember the wonder-rigour model??Here’s that thing again telling us creativity has a much harder edge than mere artistic expression.

If you want an example of imbalance in creativity step forward Mr Richard Hartman of Issaquah in Washington State who in 1999 filed a patent for a device that would automatically rotate your ice cream cone for you as you licked it, with an inbuilt drive mechanism within the hand-held housing to “rotationally feed its contents against a person's outstretched tongue”

This one for me definitely ticks the novel box, but try as I might in undertaking a decent search of the internet, I’ve not yet been able to find a major following of folk queuing up to buy this kind of device and I do like my ice-cream.?Novel yes, usefully solving an urgent problem, maybe we’re still waiting on the evidence.

The difference between creativity and innovation

Innovation is a word that has crept up on us this century.?For me it’s got a kind of masculine edge to it – proclamations of dominance, first across the line, ahead of all the others, leaving everyone in the dust in the pursuit and achievement of something new.?It’s undoubtedly got a sexier marketing edge than experimentation.??The root within innovation is new and the creation of something new.?The skill to get there is creativity.?Innovation is not a thing in itself but an output of creativity.?Whereas innovation leads us into believing the answer lie in developing something entirely new, creativity allows you to find the answer sometimes and often in what you already have.

The fundamental elements of creativity

Harvard Business School Professor Theresa Amabile proposes what she calls the “componential model of creativity”, designing the model to explain the creative process and how it works.

Theresa Amabile proposes that creativity comes from four components:

• Domain relevant skills
• Creativity relevant processes
• Task motivation
• The surrounding social environment

When these factors overlap, creativity is more likely to take place.??Or as Burkus puts this, creativity will be seen when an intrinsically motivated person with sufficient creative thinking skills and a given level of expertise operates within an environment that supports creativity.

Innovation happens when these factors align and so the resulting creativity turns the novel into the useful.?It only happens when there is an environment that supports creativity.?So it’s useful as leaders if we believe we want innovation and creativity within our organisations to understand these conditions and how we can create them.

Domain relevant skills can be known as expertise, and these are the knowledge, technical skills or talents someone has in their particular field.??It’s difficult to imagine a songwriter composing a piece of music without an understanding of scales, harmony or keys or someone creating a new piece of architecture without an understanding of engineering.??Now here’s the thing – we often mistake domain relevant skills for creativity.?We think that the jazz musician is innately creative whilst ignoring the years of practice that has gone into crafting strong musical skills and understanding.?

And this is highly relevant because if we accept creativity requires expertise or knowledge mastery then we also accept that this knowledge can be acquired, learned, rehearsed and improved and therefore we can all move closer to creativity.

Creativity relevant processes are the way that people look at a problem and generate solutions.?By looking at a problem from different angles, considering how people have approached this in the past, combining contrasting authorities on a subject.??All these processes can be acquired, learned or facilitated and people taught how to generate more ideas and once again we begin to appreciate that this aspect of creativity can be acquired and is not gifted to us in some mythical fashion.

Task motivation essentially is how keen we are to see things change, see a result or just be energised by the thrill of potentially solving the problem.?We can bring experts together but without the individual motivation to want to engage in solving the problem, the knowledge will not be freely given or fully utilised.

And finally the importance of the influential social environment.?Research points to the fact that the working environment for each individual can positively or negatively affect creative expression.?Some organisations may welcome new ideas, emphasise continuous improvement, have the means for people to spontaneously collaborate, be able to free people from certain tasks to have time to work with others.?But other organisations may have cultures that see new ideas, particularly from subordinates as threatening, or drive productivity of today’s challenges reluctant to allow space to develop answers to tomorrow’s problems.??Divisions within the organisation may find themselves competing against each other for top-dog performance thus precluding any sharing of secrets that could give the other team an advantage.

The benefit of Amabile’s model is that as leaders we hold the power to calibrate creativity through our actions and behaviours.?It is within our gift to culturally embrace and support creativity and remove the social and cultural barriers that inhibit people from expressing themselves as well as the process and structural barriers that prevent progress.?It is within our gift to organise our learning programmes to continuously support the development of expert domain knowledge.?It is within our gift to provide individuals with the support, confidence and training to generate ideas within an environment that motivates people to want to do this in the first place.

Don't sit under the apple tree waiting for divine inspiration to strike

So you see far from creativity being something where we sit under an apple tree waiting for a lightening bolt to suddenly strike us with that spark of inspiration that will change everything.?We can put to bed the notion that creativity is something that we either have or we don’t.?And therefore we can choose to organise ourselves differently instead of seeing creatives as a strange kind of sect who are kept at arms-length from the organisation.?Instead we can take specific and simple steps, even within teams, to harness the creative energy that lies dormant in all of us.

It's there for the taking, we only need to look a little harder.

Want to explore your personal creativity - read the whole series or reach out to me at ianbrowne.coach and let's work together on your creative energy