Tag Archives: creativity

Purpose, Power, Politics: Barriers to Creative Organizations

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Creativity and innovation are always in demand.  Well, to be more accurate, lip service to the ideas of wanting creativity and innovation are always in demand.  The reality is often far different. Most of us recognize the necessity of creative processes at work, regardless of whether we’re taking about strategic planning, insights development, product design. We, as individuals at least, recognize creative thinking as central to generating new ideas and innovation that in turn lead to greater brand recognition and profits.  We know all this and yet creativity is something that often dies before it can get a foothold.  That begs the question, if creativity is so valuable to an organization, why does he corporate culture regularly frown upon the very pursuits that lead to ground breaking innovation? Why do companies so often suppress creativity, both tacitly or overtly? While there is no doubt room for as many opinions as people, I think it largely comes down to three primary elements: Purpose, Power, and Politics.

Purpose:

Companies hire people tasked with strategic thinking and innovation that they think are smart, inventive and inclined to explore their world. They hire people who tend not to think in terms of perpetuating the status quo or who are inclined to think in a linear fashion.  They hire people who can think in ways others overlook.  While those people are intriguing and exciting during the interview and indeed the first few months of joining the corporate team, they are also disinclined to conform to the standard practices of the organization. They do not sit typing at their desks, revisiting the same spreadsheets endlessly or thinking about to shave 10 cents off the production price of some widget the company makes.  They are the people who find new product ideas while visiting the museum, create new strategies while shopping for organic dog food with people and draw insights that can be applied to messaging through reading a Victor Turner. Unfortunately, these sorts of activities run counter to what many business people believe when observing or talking to these sorts of folks. If the activity can’t be readily quantified or tied to a specific project of the moment, it is a waste of time. If it takes cerebral effort and any degree of time, then the employee isn’t worth the expense. What this boils down to is the idea that if creative thinkers don’t conform to the expected, day-to-day behavior of the organization, they are devalued and ultimately punished, even though it was their non-traditional methods that got them hired in the first place.

Punishment for thinking, learning and doing is the driving force. Curiosity fuels every great innovation, but this is easily forgotten. Innovative thinkers don’t simply solve problems. They are engaged in a process of discovery that is its own reward. If that way of thinking is thought of on an organizational level as something superfluous, then creativity and innovation die. These people have a quality that allows them to identify significant opportunities and to find creative solutions rather than simplistic ones.  If they aren’t rewarded or if they are devalued, they leave. And the organization loses out.

Power:

With power comes, many times, a decline in the ability to step outside your own way of looking at the world and embrace new ideas. While leadership leads to a unified vision and direction for the company, power often also distorts reality. Many leaders come from a traditional system that rewards organizations producing regular, predictable outcomes and profits.  There is a singular focus on how things should be done and a lack of flexibility, both in terms of thinking and control.  Encouraging more creativity means letting go of control and questioning the status quo.  This has two results. First, it means that uncertainty is now part of the business equation.  Business people are typically trained to avoid risk. Creative thinking means embracing a greater degree of uncertainty.  And this goes beyond direct business concerns, it goes to the heart of identity.

Embracing the way creative types think, learn and act often means relinquishing a degree over people. Power can be defined in many ways. Most simply, it is the ability to get what you want.  But what is it people want? Often it is greater power and recognition by the organization of their indispensability. Control leads to greater value and an increase sense of self-worth. Often, embracing creative thinking is interpreted by members of leadership as relinquishing control and opening oneself to personal and professional risk. The result is that creativity is subject to conflicts from the highest levels of the organization, down to the lowest. Which leads to internal politics.

Politics:

For all practical purposes, organizational politics are essentially an extension of the issue of power, but I separate the topic here simply because it is about those in search of power rather than those who have it. Creative thinking means being wiling to think about the big picture, to embrace the whole rather than the parts. Unfortunately, that means people are asked to do things in ways they haven’t before, thus challenging not only their worldview, but also their place in the pecking order – or so they often believe. Once a happy rut has been established, it is difficult to get out of it. We are encouraged by the system to stay within the confines of these ruts, receive our paychecks and maintain the status quo. We guard our kingdoms jealously, even as our borders slowly crumble around us. Consequently, innovation and creativity become subject to internal jockeying and stale thinking.

So What?

So what can be done to foster creativity in an organization? What needs to change? First, reward people for doing things differently and providing new, creative ideas. Encourage teams and individuals to experiment with new ways of learning. Encourage engineers and designers to spend a day at the natural history museum. Promote reading books other than the latest business book – poetry, science, anthropology philosophy, whatever gets the mind running at top speed and in new directions. In other words, give people license to think and act in creative ways rather than tying them to the same chain of behavior they have been tied to in the past.

Second, there needs to be more than temporary excitement at the top. There needs to be long-term, clear, open support by leadership and management at all levels.  It has to be sustained and encouraged throughout the organization. If leadership does not loudly promote its commitment to creative thinking, it will die on the vine.

Ultimately, talking about being a creative organization and actually performing as a creative organization are very different things.

Metaphor and Design Ideation

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Psychologists have been big believers in using metaphors in therapy. Beginning with Freud and Jung, they were interested in dreams because they believed dreams could serve as metaphors for issues that people were trying to work out in their waking lives. And over time psychotherapists, from the fathers of the movement to today, have often  believed that if they could introduce the right metaphor at the right time in therapy, they had a chance of helping someone see their problems more clearly, and perhaps enable them to engage in positive change.

Metaphors are powerful tools outside of therapy, of course.  From semiotics to language acquisition to design, metaphors define much of how we come to interpret the world and envision new ideas and things. Often there is nothing that can make a concept more persuasive or tangible than the use of an image that sticks in someone’s mind. An image may be memorable based on its concreteness or whimsicality or universality or perhaps its graphic nature; what makes a metaphorical image persuasive is its aptness to the situation one is attempting to understand.  It doesn’t mean anything, however, unless you can somehow analogize the illustration to some real situation. In other words, saying “it’s a metaphor” doesn’t mean anything unless you can answer the question, “what is it a metaphor for?”

I try to bring metaphors into presentations or ideation sessions whenever I can.  People may not be able to appreciate or understand how to build on an observation or insight unless they can visualize an analogous situation. Rather than focusing on solving problems or addressing “needs” right away, providing rich metaphors often assists people in viewing the insights in which their personal feelings are so entangled more objectively or more truthfully.  It allows people to step outside their daily roles and think creatively. The challenge is to design metaphors that are both memorable and apt to each party’s situation.  But that is also the opportunity for creativity on the mediator’s part, and for me, part of the fun of doing this kind of work.

Create a shared view of the present and the future. 
One element is to design a meeting tool to help quickly capture images and adjectives that people have in mind when asking what people are doing today, both inside the organization and the customers engaged with the brand, versus what they will do tomorrow. For example, you might pose questions such as: Imagine the research finding as a color, what would it be today? How does this compare to how people what it will be six months from now? It sounds silly, to be sure, but it gets people thinking about the situation in terms other than fulfilling immediate needs or focusing too quickly on details that may not be relevant to the bigger picture. It also gives people license to exercise their minds and start thinking in genuinely new and innovative ways.

Moving in the same direction. 
Pick one that’s appropriate for the design or strategy team and its journey, such as shopping for groceries for a party or preparing for a trip. Consider locations and cultures of team members as you choose the best metaphor. Find relevant photos or other images to post during the conversation to evoke the same sense of place for everyone. Get team members talking about what each must do to prepare for this adventure together, what help they need from others, the inherent risks and how to mitigate, etc. Capture responses as part of the meeting output, either online off to the side. “Translate” these responses into real- life implications for your team.

Painting pictures from the first-person perspective.
Encourage team members to use highly descriptive language. For example, you might ask: “Imagine you are a typical customer (or user) making a shopping list. How are you feeling as you walk through the steps? Why?” By painting a vivid picture, with each team member imagining s/he is the focal point, you’ll cull out more vivid and authentic responses far more quickly than if you asked: “Describe the typical customer experience.”  In other words, it forces the participants to think in the role of the person for whom they are designing, not in the professional role with all its baggage.

Choose images carefully. 
When you’re working with team members who have different  professional languages and concerns, using visual communications is more efficient and effective than using words alone. Tread carefully, however. Make sure that the use of a particular image, whether literal or proverbial, is appropriate and understandable for all team members.

Metaphor as a Design Tool Also Works For Business Development

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Retrieving concepts from metaphors demands creative thinking.  Contemporary theories have defined metaphors as a structuring of our cognitive system.  Metaphors are a way of equating signifier and signified into a new symbols, or at least making parallels between a symbolic construct and something completely new. In other words, metaphors affect the way we perceive the world, categorize experiences, and organize our thoughts. Metaphors not only guide reasoning but also enhance innovative thinking. They allow the marketer, the designer, or the business developer to think unconventionally and encourage the application of novel ideas to problems.

When used to pin down abstract concepts or unusual details, the use of metaphor bridges a major gap of understanding. The use of metaphors helps structure the mind to identify and define similarities and differences, break away from binary thinking and start to examine to problem from the standpoint of a system (as opposed to a series of elements within a system). It is also helpful for explaining strategic decisions back to a client. Few client-provided specifications are all-inclusive, and you can expect questions when your judgment calls don’t match what they imagined. If you explain that you designed your strategy “like Company X,” you can more readily summarize a wide range of choices and elements of the strategic plan, as well as gain added authority by showing that your choices mirror those of a successful strategy.

In design, metaphors are viewed as heuristics that help organize design thinking and tackle ill-defined design problems. Metaphorical reasoning is an iterative process through which designers gradually increase their knowledge of a design situation. Basically, the use of metaphors aids in structuring problems.  The same process can be applied to marketing and business development.  We frequently take observations at face value, focusing on the product or service to such a degree that we can’t open ourselves to new possibilities.

Why does that matter?  Because “innovation” has largely become a buzz word and doesn’t necessarily equate with creative thinking. The result is incremental thinking that is limited by conceptual walls we struggle to break through.  Creative thinking enables one to perceive a problem from unorthodox and innovative perspectives.  Creativity is a captivating and stimulating aspect of human thinking. It has been defined as the ability to restructure old ideas to produce singular inventions and to apply original thinking. It is the capacity to look critically at reality, explore unconventional alternatives, and perceive situations from unexpected perspectives. That leads to real opportunities.

 

 

 

Innovation and the Creative Mind

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For years businesses have been calling for more and more innovation, creativity and/or enterprise. Particularly in a weak economy where innovation can mean the difference between life and death, the call for creative thinking has grown increasingly strong.  Unfortunately, budgets and a stomach for risk have not followed suit.  But before we even attempt to tackle those issues we need to think about what innovation and creativity mean. Why? Because these things mean very different things to different people. we are faced with a need for something, something seen as important, but which is either undefined or is defined with a wide range of interpretations.

Creativity is, in its broadest sense, the ability to think a new idea. This may be a new design, a new way of understanding the world, a new way of approaching a problem, a new melody, etc. It may be rethinking an old idea or a use for something we had forgotten.  Out of the creative act is born symbols and myths.

Innovation is the process by which the new idea is put into practice.  It challenges the existing ways of doing things and is a means of tangible change. Because it is a form of change, people will react as they do to any change. The more surprising the innovation, the more extreme the reaction will tend to be positive or negative. As with creativity, innovation can provoke, inspire or simply be lost in translation.

Creativity and innovation are inexorably linked, two sides of the same coin. Both are characterized by the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Both involve thinking, then producing. If you have ideas, but don’t act on them, you are imaginative but neither creative nor innovative.

Unfortunately, language can get in the way of action.  It does not help that “creativity” has strong associations with the special artistic talents of a small number of exceptional people: creative geniuses like Mozart or Shakespeare. People in business often claim to be uncreative for this reason. Equally, “innovation” has connotations of logic and technical expertise.  Think Bill Gates or Einstein.  Consequently, innovation often falls to people other than the creative class.

We often forget or ignore our creativity and potential to innovate because we get too wrapped up in the roles we assume in our professions. And yet, as a species we are hardwired to embrace both. That means taking risks and relearning how to reject the mundane, assume risk and be willing to experiment.  Especially during a time of economic uncertainty.

 

 

 

 

 

Making Insights Work: Teaching is more than a list of findings

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We sometimes forget that part of what we do when conducting research is teaching.  We collect information, gather stakeholders together and tell them what we’ve learned. Working from this position, we also are prone to forgetting that we are part of a system, not individual ethnographers working predominately in isolation. Companies hire us to create, uncover and teach. Consequently, it’s healthy for us to periodically step back and think about not only how we deliver research, but how we teach.  Pedagogy is more than a $5 word, it is central to how we create and how we find our skills incorporated into the greater design and business dialogs.

Praxis is where it begins. Where other forms of participatory action research emphasize the collective modification of the external world, the praxis intervention model emphasizes working on the Praxis potential. This means the researchers’ potential to reflexively work on their respective mentalities.  The division between client and participant is diminished or done away with, and all parties engaged in the research become beneficiaries of the research – the focus becomes the system rather than the constituents alone. The praxis intervention method prioritizes unsettling the settled mentalities, providing a creative, lived-in learning space.  And it is precisely because of this action-oriented, shared sense of learning that pedagogy becomes a matter of import.

Pedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. It isn’t enough to do fieldwork and report, we have to consider how we teach. Pedagogy generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction.  There are, of course, a multitude of competing theories, but in the design space (from message design to industrial design) Creative Pedagogy works well. Creative Pedagogy teaches learners how to learn creatively, become creators of themselves and creators of their future.  The theory is predicated on the idea that society needs more and more creative people, something with which I am inclined to agree. The emergence and growth of the creative class is a reality. Hence the idea developing a creator (a creative person) capable of meeting the constantly growing complexity and accelerating development of the society.

The goal is, or should be, to develop models for creating and teaching once we leave the field, rather than simply providing content. Content is usually ignored or at least filtered through the cognitive model/professional lens that people are most comfortable with. Give a finance guy an insight and he will either dismiss it if he can’t make sense of it within his framework, or he will reinterpret to fit his model of thinking.  Creativity dies at the point of the handoff.  That means that a large portion of every project has to be devoted to how we turn information into something meaningful.  Good research design is part of the project, but equally so is good pedagogical design.

The Power of Stupidity

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As part of a storefront campaign, Diesel blanketed windows to their retail spaces with the caption, “Smart Critiques, Stupid Creates.  Be Stupid.”   Is it cute or an example of playing to our fear of not being part of the elect?  If you’re smart, you are devalued.

Being cool means being stupid, but it also means inclusion.  Interesting paradox when you start to look at the interplay between the idea of creativity as an individual act that has come to represent, symbolically anyway, rejection of the culture at large for membership in a subculture of art.  But that is another issue.  More to the point, Diesel is exploiting the myth that intelligence is a negative.  Science and deep, slow thought represent something potentially more dangerous than the potential dangers brought on by the manifestations of a small mind – the former is paternalistic, the latter is childlike.

We are rapidly becoming a culture of subject over substance and for better or worse, Diesel understands that.  Perhaps they are smarter than they let on.