The Intelligence of Being Creative

Why corporate creativity? Funny, engaging but still dead serious about the absolute need for creative thinking in the workplace, Sir Ken Robinson will be the featured speaker for Corporate Creativity: Unlocking Talent. Driving Growth, on October 30 presented by the Arts & Business Council in partnership with Towers Perrin. Local business leaders were invited to participate in a dialogue about corporate creativity, because building ways for business and art to intersect is critical to making the Greater Philadelphia Region culturally vibrant and economically strong.

The Intelligence of Being Creative - Article for 'Winning Business'
By Sir Ken Robinson

According to McKinsey, organizations everywhere are now fighting a 'war for talent'(i). Companies are competing in a world of economic and technological change that is moving faster than ever. The ability to adapt, to make decisions quickly in situations of high uncertainty and to steer through change is critical. To succeed they urgently need people who are creative, innovative and flexible. Too often, they can't find them. McKinsey concludes that companies are engaged in a war for senior talent that will remain a defining characteristic of the competitive landscape for decades to come. Yet most are ill-prepared and even the best are vulnerable. This problem is part of a global, creative crisis. In my new book, "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative,"(ii) I offer answers to three questions that are now vitally important for all companies:

• Why is it essential to promote creativity? -- Why should companies be so concerned with creativity and innovation? What's the price of failure?
• Why is it necessary to develop creativity? -- Why do so many people think that they're not creative? Most children are buzzing with ideas, what happens as they grow up?
• What is involved in promoting creativity? -- Is everyone creative or just a select few? Can creativity be developed and what can companies do to make the most of their creative resources?

Companies face big challenges in making the most of their creative resources. These challenges can be overcome but occasional courses in creative thinking are not the answer. Like rain dancing, they underestimate the nature of the problems they are trying to solve.

The Intelligence of Creativity
Creativity is the process of generating ideas that are original and of value. If we're serious about developing creativity the first step is to recognize how diverse and individual creativity is. People underestimate their creativity because they underestimate their intelligence.

One of the most fundamental problems is that companies are trying to fix a problem that originates in our schools and universities. A powerful illustration is the crisis in graduate recruitment. It's not that there aren't enough graduates to go around - there are more and more. In fact, in the next thirty years, more people will be getting formal qualifications through education and training than since the beginning of history. But many graduates don't have what business urgently needs: they can't communicate well, they can't work in teams and they don't think creatively. But why should they? University degrees aren't designed to make people creative. They're designed to do other things, and they often do them well. But complaining that graduates aren't creative is like saying, 'I bought a bus, and it sank.'

The main reason for these limitations is that education is obsessed with academic ability. It's very important. But there's much more to intelligence than academic ability. If not, most of human culture with its complex fabric of scientific, technological, artistic, economic and social enterprises would never have happened. The preoccupation with academic ability has led to an incalculable waste of human talent and resources. People with strong academic abilities often fail to discover their other strengths. Those of less academic ability may have other powerful intellectual abilities that lie dormant.

The plain fact is that human intelligence is complex and multifaceted. We can think about the world in all the ways we experience is: visually, in touch, sound, in movement and in many other ways too. Human culture is as rich and diverse as it is because human intelligence is so complex and dynamic. We all have great natural capacities and we all have them differently -- our own profiles of intellectual strengths in visual intelligences, in sound, in movement in mathematical thinking and so on.

Conventional education looks only for certain sorts of ability. Those who have it often have other abilities that are ignored: those who don't are likely to be seen as not intelligent at all. Some of the most successful people I know failed in education. No matter how successful they have become, they carry within them a secret worry that they're not really as clever as they're making out. Many only succeeded once they'd recovered from their education. So what should organizations do to promote creativity and innovation? There are three priorities.

Identifying Creative Talent
Creativity is possible wherever human intelligence is actively engaged. People are not creative in general but in doing something specific: in mathematics, in science, in technology, in business or whatever. Real creativity comes from finding your medium, from being in your element. When people find their medium they can discover their real creative strengths and come into their own.

People join companies from many different backgrounds. Two major influences on how they are judged are their educational qualifications and their existing job descriptions. But many people have abilities that have not yet been brought out because they haven't been required or valued. Highly able, creative people can be turned away from companies or lost in them because their qualifications tell the wrong story. Many people work with their minds in neutral because their real abilities aren't engaged by the work they do or by the roles they're given.

Identifying creative abilities is not simply a matter of conducting a formal test. There are no general tests that provide a reliable picture of person's creative capacities. The range and subtlety of individual creative ability combined with the many factors that motivate or suppress it mean inevitably that any formal test can give only the roughest guide. There is no substitute for putting people in situations where their abilities can be used differently or where different aspects of their potential are called on and revealed. Their creative abilities then need to be trained and developed in a systematic way.

Facilitating
Training individuals is not enough. Many people have been sent on two or three day courses to develop their creativity in various ways. Like white water rafting, these experiences can be very worthwhile and enjoyable. They may even find themselves bonding with people in unexpected ways for the weekend. But they often come back to the same job on Monday morning and find the company unchanged. Developing a culture of creativity involves more than enthusing a small number of individuals. It means energizing the whole organization. There are several related processes in facilitating a culture of creativity.

Blurring Boundaries
Creative insights often occur by making connections between ideas that were previously unconnected. This is why the best creative teams are often made up from specialists in different fields, and why the most creative period in the life of an organization is often in its early days when there's a rush of excitement about new possibilities -- before it has settled into fixed structures and routines. Stimulating the creative impulse in companies often involves blurring the boundaries between specialists and departments so that ideas can flow more freely between specialists who are too often kept apart from each other. This can be done by bringing specialists together into focused project teams, simply to encourage experimentation and the exchange of ideas.

Loosening Expectations
Creativity relies on the flow of ideas. This happens best in an atmosphere where risk is encouraged and where failure is seen as part of the process of success. Creativity can be stifled by pressure to deliver the wrong sorts of resorts [results] over the wrong timescale -- by the wrong sort of accountability. There's a tendency throughout the corporate world to 'short-termism.' As organizations compete in increasingly aggressive markets, budgets for experimental research, blue-skies thinking and long-range development are being cut back in the interest of immediate returns and instant results. The effect can be to stifle the wellsprings of creativity on which long-term success ultimately depends.

Harnessing Creativity
Organizations must also establish systems in which creative abilities from all areas and levels of the company are harnessed to the organizational objectives. Those who run companies must make it clear in very practical ways that new ideas will be evaluated, developed and actively rewarded, professionally and financially.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the War for Talent can only be won by raiding the resources of our competitors. A better strategy is to recognize the abundance of untapped potential in our midst. Human talent is not in short supply. The limitations are in how we recognize and develop it. In the future as in the past, companies that make the most of their people will find people who'll make the most of them.