The fastest and best way to build a creative culture is to have lots of creative people together. No kidding. It works. Hire creative people, they will create a creative environment (because the leaders will be creative) and we all will be creativists.

I am not pulling your leg. The issue is that we often hire lots of non-creative people, people who have never created anything (seriously, never, not even in school) and then we say: we want an innovative culture, we want you to be creative. It does not work.

Problem two (the above was problem one) is the inverse. We hire or gather lots of creative people, but we ask them to recite the yellow pages in search of the Big Idea. Bad idea.

Back to the creativists. Many people can innovate and be creative if, and there is an if, the environment pushes them that way. Innovation is going to the mental gym every day. No gym, expect arthritis.

Creativity is very sensitive to suppression. It’s actually quite easy to curtail. The education system in many places is a benign straitjacket. Entering the school system as a question mark, leaving as a period ^[1], a la Neil Postman.

Leaders have to create the conditions for creativity and innovation. I don’t buy the functional and professional boxing: accountants are not creative, engineers neither, and designers (particularly the ones in a garage) are full of uncontrollable creativity (And don’t try to put the accountants in the garage, you will waste your time and it annoys the accountants). I have met incredibly creative engineers ( and accountants) and lots of emperors-with-no-clothes designing in garages.

Bottom line. Expect miracles if you wish, but to accelerate that thing called creativity and innovation, (1) transplant those people and give them the space; (2) add not-so-innovative people; they will copy the others.

Even in the case of creativity and innovation, Homo Imitans ^[2] works.

 

 

Or the curious phenomenon of not wanting something that you really want.

Leadership is full of this stuff. We don’t want charismatic leadership, it is démodé. And you should say it in French to be really démodé. But if you have a crisis, you are looking for the charismatic tab in your digital database.

You don’t want to be told what to do, but sometimes, if these goddam ( as my American colleagues would put it)  leaders could tell us what exactly they want us to do!

We want spontaneous, creative, out of the box people but, would it be nice if they were less enthusiastic, ‘less creative’ ( as in pushing for strange things) and often ‘in the box’. Just a bit.

I was struck by some smarts lines in Ariel Levy’s book ‘The rules do not apply’, quoted in a paper’s review. The New Yorker staff writer’s explains her many contradictions in her memoir of miscarriage, divorce and a few other small life difficulties. They resonated as examples of the same ‘can-I-have-both-please’ that I have applied to my leadership examples above. She says: We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t.

That sucks! Seriously. Do you mean we have to choose?

Innovation and repetitive processes? Trial and error and zero defects? Unconventional and rational logic?

My very good client BTG plc has created a habit of getting leadership teams together into racing boats for a day, in serious waters, to race, of course. The coach team are of Olympian level, indeed some of them now part of the British Olympic Team. They get the instructions first thing in the morning, get to do some training in the water and then racing for the rest of the day. Some people may be sportive, some may have never been in a boat before. After the long day, the dinner, the social aspect and a goof night sleep, the next day the team is confronted with their own business situation to apply any learning form the day before. It works brilliantly.

There is an extraordinary immediate (organisational and leadership) learning from the model, which I’d like to unpack. The whole experience, can be unbounded into 4 components. I will explain, and, at the same time, I will make the comparison with what is more or less standard in our business life.

1. Minimal instructions. The early morning class on racing is beautifully done, but it is one hour, max. There you have ‘all you need to know’ from safety to rules of racing; from winds to maneuvering; from strategy to tactics. BTG calls this the ‘get it’ part. Compare that with our obsession with having a perfect briefing with perfect data with all the dots in a row and boxes ticked, before we start doing anything.
2. Minimum sense making. Nobody receives the total wisdom on racing in an hour, There is no room for absolutely, everything to make sense. It just makes enough sense to assume that that other things will emerge. Enough sense to act. Compare with our usual need to obtain maximum comfort. Is everybody on board? Everybody aligned? Does management support this and that? Are we sure that this is what he CEO wants? Have we double checked with the US? We spend our organization life creating ‘packaged comfort’ before we act.
3. The magic trust comes in. If the team has a decent level of trust, between their members, the magic sparks. You trust that others will have understood, that others will know what to do, that others will help and jump if needed. No trust, this is where all breaks down, or at least starts having some cracks. In our organizational life trust is also the fuel. Nobody quite knows how to create it but you’ll see it when you’ll see it, or you wont. In BTG racing sessions, teams with intrinsic low or poor trust in real life, perform significanlty worse in the waters. Interestingly, the coaches who may not know about the teams themselves in rewal life, can spot and predict a bad business execution but seeing what happens in those boats. And they are always right.
4. Then you go, go, go. And recalibrate, and execute. BTG calls these in several ways: to be ‘on it’, to ‘look out’ and to have the ‘appropriate bandwidth’. It is an imperfect world. As a guest, I have attended sessions where in the morning and during the training bits we have dealt with all possible winds and associated manoeuvring, to get into the race itself and find zero wind, nothing moves whatsoever. Prepared for high winds, what do you do with lack of it. Does it sounds business as well?

I am incredible skeptical of ‘sports analogies’ for business. This one works, because it is not an analogy, it is real experience of an full imperfect world in a day with immediate, transferable. unavoidable learning.

Dealing with the imperfect, the unpredictable, the ambiguous is part of todays business life. Part of my serious leadership development toolkits. And for the imperfect, the unpredictable, and the ambiguous, people still seek perfect training, perfect guarantees and perfect comfort. Old school that is.

A short piece in The Guardian announces quietly that Mercedes Benz is replacing some robots with humans. ^[3] Not the other way around. The Technology masters have decided that some tasks are ‘too complex for robots’ and are better carried out by humans. Later in the piece the author gives us a sort of after thought in the last lines after: it’s not only Mercedes Benz, Toyota and others have been gone into this reverse mode for a while.

Going beyond the clever headline ‘Human replaces robots’ is easier to understand the logic. In their case, the techno masters are not talking about total replacement but the replacement of the big isolated do-it-all robot by smaller robots that can act at a human command. Literally it says: ‘Car makers switch to smaller and safer robots working alongside humans for greater flexibility’

I find these news fascinating and deserving a full page of the newspaper, instead of the ones about how a particular journalist with no particular credentials pontificates about the merit of something which she obviously does not understand, whoch leaves me at her last paragraphs with two expressions, often heard loudly by my family at the other side of the room: Really? Seriously?

Going forward into a particular innovation direction can certainly side-line or totally supress an ancestor. This is true for the fax machine, for example, a piece of equipment that I keep in the museum corner of my office, and which had prompted in the past my teenagers to say things such as ‘but where is the keypad?’ or ‘what is the point?’.

Nobody expects to go back and communicate via telegraph either, or use those ‘portable telephones’ the size of a shoebox with a black thing sticking out. But it would be equally naïve to think that everything forward always uses the same pattern.

There are a few marktwainian ‘deaths largely exaggerated’ here. And one of particular delight to me is the book, the physical book, which sales are actually going up.

Human may become a disruptive innovation for robots. Physical books may be disruptive innovation for the digital and e-stuff-to-be-read epidemic.Fface to face conversations is already serious disruptive innovation for social media and screen to screen. A letter, a physical letter, OMG, the most disruptive of all.

‘Reverse disruptive innovation’ may be an interesting territory, after all.

 

A report on the Future of Jobs by the World Economic Forum compares the skills priorities of 2015 with the ones predicted by 2020.

I am pleased to see Critical Thinking jumping to number 2 in the list, just below ‘Complex Problem Solving’ (that requires a great deal of critical thinking until the robots take over and think more critically than us, that is)

In these Daily Thoughts I have endless parroted about Critical Thinking and many times said that is in short supply in our organizations. Alpha males (and females) are keen to do and act and produce faster than their brains can think critically. The others may have a different pace but they are prone to perhaps shortcut, use whatever information is available and declare it good, and then, there you go. Caricatures as these may be, the fact is that Critical Thinking is even seen as suspicious in many quarters as a risk to slow down and super-analyse. But Critical Thinking is about the discipline of questioning and avoiding mental traps that we all have. And if you do these well, not only you wont slow down but quite the opposite.

Critical Thinking is a meeting point of Psychology, Philosophy and Education and, as such, you need to borrow from these disciplines to be able to apply in the organization. But it is very doable and train-able

By the way, number 3 in the list is ‘Creativity’, which requires a great deal of lateral thinking and a ‘what if’, as critical thinkers do.

I believe that imagination and creativity are certainly something natural in some people, nature or nurture, but that it can be ‘institutionalised’. Not speaking for myself, one does not have to be an athlete to go to the gym. I am not an athlete. I don’t go to the gym. But in fact, gyms are full, I am told, of non athletes, but people who need and want to exercise. Equally, going to gym once a month may be social but nothing else. Again, discipline, discipline. Critical Thinking needs to be embedded in the culture, not just left for the Grand Strategic Decisions.

Injecting Critical  Thinking discipline in the organization is a good investment. It is unfortunate that the producer of the survey in Davos have not managed to get much Critical Thinking in the water supply of the World Economic Forum itself.

In WWII there was a curious episode of injection of critical thinking, not entirely well publicised. Big airplanes bombers in the Allied camp were shut down more and more, and the lucky ones that returned to base did so with multiple bullet holes, all over the place in the fuselage.

It was obvious to people that this was a sign that the fuselage needed to be stronger, with more armour and protection. But heavier plates would not necessary help the performance of the airplane.

A Jewish mathematician who had fled from Hungary, Abraham Wald, was asked to look into the problem. I don’t know exactly why him. But the first thing he did was to sketch the distribution of the bullet holes in the returning planes. Doing so many times, he saw a pattern: the areas with more holes were wings, tail and the nose of the aircrafts, whilst others such as the culprit and a sector of the back were not. The answer was simple: these areas with the holes were the weak areas of the fuselage, the ones that needed the extra plates, the reinforcement, the thicker armour.

Really?

Wald turned the problem and the logic upside down. The reframed question now was not where the bullet holes were in the aircrafts that returned, but where they would be in the ones that didn’t. If areas of the fuselage needed reinforcement and the extra armour, it was not the ones with the holes – the aircrafts returned after all – but the ones with no holes at all such as the culprit and part of the back. Presumably, this is why those aircrafts did not come back.

Wald reframed and inverted the problem. It did not cost anything. Certainly at that time, sophisticated simulations that would have been the order of the day today, were not available.

Seeing the problem upside down, reframing and finding ‘the other side of the coin’, is a tool within a good Critical Thinking approach.

As in the previous Daily Thought, another case of ‘Invert, always invert’. ^[4]

The Critical Thinking vignettes continue during this week. Pass it on.

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, a 19^th century Swiss mathematician is remembered by many things in his scientific turf, but by one in particular outside the field: ‘Invert, always invert’. He used this phrase to suggest that hard mathematical problems could be addressed better, and eventually solved, by inverting the problem, articulating it in its inverse form, by working it backwards.

In recent years, the quote perhaps needed the visibility lent by Charles Munger, business partner of Warren Buffet. Munger is revered in many quarters as great thinker, and his pointing into directions, from general wisdom to investing wisdom, gets good highlights. He has referred to ‘Invert’ many times in his writings and interviews.

‘Invert, always invert’, is a very pragmatic and heuristic mental trick that we at The Chalfont Project have long incorporated into our Critical Thinking programme armamentarium. It is part of a broader set of ‘Reframing’ approaches. Reframing forces us to ask alternative questions to the question that seem to be obvious, or the given one.

For us in day to day management, a simple example of ‘invert, always invert’, is to invert the question. The question may be ‘how can we (succeed and) achieve X goal by Y time?’. This is a very standard question, but the problem may be complicated and people may get very stuck in the finding of the answer or answers.

Indeed, it may be that you find yourself already in the road with several brainstorming sessions and a few PowerPoint ‘summaries’ on your back, but you may feel that you are not getting closer to an answer or even a clear path towards it. And this may well be despite the overgrowing analysis of the issue.

Stop there. Invert! Reframe the issue as follows: ‘How can we completely and thoroughly screw up and fail miserably?’ Restart now. I can guarantee you that renewed energy will come to the collective brains, people close to falling asleep under the previous question will wake up, and, progressively, the dull infection of brainstorms will turn into speed recovery with exciting and creative exercises. Try it. Invert the problem.

Give to the inversion a serious change, not just a game or a mental trick. Apply the same brainstorm techniques that you use. Write down the principles of a Strategic Plan to Fail Miserably and Being Ashamed Fast.

At some point, when enough light has come up, you will invert again and will address the original question.

Reframe, always reframe.

PS. This week is Critical Thinking week and I will continue with a few more insights. Pass it on.