7

Overcome the Bias against Creative Leadership

Let’s return to Bob McDonald for a moment.

Around 2011, as Procter and Gamble’s CEO, McDonald was hailed as a creative leader. He described innovation as a major strategic priority for his company when he said, “We know from our history that while promotions may win quarters, innovation wins decades.” He encouraged idea generation from all corners of the company. Specifically, under his reign the company spent nearly $2 billion annually on R&D (50 percent more than its closest competitor). P&G had honed the Connect + Develop crowdsourcing website, where suppliers and consumers are encouraged to suggest new product ideas. By all accounts, the ideas P&G had access to and the funds to develop them were surging.

But at this point, after reading this book, do you think encouraging employees and others to generate ideas was enough? Not according to P&G, which replaced McDonald with A. G. Lafley after the company’s performance declined under McDonald’s leadership.

A. G. Lafley was the former P&G CEO who stepped down in 2009 when P&G’s profits were on the rise. Due to his prior performance at P&G, Lafley was hailed as a “strategic visionary and an innovation guru.” One journalist compared the return of A. G. Lafley to P&G to the return of Steve Jobs to Apple. So when Lafley took over in 2013, he was seen as a creative leader too. But was he? Not according to James Surowiecki at The New Yorker, who noted that Lafley steered the company away from new product launches and sold off less profitable businesses, and under Lafley’s leadership P&G’s stock prices underperformed the market.

P&G is not alone—most companies and the people in them struggle to recognize true creative leadership. But why? Could it be that just as we can hold an implicit bias against creative ideas, could we also hold an implicit bias against selecting creative people as leaders?

Ask any leader and she or he will tell you, absolutely not! IBM conducted a survey of over 1,500 CEOs and identified creativity as the number-one leadership competency to win in the future. When asked to name the one attribute CEOs need most to succeed in today’s turbulent economy, Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Inc., replied, “curiosity.” So clearly, if the number-one leadership competency is creativity and the curiosity to cultivate it, then people are sure to be promoted to leadership roles if they exhibit creativity, right?

Jordan Cohen, a manager at Pfizer, was featured in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review for developing PfizerWorks—a process to get twenty-four-hour feedback from users. How did Cohen get buy-in to develop his idea? He didn’t. He hid his efforts for almost two years to gain enough time to hone the service and to prove the concept. At the time, he was the chief innovation officer of the company.

Priya Kannan-Narasimhan interviewed Silicon Valley innovators at companies that lauded innovation and creativity. Can you guess how they got buy-in for early-stage innovations? They didn’t. In fact, like Jordan Cohen, they hid their projects. One manager in a large Silicon Valley firm who participated in the study summed it up beautifully, “A very common tactic here is: Do stuff under the radar as long as you can, get a prototype to show, and then start showing people—and then you know you can get through some of the initial ‘Oh, that’ll never work.’ ”

What are innovators hiding from? Creativity research before 2011 says that everyone believes creative types are intelligent, witty, fun, charismatic, and interesting. So if you took this research to heart, you might describe yourself as a creative problem solver versus a practical problem solver on your résumé to help you find a job. Jack Goncalo and I tested this idea (but never published the data). We chose the exact same résumé but varied it only on whether the candidate said he was a creative problem solver or a practical problem solver. Turns out, framing your problem-solving ability as “creative” versus “practical” will, all other things being equal, make others view you as a better-qualified job candidate.

So maybe labeling yourself as creative is a good thing. One CEO told me that she resented the fact that a subordinate said she wasn’t creative because she was so efficient at implementation. The evidence suggests that everyone loves creative thinkers, and we dearly want to label ourselves as creative.

But do we really?

One hallmark of a creative person is, of course, that she comes up with creative ideas. And you already know our complicated relationship with creative ideas. Creative ideas have uncertain feasibility; we just don’t know if they are reliable and useful in all the ways we hope. So just as we admit to loving creative ideas while we hide our hate of them, could we also admit to loving but hiding our hate of creative people? In turn, is that why creative people hide from us?

If this is true, then labeling yourself as a creative thinker is all well and good, until you produce a creative idea that is uncertain. Once you add uncertainty into the mix by expressing your creative idea, your reputation is now on the line—especially when it comes to leadership.

THE TRICKY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND CREATIVITY

Bob Nardelli rose through the ranks at GE during the Jack Welch era, which had zero tolerance for nonperformers. Given this stellar pedigree, Nardelli should have become one of the great leaders of our time, right? Well, not quite. Nardelli did not meet with great success as CEO of Home Depot, nor later at Chrysler. But he’s not alone—other leaders with top-notch résumés have had disastrous failures, too. For example, after heading Andersen Consulting—now Accenture—George Shaheen was installed as the CEO of Webvan, one of the largest startups during the dot-com bubble. You would think that one of the most successful business consultants in the world would make a great leader, but, as it turned out, Webvan did not succeed.

How do we choose our leaders? There are two ways. We choose leaders whom we view as expert, and who know the key strategies that their groups need in order to succeed at important tasks. But the second (and more common) way we choose leaders is by employing stereotypes. That is, we look to see what traits a person has, and if those traits match our personal beliefs about leadership, we usually peg her or him as a leader. We believe leaders are intelligent, strong, charismatic, masculine, tyrannical, dedicated, and attractive. In other words, our stereotypes concerning leaders tell us that we need to promote and follow the strong person who seems to fit all the criteria.

Notice that our stereotypes of leadership don’t have much to say about creativity directly. There is no reference to curiosity either. So what happens to our reputations as leaders if we tell others our creative ideas?

Jack Goncalo and I recruited Dishan Kamdar of the Indian School of Business to do some research with us at a large oil refinery in India. This particular company was very proud of its ability to promote creative ingenuity. We examined a group of engineers who were all responsible for discovering new ways to keep the plant running efficiently. We asked the engineers’ supervisors to rate each engineer on two abilities: the extent to which they generated creative ideas, and their overall leadership potential. What we found surprised us. Instead of finding a positive link between the generation of creative ideas and leadership potential, the two were negatively correlated. This means that the more creative ideas engineers generated, the less their supervisors perceived them to be leaderlike. We have since replicated this same finding in at least two other companies.

People are punished for expressing creative ideas in America, too. My colleagues and I went into two Ivy League universities to conduct a similar study. We found that students who scored high on a creative ability task were less likely to be seen as leaders by peers in their study groups. We conducted another study and assigned students to pitch either a creative or a practical idea to an observer. We learned that when students pitched the creative idea, they were seen as less leaderlike by observers than when they pitched the practical idea. We replicated this finding even in contexts where people were expected to brainstorm, and when the creative and practical ideas expressed were of equal quality.

I later dug deeper into our general beliefs about creative people and found that we think creative types are smart and fun. But people in business contexts also peg creatives as being naive and too disorganized to get things done and efficiently implement ideas. In some pilot studies I ran, I found that if you brainstormed many ideas in front of others (relative to selling a single idea) you were seen as inefficient, lacking business savvy, and less leaderlike.

In contrast, we want our leaders to know the answers. We want our leaders to be experts. We want our leaders to make us feel less uncertain about the world, not more uncertain. And we care whether our leaders can execute tasks efficiently.

If you were to follow our stereotypes of leadership to a T, guess who would fit them perfectly? Donald Trump. Even though four of Trump’s businesses filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, he has no previous political experience, and he is described by some as a bully, as of this writing he was the Republican presidential candidate for 2016. Remember, we always love the feeling of fit, and will forgive people a lot if we think they have it. For a flamboyant businessperson like Trump, because he fits our stereotypes so well, research shows that we will be less critical of him even if he ultimately fails. In other words, autocratic narcissists perfectly fit our old-school definition of leadership.

Where do these stereotypes come from? They come from the history we learned in grade school about kings, tyrants, and warlords. We learn them from TV shows like The Sopranos and from movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, where autocratic narcissists are lauded. Of course, this stereotype of leadership plays well in the media and in history books. These leadership stories are interesting and so remembered and repeated (often as cautionary tales). But the truth is, these stereotypes are woefully out of date.

In today’s world, we have less and less use for purely autocratic leaders. Why? Because to be an effective autocrat, you need to be the most expert person in the group, and you need to know the answers to productively tell people what to do.

But in today’s complex world, where you need deep expertise to know anything about any domain, nobody can truly know all the answers. In contrast, it’s a sense of humility—not taking credit for knowing the answers—that promotes effective leadership. Therefore, there is a mismatch between our stereotypes and the traits that leaders actually need to lead effectively in today’s world. The old-school stereotypes of leadership often move us to promote the wrong people into leadership roles. I believe these antiquated stereotypes of leadership are a major source of the creativity crisis in America.

Where is the evidence that today’s leaders lack the skills to make creative change?

Let me give you an example. One large company approached me with an internal white paper that they did not want others to read. The white paper showed that leaders in this organization were highly proficient at communicating, problem solving, and organizing. Unfortunately, these leaders also received low scores on creative thinking. In short, these leaders could execute well, but they could not easily adapt to new situations. This reality was holding the company back.

In his groundbreaking book, Leadership BS, Jeffrey Pfeffer notes the overwhelming evidence that those we elect or appoint into leadership positions lack the skills to make creative change and fail themselves, their customers, stockholders, and employees.

SOCIETAL CONTRIBUTORS TO THE CREATIVITY CRISIS

By the way, the creativity crisis isn’t happening only in corporate organizations, it’s also happening in American schools. And the data suggests that the problem is bigger than you might think. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William and Mary examined a sample of 272,599 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. She identified that millennials had significantly lower creative-thinking test scores relative to earlier generations. Millennials weren’t generating as many ideas, and they weren’t exhibiting as much motivation to explain them either. According to this research, hiring more millennials because you think younger people have stronger creative ability won’t help your organization become more creative.

So why have students’ creative-thinking scores declined over time? Ken Robinson’s TED talk—the most-popular TED talk ever—does a good job of explaining why. Early in his talk, titled “Do schools kill creativity?” Robinson says, “I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.” And he notes Picasso’s famous quote that “all children are born artists.” But then he says, “Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts.” Then he notes that there “isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics.” Basically, he equates creativity with the arts and notes that creativity is not a teaching priority for most schools. He then asserts that schools should devote more time to teaching the creative arts, like dance.

But this is the exact reason that educational administrators give for not including more creativity in the classroom. One review paper showed that teachers believe creativity happens mainly in the arts and involves doing something new that doesn’t necessarily have a practical purpose or use—so it is not essential.

Put your FAB (fit, aha, broaden) hat on. Now that you know how sticky the status quo bias is, do you think Ken Robinson’s talk would rally educational administrators to change? Do you think his plea would make educational administrators feel the failure? Or does he make the classic mistake of telling people what the status quo is, note that everybody is doing it, only to then say, Don’t do it? This might be the most popular TED talk of all time, but it’s more likely to further reinforce the status quo than to change it.

Here is the problem for business executives. Every executive who grew up in the United States has been taught by an elementary school teacher. So if elementary school teachers equate creativity with the arts—which they believe are important, but not essential for education—what message do you think teachers send to the next generation of leaders? When conducting seminars on creativity, executives will often tell me, “We aren’t artists. Why do we need to learn about creativity?” So the bias against creativity (creativity is for artists, not businesspeople) that I often see in corporate America appears to have strong roots in U.S. schools.

People have blamed standardized tests and No Child Left Behind for the decline in creativity in U.S. schools. People have blamed teachers as well. But I think blaming teachers is a mistake. They are embedded in a larger, autocratic system. The system pushes teachers to reduce the focus on creativity in order to teach students to take standardized tests. So who controls the system?

Educational administrators do—the school boards, principals, politicians, and administrative staff who make the policies. They tell the teachers how to structure education, and thus they kick creativity out of the curriculum, not teachers. And given what we know about leaders lacking creativity in corporate America, why would we think it’s any different in education? The people we promote to leadership positions in our schools are likely as how/best oriented as the people we promote to leadership positions in corporate America.

I believe the creativity crisis America faces stems from a lack of creative leadership. In today’s complex, ever-changing world, you need to understand how to make creative change in an organization to be an effective leader. But the leaders we select today in our schools and corporations are often promoted based on an out-of-date stereotyped image of what leadership should look like. That old stereotype is no longer relevant for a new world of increased complexity, where creative thinking by a diverse group of people is every bit as important as efficient execution.

I believe our current inability to recognize creative leadership is sowing the seeds of a creativity crisis in America. The good news is that we can retrain ourselves to recognize creative leadership. If you could learn how to recognize the difference between the antiquated stereotype and the new model of creative leadership, then you could more accurately identify the kinds of leaders with the skills to recognize and embrace productive new directions.

In sum, if, as a nation, we want creativity, we need to disrupt our long-held stereotypes of leadership. We need to follow a process of creative change that includes recognizing our current definition of leadership, understanding when this definition gets us into trouble, and then learning to expand the definition to become more productive. To that end, I’ve developed a three-step process to identify creative leaders in your organization.

 

Step 1: Diagnose Your Definition of Leadership

 

Below is the transcript of a decision-making meeting, adapted from an actual business situation. Executives in this meeting came from many different disciplines and were charged with choosing a system to make all information electronic in the American healthcare industry. In 2012, the American healthcare market was estimated to total $3 trillion, and it was increasing at a rate of 4 percent per year, so it accounted for roughly 15 percent of U.S. GDP. This decision had massive economic implications.

As you read through this discussion, see if you can identify the leader.

 

RICK: Our goal is to make a decision today. We have four options to choose from. We can either go with what exists, Option 1, which is not our mandate, or we can choose Option 2, Option 3, or Option 4.

JIM: Before we start, it’s essential that we keep in mind the feasibility constraints we face. We need to coordinate among multiple institutions, states, and across many kinds of technological platforms. We also need to choose a solution we can implement relatively quickly without spending our entire budget in case we need to tweak later.

TOM: Thanks, Jim, but I think the feasibility issues are secondary to patient privacy concerns. If we get this thing wrong, we could have a bioterrorism situation on our hands or we could dismantle the entire health network as we know it.

SUSAN: I agree—patient privacy is key. If we lose that, we have no solution. We are in an Internet security war with hackers from China and elsewhere. What happens if the security in place now fails to handle the security issues we already face? I understand Option 1 isn’t advisable, but until Internet security improves, I don’t see us having any other choice.

[The group is silent for a moment.]

JADA: Let me ask you something, Susan. Why is Option 1 a good solution? What problem are we trying to solve?

SUSAN: Well, I think it’s pretty obvious that Option 1 doesn’t solve a problem, but it keeps us from having another kind of problem.

JIM: I see the problem as multidimensional. The ultimate goal is to reduce costs in the system. This would also help patients and physicians quickly access data, and that would improve the quality of healthcare. So I guess the point of the solution is to bring value to the patient and the hospitals.

RICK: I agree that the whole point of this committee is to do something. If we do nothing the entire system suffers. But, personally, I think Option 4 is really way off in the future. We would have to ramp up the entire system, and that simply isn’t feasible. Option 3 is also a stretch, but I don’t think Option 2 is enough. Option 2 will simply not allow for a wide enough impact. So I don’t see a clear solution here.

TOM: I agree. All the solutions we face have some benefits, but huge downsides. I believe our role is to minimize the downsides. None of the solutions on the table allows us to do that.

JADA: So how do we make this work? You have discussed how it doesn’t work. How can we use what we have to make it feasible and impactful?

JIM: Well, I suppose one option could be to combine solutions. What if we combined the best of Option 2 with Option 3? We can think of this as a progression—we could even add Option 4 as a future final step in the chain of progression. That way, our plan would have a short-term implementation strategy, with a long-term trajectory.

RICK: That’s a great idea, Jim!

TOM: I think it’s reasonable.

SUSAN: I still think we need to be very careful with respect to security concerns.

RICK: Great. Let’s talk about exactly what this new option would look like . . .

 

Who is the person most responsible for shaping the creativity in the meeting? In other words, who would you peg as the main creative leader of this discussion?

You might say Rick was the leader because he kicked off the discussion, identified the options, and later guided the team toward fleshing out the solution. You might say Jim was the leader because he was the one to emphasize the group’s mandate to improve the quality of healthcare, and ultimately generated the solution the group chose.

If you chose either Rick or Jim as the leader, then you might define leadership as simply “managing the meeting,” or “knowing the answer on future direction.” But all these kinds of leadership are very much in line with the old-school stereotypes we use to identify leaders. So if you chose either of these people, then you might fall prey to discounting creative leadership when you see it.

There is another way to view leadership. In this alternative view, knowing the answer is great, but just because you have technical skill or smarts doesn’t mean you can cultivate creativity in the group. For that matter, merely reiterating the group goal or purpose is helpful, but it does not necessarily motivate others to generate creative solutions. Enforcing an agenda and summarizing options might make you a good line manager, but you aren’t actually leading the group in a creative direction.

So who was responsible for shaping the creative direction of the meeting? Who pushed the group to open up and think differently? I would say that Jada was the creative leader in this group. It is true that Jada didn’t know the answer. It is true that Jada didn’t structure the meeting. But by asking questions, Jada disrupted the direction of the meeting. She disrupted the group from choosing the status quo. This also opened up a space for Jim to have the idea that the team ultimately chose. Jada didn’t have the creative idea, but she led the creative process.

 

Step 2: Self-Disrupt and Identify Fakers

 

Early in my career as a PhD student, I attended a leadership conference at Harvard Business School. As you might imagine, I was drawn to the sessions on innovation management, so I attended one session where high-tech executives discussed the challenges they faced. One executive told the story about how the product she launched generated millions in revenues, well beyond the expected profits. I was intrigued, so I asked a question: “How do you know when the timing is right to launch your product?” She gave me a withering look and replied, “When your phone is ringing.” Everyone in the audience laughed.

I felt foolish until I reminded myself that my question was one that scholars in my field had struggled with for decades. If the scholars had no answer yet, maybe this executive didn’t either. Then I wondered something else: what would have happened if the executive had admitted, I don’t know. Would she have seemed less confident, and so have lost her perceived leadership edge? Was she merely trying to protect her image as a leader?

Ask any person whether confidence is important for leadership, and they will tell you that of course it is. One leader said, “If you have a sinking ship, and your leader is paralyzed with fear, how is that person going to mobilize others to action to save lives? Instead, you want a leader who is calm and confident, to keep subordinates from utter panic.”

This would seem to make a lot of intuitive sense, if confidence were a true reflection of competence. But what if the captain of the sinking ship was a faker? That is, what if you’d hired the captain because he sounded competent and seemed confident and capable, but in reality, he was faking it to get the job? Or, what if the captain was so confident in his knowledge that he is leery of trying something new when creative solutions are needed?

 

Is it easy to fake confidence? You bet. Just ask Amy Cuddy, whose brilliant work with Dana Carney and Andy Yap showed that posing like Wonder Woman for two minutes made participants feel more confident. Amy Cuddy’s book, Presence, which has become a major bestseller, is based upon the theory that one can fake it until one makes it. And this solution is especially helpful for those of us who are competent but need that boost in self-confidence to help us on our way.

Be cautious, though—there can be a dark side to the power pose. There are some people who are not competent and really don’t care about learning or improving; they just power pose to seem competent so they can dominate. To that end, what kind of leader do you want to hire? The one who is actually competent or the one who power posed in the bathroom before her interview to make you think she was competent?

Fakers—those with confidence but little care to improve their competence—are dangerous. Research shows that fakers are more likely to gain high-status positions even though they are less competent. And worse, if you elect a faker to a leadership role, your group’s performance goes down. Good fakers can fool you easily, so don’t let them.

How do you know if someone is a faker? Cameron Anderson and his colleagues have conducted research showing that overconfident people—fakers who were less competent than confident—speak first in a group, take up more air time, and are calm and relaxed. In contrast, people who are truly competent—those people you actually want to lead—don’t behave in this way. Competent people speak up only when they have something to say. Fakers claim to know the answers, and they aren’t humble, unless they believe that appearing so will make them look good.

What does a faker do in times of uncertainty when creativity is needed? In times of uncertainty, a faker will try and convince you that his answer is the best. He won’t give you a range of possible solutions. He won’t talk about the possibility of being wrong. He won’t try to diagnose the problem by asking questions. He won’t say I don’t know. Fakers tend to veer away from admitting uncertainty or tolerating it because they know that admitting uncertainty to those with antiquated stereotypes of leadership could diminish the perception that they are leaderlike.

The good news is this: Taking credit for knowing the answers and having the best answer is a key trait of a faker, so be on the lookout for people who show no uncertainty. Be forewarned—leaders who show no uncertainty in their approach are often faking it.

Does this mean that you need to throw confidence out with the bathwater? No. I’m suggesting that you still look for confidence, but confidence of a different flavor. You can be confident and curious. You can be confident and not know the answer at the same time. Do you think Jada needed courage and confidence to question the direction of the group? You bet! She needed courage because she went against the group’s direction, and also because she didn’t have the answer to the question she asked.

 

Step 3: Learn to Recognize Creative Leadership

 

When looking for creative leadership, focus less on what people say about themselves and their ideas and more on the actions they engage in to shift the direction of the group. I’m not talking about promoting people who generate lots of creative ideas, although this does indicate flexible thinking. I’m not talking about promoting leaders who support employees generating lots of ideas—the traditional definition of a creative leader. Just like Procter and Gamble, CEOs can encourage creative-idea generation, but they can also promote rigorous stage-gate processes (like Bob McDonald did) and other practices that kill creative change. I’m talking about identifying those people who have a knack for understanding the creative process and who can help groups move forward when stuck. The essence of creative leadership is helping employees disrupt and embrace productive new directions.

One way to exhibit creative leadership is to ask questions. I’m not talking about the individual who questions everything. Asking questions simply for the sake of asking questions can disrupt group momentum and morale. I’m taking about identifying the person who understands when questions need to be asked. Creative leaders know to ask the right questions when groups show signs of poor decision making, or when problems emerge that need solving. There are also many instances when a group needs disrupting. Two of the most common occur when group members polarize in an extreme direction, and when group members conform in ways that block out creativity.

 

Creative Leaders Know When to Disrupt

 

Group polarization. If you look at the example of Jada, there were two key moments when she chose to ask her questions. The first was when the group polarized in an extreme direction. Group polarization happens when people jockey for status and end up taking a more and more extreme position regarding risk during decision making. What you saw in the group meeting is called a conservative shift. That is, the group shifted in an extremely conservative direction that valued low risk. You can see this conservative shift begin when Jim mentions feasibility concerns, which Tom escalates to bioterrorism, and Susan then escalates further to include a hacker war with China.

You can also have the opposite—a risky shift—occur when a group shifts toward endorsing ideas with extremely high risk. When groups polarize to an extreme position (a conservative or a risky shift), they definitely need disrupting. In the case of the meeting above, the group went dangerously close to choosing the status quo and doing nothing to solve the problem. Creative leaders usually have a finger on the pulse of groups and will recognize when they veer out of balance in their risk preferences. These leaders bring their groups back into balance by asking questions to disrupt and focus them.

 

Group conformity. Group conformity can take many shapes and sizes when groups decide which ideas to pursue and push to the next level. In general, group conformity becomes a problem when groups get stuck and bogged down. In my experience, when groups generate options, they can get stuck generating the same kind of solution. For example, Leigh Thompson at Northwestern University developed a brainstorming paradigm where people brainstorm different ways to clean up pet excrement. When I run this brainstorming task, I’ll often see groups generate many different kinds of ideas with the same properties (e.g., different kinds of bags, including no-smell bags, no-rip bags, scented bags, easy-tear bags, etc.). When this happens, group members aren’t adding as much value but are just iterating and conforming on the same basic kind of idea. So leadership in this context would involve a person recognizing that the group is anchored on the same kind of idea (in this case, bags), point this out, and then ask questions to shift the group in a new direction. (The leader might say, “All our solutions are for people walking their dogs. What about a busy mom who doesn’t have time to walk her dog but has to clean the yard?”)

When groups are selecting various ideas to pursue and face creative change, they can still conform and anchor. Groups can anchor when people start framing the selection decision in the same way. That is, members of groups can converge on using a how/best or even a why/potential way of viewing an idea. In the meeting example above, Rick starts vetting each idea, asking which one is best, and this problem frame is echoed by Tom, who describes his definition of the best idea. So this group is beginning to anchor its discussion in a how/best way of evaluating ideas.

When groups converge on a how/best problem frame to vet ideas, one of two things happens pretty quickly. They either choose a solution and move on to the next issue, or they get stuck. The how/best method is really efficient for making decisions fast. But if you want new or novel ideas, an uninterrupted how/best frame is likely to produce a more conservative shift. In this case, the goal of the creative leader is to ask a question to help shift the group away from a how/best problem frame. When the group above got stuck using their how/best problem frame, Jada disrupted them by asking a simple question that forced them to broaden and come up with options. She asked a brainstorming question, “How can we make this work?”

 

Creative Leaders Ask Questions

 

There are three kinds of questions my colleagues and I have identified as key to helping groups disrupt. Each kind of question solves a different problem that groups or even individuals can have when selecting creative ideas. When diagnosing creative leadership, look for people who know what to ask when.

 

Question 1: What problem are we trying to solve? Albert Einstein is believed to have said, “If I had sixty minutes to solve an important problem, I would spend fifty-five minutes on defining the problem and five minutes on the solution.”

For the past fifteen years, I’ve run a simple simulation in my MBA classroom. I tell the students, who are in groups of four to five, to make a decision about how to solve a problem. I give the group a list of options to select from. If you assign each person in the group different preferences (as often happens spontaneously in groups), members immediately start negotiating and politicking to get their solution chosen. But it is a rare group that asks the simple question “What is the real problem we are trying to solve?” When they do, they make a better and more informed decision.

In my experience, teams of executives often tend to converge quickly on a how/best way of approaching problem solving. When this happens, they may believe that they understand the problem they are trying to solve. But when I look deeper, I routinely find that these teams have only a surface understanding of the problem.

They will say, “We want the company to be profitable,” and quickly move on. But wanting to be profitable isn’t actually a problem that needs solving, it’s a goal. When you are identifying a problem that needs solving, you begin to understand trade-offs and constraints. You can see Jim in the example above beginning to grapple with tradeoffs when he identifies the problem that needs solving: making a cost-effective decision while also improving patient healthcare. In other words, a creative leader doesn’t just ask the question “What problem are we trying to solve?” and move on. A creative leader has a sense of whether members of the group really understand the problem and the tradeoffs and real constraints they face.

Creative leaders can also ask, “What problem are we trying to solve?” about the future. This is the magic of Marc Andreessen’s role in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. When he asks about the future, he expands how the group is viewing the problem at hand by focusing them beyond the present constraints.

I believe that deeply understanding the problem you are trying to solve both in the present and in the future is the critical piece of leading the creative process. It is important when you lead idea-generation efforts and it is equally important when you lead efforts to select which ideas to pursue. Creative leaders have a sense of when groups are merely choosing solutions versus actually solving problems. Groups merely choose solutions when members politick and negotiate for their own self-interests. Groups solve problems when they identify solutions that manage the tradeoff they face. When creative leaders see that groups are just choosing solutions, they must have the confidence to halt the forward momentum and to redirect the group toward problem solving.

 

Question 2: Why does this solution have value? When Sarah Harvey at University College London and I examined decision-making teams, we identified that why questions helped teams embrace new ideas.

We found that teams would often converge on a solution, usually by using how/best ways of vetting the idea. When this happened, it was common for these solutions to be extremely feasible—which is important—but we also found that groups could sometimes choose ideas just because they knew their organization could easily achieve them. The problem, of course, is that just because an organization can do something doesn’t mean their customers will buy it, or that it will solve problems.

The benefit of asking the why question is that it helps groups broaden, recalibrate, and see the larger picture. One team was ready to endorse an extremely feasible idea until a member asked, “Why does this idea help achieve our goals?” When the member asked this question, the team lost steam. Some members got annoyed because they enjoyed making progress. But then someone on the team admitted that the solution wasn’t really in line with the company’s broader strategic mission, nor did it solve the immediate problems they believed customers had. So in the end, this team made a good decision not to endorse an extremely feasible idea that probably would not have yielded profit.

 

Question 3: How can we make this solution work? When leaders ask, “How can we make this work?” they are using a type of broadening strategy within the FAB framework. What’s nice about this kind of question is that my work with Scott Eidelman from the University of Arkansas shows that getting people to brainstorm before making decisions can help diminish their preference for the status quo. We are still nailing down the mechanisms, but my intuition is that brainstorming implies the status quo isn’t that great and needs improvement. Brainstorming ideas also allows group members to have fun and feel good, and so diminishes any anxiety about making a bad or wrong decision.

 

Creative Leaders Strive for a Balance Between How/Best and Why/Potential Problem Frames

 

Creative leaders are in tune with the balance of how/best and why/potential ways of framing a problem. Generally, you want an equal balance. When groups veer too much in one direction the creative leader knows to start asking questions to get the group going in a more balanced direction. For example, although it is uncommon, I’ve seen groups that veer too far in the why/potential direction. One group was off in the weeds talking about the future implications of the idea, and the creative leader brought the group back into focus by simply asking, “How do we make this idea feasible now?”

 

Creative Leaders Understand the Process of Inquiry

 

Think for a moment about some of the more accomplished creative leaders of our time: Dr. Tom Fogarty funds founders who understand the process of innovation. Mark Parker, CEO of Nike and named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2015, started his career as a designer. Parker used a process of experimentation to design, which he describes as “Conceptualizing, creating. Putting it on the athlete, getting all that feedback and then modifying. The whole process was a very tight loop.”

Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Sorensen was chosen as the top CEO in the world in 2015 by Harvard Business School. He says that his leadership style in more recent years has become “involved with the research side.” Larry Page, CEO of Google—and the top-rated CEO on Glassdoor—was experimenting from an early age, having built an inkjet printer out of Legos while getting his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan. While pursuing a PhD in computer science, Page started a research project that was soon to become the focus of his dissertation—building what is now Google’s search engine.

Creative leaders understand the process of inquiry, often because they have trained in it. One of the most powerful processes of inquiry that exists is the experimental method. Look at any discipline within the sciences and humanities and it will employ some version of the experimental method. In my experience, the experimental method isn’t something that is brought into the MBA or undergrad business educational curriculum in any real way. MBAs don’t do real research projects or write master’s theses. If MBA or even undergraduate business students are exposed to research, statistics, experimental method, measurement, it’s usually only at a surface level.

So, if you wish to cultivate more creative leadership in your organization, an easy place to start is by hiring candidates with meaningful research experience. Look for undergraduate and graduate students who have spent two or more years as research assistants in a professor’s lab—the discipline doesn’t matter. Look to see if these students have presented papers at conferences or published articles with their professors in journals with high impact factor (this is a measure of how many times the average journal article has been cited in a given year). If candidates have entrepreneurial experience, look to see whether they used some version of the experimental method (e.g., lean startup methodology) to achieve company results.

One key sign that candidates have had a meaningful research experience (as opposed to merely surface-level exposure to research) is to ask them specifically what questions they are curious about and the studies they have designed to explore them. Furthermore, during interviews, look to see if these candidates can use the experimental method to describe how they would approach solving a problem you care about. In other words, when choosing leaders, look to see whether candidates used a process to obtain results, rather than focusing only on their past experience or end results.

When choosing creative leaders, you are looking for people who have the skills to transform their curiosity into improving products and processes you can use. Knowing facts about accounting, finance, or even management is good, but it’s not enough. Having experience working in an industry is also fine, but also not enough. You are looking for someone who has shown the initiative to gain the research skills beyond what is typically taught in the classroom. You are looking for someone who has had a real-world research experience and can use this process to solve problems your organization needs solved.

In sum, if we care about creative change, it is critical that we select leaders who can tolerate and manage the uncertainty of others. The first sign of a leader who can tolerate uncertainty is one who admits that she or he doesn’t know the answer. I’ve seen some leaders exhibit this kind of uncertainty by saying, “We will find out the answer through a rigorous process of allowing it to emerge from our people.”

And remember to retrain your brain to recognize creative leadership. If a person isn’t yet a leader and says, “I don’t know,” the old-school approach might categorize this person as weak, or lacking competence. But that is backward thinking. Instead, re-categorize this kind of a statement as indicating that this person has the inner strength to be authentic and humble.

Once you retrain your brain to categorize those who admit that they don’t know as being authentic and having leadership potential, then you can look to see what they do know that indicates creative leadership. Creative leaders might not know the end result now, but they do know the process to develop the answers you need.