In 2016, a group of eminent scientists—the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—including several Nobel laureates, rated our current global predicament as being three minutes to midnight. This means that, according to the smartest people on the planet, the human race is about as close to annihilation as we were during the Cold War, a time when a nuclear war with the Soviet Union seemed like a distinct possibility.
To echo scientist and best-selling author Carl Sagan, humans may not survive our technological adolescence. We have serious problems to solve: global warming, terrorism, pollution, nuclear threats, and more . . . And we need solutions. Tick tock.
How do we find solutions? Creativity.
We believe creativity will save us. Scientists bet on creativity to save our species. And scientists aren’t the only ones who care about creativity. If you are a businessperson, no matter what company you work for, no matter what your industry might be, you will pray for creativity if your company starts to falter and your job is threatened. If you are an entrepreneur, you pray for creativity every day. If you are in the military, creativity is just about the only thing that will help you win a losing battle. If you are an educator, you hope to teach your students to be more creative so that they can solve the complex problems we face, or at least so they can compete in the world.
I believe this eternal hope for what creativity can do for us is part of the reason behind our fascination with creativity and our endless love of it. Most cultures associate creativity with all things good (e.g., joy, beauty, the divine). So the advice has always been to generate more creative ideas! The more ideas we generate, the better, because the sooner we generate the right idea, the sooner we will be able to solve our most pressing problems. Right?
And we have been following this advice. We have been generating lots of ideas. In fact, we know a lot about how to generate creative ideas. With minimal instruction, any student can generate several good ideas in an hour. With a crowdsourcing website, you could potentially generate thousands of ideas in minutes.
So what is holding us back from a better world? As a species, why are we on the existential brink of annihilation? Why are people and corporations and communities and nations still struggling to be creative?
In the case of companies, you might think that they are not doing enough. True and unique creativity is very rare! So perhaps to find that one creative solution that solves our problems, we need to generate many more. Invest in more inspirational idea-generation programs and brainstorming initiatives for groups. Increase your R&D budget. Empower your employees to generate more ideas faster. Take your people on brainstorming retreats and buy brainstorming software.
For nearly twenty years I’ve devoted my professional life to studying creativity. This dialogue around generating more and more-creative solutions is starting to scare me. That’s because my work shows that this dialogue is addressing the wrong problem—a problem we may no longer have. From where I’m sitting, I’m not at all convinced that if someone generates the idea that has the potential to save us all, or to save your company, that it will matter for our society, or for your business.
I’m writing this book to disrupt the dialogue we’ve been having around the concept of creativity. We need to change this dialogue, and we need to change it fast. Why, you might ask? What problem are we trying to solve? Both good questions. This book is dedicated to answering them.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: I think we have developed lots of great methods to help us generate new ideas and solutions. The problem is, however, that our ability to recognize and to embrace creative solutions is, to put it mildly, dysfunctional. The sad irony is that we are more likely to reject an idea because it is creative than to embrace it. If our ability to generate creative ideas far outpaces our ability to truly embrace them, then it doesn’t matter if you generate a lot of ideas, because they won’t make any impact. Great ideas will be left in the file drawer unimplemented. The solutions that can save us won’t have a chance to develop and thrive even though someone, somewhere, took the time and effort to generate them.
In short, right now in our timeline, our problem isn’t the idea-generation part of creativity. Our problem is our inexplicable inability to get out of our own way, to disrupt our unproductive thinking, and to embrace the new and the bold. You may have heard of “creative destruction,” a term that economist Joseph Schumpeter coined to describe how new technologies can destroy old markets. Well, I’m suggesting that the choice not to embrace creativity will result in another kind of destruction—uncreative destruction—sticking to the status quo when urgent and pressing problems require that we embrace creativity immediately.
You might say, “Yes, yes, yes, we already know this. We already know that people resist change.” To which I will counter, “Yes, you are right. And if that’s true, now do you see the irony around our spending so much time and effort generating the very kinds of ideas we are most likely to reject?”
My colleagues and I believe we can explain this curious puzzle—why we desire creativity so very much, but usually reject it in the end. My goal in the pages that follow is to unveil our best thinking for you about the underlying cause of this hidden barrier.
Here’s the good news: We are three whole minutes from midnight, not two and not one. It isn’t too late. But it is time to disrupt the dialogue.
Creativity is not magic; I believe we can engineer how we create creativity. And in fact, there are many terrific books and resources to help you generate creative ideas. But this book is not one of them.
Rather, this book contains solutions for how we can embrace creativity, which is a vital process that is, oddly, not often discussed or even acknowledged. I believe that we can engineer our ability to embrace creative change. Once we enhance our tendency to embrace the new, then generating lots of ideas will make sense again, because they will have a fair shot at making impact.
To start, you might ask, aren’t creative ideas new but also useful? If so, why would people reject them? Chapters 1, 2, and 3 describe the scope and scale of the problem.
Specifically, Chapter 1 defines creative change and unveils what I will call the hidden innovation barrier to explain why companies can desire creativity, generate many creative ideas, but still undergo uncreative destruction. In doing so, Chapter 1 asks a surprising question: we know that people love creativity, but could they also hate it?
Chapter 2 describes how our hatred of creativity is not a given but is driven by the situations we are in and the resulting mindsets we use (and have been trained to use) when evaluating ideas. This chapter identifies how our mindsets can turn our love and hate of creative ideas on and off.
Chapter 3 delves into the science behind why we hate creativity and the role our mindsets (and expertise) can play. That chapter raises the possibility that a dislike of creativity is something that people will not easily admit. Instead, it is more like a knee-jerk reaction that may operate beneath our conscious awareness.
Chapter 4 provides you with a four-step process and a lifeline to help you self-disrupt your maladaptive mindsets and more accurately see value in creative ideas. This chapter explores how some of the world’s most brilliant minds and inventors evaluate creative ideas and aims to provide you with strategies to manage your own negative knee-jerk reactions to reject them.
Chapter 5 flips the coin, providing you with strategies to help others disrupt their thinking and see value in creative ideas. Because creative ideas have unique properties, some influence strategies can backfire and harm your ability to effectively sell them. To combat this, I’ll present the FAB framework: fit, aha, and broaden. The FAB framework is built specifically to help you cogently influence others to like and to use creative ideas.
Chapter 6 discusses creative changes in your own organization and raises a controversial and troubling question: Could the very fabric of how most organizations (universities, companies, institutions, governments) are structured in our current day and age evoke a real aversion for creativity—even when we say we desire it? If so, how can we overcome our situational and institutional dislikes? This chapter offers several solutions to help you structure your organization to actively promote, rather than inadvertently deter, creative change.
Chapter 7 spearheads our difficulty recognizing true creative leadership. This could explain the looming “creativity crisis”—research shows that millennials scored lower on creativity tests than prior generations, and modern-day leaders who make it to the top may lack creative-thinking skills. This chapter suggests that the cause of both problems could be linked, and it provides solutions to help us avert this impending community crisis and recognize true creative leadership.
Chapter 8 issues a call to action: stop generating so many solutions and start making creative change. Just about every book on creativity will tell you to generate more solutions, because more is better than fewer. But is it? What if generating more solutions could actually make it harder for organizations to innovate? What if generating more solutions evokes our hatred of creativity rather than our love of it? This chapter provides research data to address these questions and presents solutions for how we can generate ideas without sacrificing our ability to make them count.
In sum, the first half of this book chronicles why we resist creative change, and the second half chronicles how we can get ourselves and others to embrace it.