8   Championing Creativity

In 2017, I was coleader of an executive program for the senior executives of an Asian company with a storied past. The home-base country’s former monarch had chartered the company over a century ago. That recognition allowed it to consistently attract great employees. Its operations stretched across East and South Asia, and revenues substantially exceeded a billion US dollars—a massive sum in purchasing power parity terms. Moreover, it was well integrated into the global economy: The leading European company in its industry and a global private equity firm had minority ownership positions. Nonnationals, indeed, non-Asians, held board and senior executive positions. So this story could be from most established companies worldwide, perhaps even yours.

The senior executives in the program visited a business incubator in the home-base country. The incubator’s layout, available resources, and culture resembled those of incubators in cities renowned for digital innovation. Well-known entrepreneurs and venture capitalists had begun visiting to mentor or invest.

Serendipitously, one of the two entrepreneurs who hosted us knew four of the visiting executives. He welcomed them in culturally appropriate ways. The executives responded with affection and paternal delight. The young man had been a very promising manager in their company.

This entrepreneur’s business model could transform how the visitors’ industry sold products. In his presentation, he noted that he had developed its core ideas while working for them.

I asked both entrepreneurs a question with a predictable answer: Would they consider working for companies like their visitors’? I wanted the executives to hear their unhesitating response, which, as I had expected, was “Never.” I also privately asked the ex-employee why he had left despite the mutual affection and respect. This being Asia, he chose his words carefully, essentially saying he had been managed for productivity, not led for creativity. He had given the effort he was paid for, not the thinking he was capable of.

As cerebral work displaces physical (Principle 4), “good work” takes the form of ideas and concepts. Executives must lead for creativity not merely as a nice-to-have virtue in R & D departments but (almost?) everywhere. Continued managing for productivity will put organizations—and their own reputations—at great risk. How, then, do you lead for creativity?

This chapter isn’t about the tools, structures, and processes that Pixar or LG or Inditex or Hermès or Apple or Tencent or Fast Retailing or Google or other top innovative companies use to be creative. You can find those discussions elsewhere.

It also isn’t about Design Thinking. If you don’t know Design Thinking—the mindset, not just the methodology—you should rectify that deficiency immediately. Find a multiday workshop where you’ll get hands-on experience. Good books can supplement, but not replace, experiential learning. Avoid lectures about it like the plague. I’ll discuss some core Design Thinking beliefs since their absorption is key for the effective use of the tools they power.

Finally, it isn’t about Steve Jobs’s or Richard Branson’s or Jack Ma’s approach to creativity. You’ll meet one genuine superstar but may not recognize him. His words will illustrate my recommendations. Those are based on interviews of, and personal discussions with, executives and professionals, as well as my own experiences of leading creative efforts.

But first, a handful of brief definitions: Though they are often used together, the terms “creativity,” “invention,” “innovation,” and “Design Thinking” aren’t interchangeable. Creativity is the ability to look past received wisdom and traditional approaches to give form or structure to new ideas. It requires framing—looking at—challenges in ways others haven’t. It needs influxes of fresh ideas. It necessitates solving old problems in new ways, or new problems in old ways, or new problems in new ways—but never old problems in old ways. It demands testing solutions. If they don’t work, it requires recycling to the start—or pursuing the unexpected outcomes. It’s hard to define—and easy to recognize.

Invention introduces something new to the world. Innovations are (a) introductions of products or services that an organization didn’t offer previously or (b) structures, processes, business models, or systems that didn’t exist in their present forms in the present places in an organization. Most inventions don’t become innovations, and conversely, most innovations, unlike inventions, adapt and adopt ideas from elsewhere.

Creativity is essential for both inventions and innovations. Design Thinking is a powerful tool for sparking creativity. Its core premise is that optimal design puts the needs of humans (“Is it usable?”) on a par with the needs of technology (“Is it feasible?”) and business (“Is it profitable?”).

The Crushing Burden of the Past

It is easy to overlook the magnitude of the challenge of moving leadership of creativity to center stage. For over a century, businesses have focused on productivity (more output with less input) and process (one right way to act). Their leaders typically weren’t personally creative and, most often, weren’t required to inspire creativity in others. For eighty years, the boss was always right, even when he was wrong. That left little room for creativity (except in R & D labs if those existed in a given company). For another thirty years, non-R & D staff could be “creative with a small c”; businesses encouraged “continuous improvement” that made existing work error-free, faster, or cheaper but generally withheld the authority to do more.

A brief 2012 Harvard Business Review article urged limits on continuous improvement.1 It argued that quality management tools created mindsets, metrics, and cultures that interfered with the “fundamentally different” needs of “discontinuous innovation.” That this needed to be said a mere eight years ago suggests many executives and companies don’t understand the needs of the digital epoch.

The challenges of learning to lead for creativity begin as early as business school. The most widely used means of educating leaders—case studies and lectures—are better for teaching analysis than synthesis or creativity. Universally taught concepts—such as discounted cash flows, optimization, and segmentation—ingrain a mindset of productivity. Mary Parker Follett published Creative Experience in 1924, but her outstanding scholarship (on a broad range of management issues) is largely forgotten. Charalampos Mainemelis, Ronit Kark, and Olga Epitropaki,2 who did a 2015 review of the substantive body of research on leading creativity, established that its study—like that of teams—is a very recent phenomenon. Of the more than 300 articles and books they considered, 79% were published since 2001 and only 5.7% before 1990.

While top corporate leaders may like creativity’s benefits, they aren’t investing in it—yet. The Global Survey found business leaders don’t effectively lead for creativity (see figure 4.6). A 2010 IBM survey reported that CEOs considered creativity their top requirement of leaders,3 but IBM surveys since then either didn’t replicate that finding or didn’t report it. Other efforts haven’t substantiated its results.4 The IBM study would have been more robust if it had also asked whether the CEOs’ priorities would change if finding leaders who led for creativity required missing profit or growth targets for a year or two. Even so, articles written almost a decade later routinely cite the lone IBM study. Finally, research suggests that creative people are less likely to become leaders.5, 6

These observations shouldn’t be surprising. Experimental research suggests people espouse creativity but often reject creative ideas. In uncertain environments, they favor practicality over creativity. This preference adversely affects their ability to recognize creative ideas.7

Real leaders take needed steps even when these are costly; it’s easy to be in favor of costless virtues. In 1987, Nobel laureate in economics Robert Solow famously opined, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”8 Though he wrote at the very beginning of the digital age, his observation still holds.9, 10 Yet, no economist would say, “Ignore computers.” Similarly, today you’d be wrong to avoid leading for creativity. If you do, at some point in time, the blame for not doing so will, rightfully, fall on you.

What Isn’t Enough but Can’t Be Ignored

In the aforementioned review of the literature on leading for creativity, Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki wrote that “creative leadership entails three alternate manifestations: facilitating employee creativity; directing the materialization of a leader’s creative vision; and integrating heterogeneous creative contributions.” Let’s begin by summarizing these, adding context from fields beyond the study of leadership, highlighting important issues, and discussing where they fall short in the digital epoch.

“Facilitating” Leaders aren’t creative themselves but enable others to be creative. They set appropriate goals, guide and direct idea generation, and evaluate and support idea execution.11 They create needed work processes12 and ensure effective communication.13

The study of innovation in perennially innovative companies offers many tools Facilitating Leaders can use for funding, team structures, staff evaluation, infrastructure, information flow, and key cultural practices.14 Powerful, “multilingual” executives, who understand the work done by different disciplines, often lead major innovation efforts. They design team structures appropriate to the task at hand.15 They try to recreate Pixar’s brain trust16 (a brainstorming session during which peers provide inputs and advice to a project team) or IDEO’s Deep Dive (an embodiment of Design Thinking).17, 18 They oversee handfuls of “clever people”19—valuable professionals who ignore organizational rules and have low thresholds for boredom—well.

Only a few of these tools (e.g., brain trust) were specifically designed for the digital world, but the insights of most are still valid or easily adapted. Not using them can make delivering creative outcomes difficult.

But as a complete toolbox, they are inadequate. Creativity is no longer limited to few areas. Leaders must engage many formerly “ordinary” people whom digital technologies have made far “cleverer” than they might have been in the predigital world. So the Facilitating Leader needs help.

Professions where creative work is inseparable from leadership—top executive chefs, renowned symphony orchestra conductors, and artistic directors of ballets—could provide insights. Such “Directing Leaders” provide the creative vision20 and very precise instructions about execution to their professional staff. Those professionals—sous-chefs, line cooks, orchestra musicians, dancers, and others—must be highly capable merely to be selected to contribute. They must execute these directions perfectly21, 22 since even minor failures are problematic.23

Early in the twenty-first century, several business schools in large cities began collaborating with local symphony orchestras to teach “Directing Leadership.” One of the first to receive wide publicity used Ravel’s masterpiece, Bolero, to illustrate the orchestra conductor’s role. Executives heard maestros speak of clarity of vision, clear roles and responsibilities, coaching and feedback, and the importance of visibility to provide needed direction.24 Some symphonies still offer such programs.

What they left out is as, if not more, important. Chapter 6 urged you to develop “a broad wingspan, not a long tail.” Directing Leadership requires “a broad wingspan with many long tails.” Directing Leaders have deep capabilities in multiple disciplines and lead highly skilled people with deeper capabilities in very few narrow disciplines. Consider, for example, the knowledge and skills of an orchestra conductor.25

While conductors need not know how to play every instrument in an orchestra, they must excel in at least one instrument, and ideally, more than one. They must, however, know the capabilities of each instrument and the specific challenges musicians playing them face. Furthermore, they must be experienced ensemble performers themselves so as to understand firsthand the ways musicians operate individually and in groups.

Long before approaching their orchestras for rehearsals (let alone performances), conductors spend countless hours mastering musical scores that can have 100 to over 600 pages. They have to reproduce in their heads how the musical notations from the score will sound; this activity is similar to the “voice” people “hear” in their heads while reading a beloved’s email. The difference is conductors have to do so not just for each instrument individually but also for all of them collectively.

Conductors don’t just present what is on the score sheets; they also interpret the music. To do so, they must master the intricacies not only of music theory but also of the context in which each composer was working, as well as how other conductors have interpreted each composers’ music through the ages.

During rehearsal and performance, conductors must be able to distinguish among the various streams (e.g., brass or woodwinds), so they can catch errors or balance loudness or align beats. They must be able to get the entire orchestra to course correct on the fly if a featured soloist or opera singer makes an error. All of this must happen under stressful conditions.

Conducting, then, isn’t just waving a baton. Much of this knowledge must be recreated for each symphony or opera in a conductor’s repertoire. Indeed, over time, such work changes the shape of conductors’ brains.26 Expert conductors also develop better music-related long-term memories and divided-attention capabilities than even comparably expert pianists.27 The knowledge and skills summarized here are essential for the clear vision, roles, responsibilities, coaching, feedback, and visibility conductors seem to provide effortlessly.

This breadth and depth of knowledge is an extraordinarily high bar for success modern businesses, which, unlike orchestras and restaurants, incorporate very diverse activities. How many separate bodies of knowledge must a Directing Leader master in the auto industry? Moreover, knowledge in many fields important to businesses—such as digital technologies and genetics—have high rates of obsolescence, while knowledge in the field of classical music has remained relatively static over centuries. That makes the challenge a lot tougher. A leadership model that’s only accessible to extraordinary individuals isn’t scalable.

Additionally, since the same piece of music involving the same musicians sounds different if the conductor is changed,28 Directing Leadership only allows the leader’s vision and creativity to flourish. This type of leadership only makes sense when the identities of an organization and its leader are inseparable; that wasn’t true even at Steve Jobs’s Apple. It certainly doesn’t make sense when distributed work creates and combines unrelated intellectual properties.

Finally, Directing Leadership is inherently autocratic and can produce coercive workplaces reminiscent of the scientific management epoch.29, 30 People working in them may experience psychologically unsafe conditions more often than those working in other workplaces. This reason alone makes Directing Leadership a terrible model, perhaps worse than thoughtful Facilitating Leadership.

Could Facilitating Leadership and Directing Leadership be combined into something better? Directors in the movie industry do just that. They serve as “Integrating Leaders” with key roles but must allow screenplay writers, actors, sound designers, and others to be creative in their own right.31 If these nominally secondary roles don’t collaborate and contribute, movies suffer. So Integrating Leaders must be firsts among equals, albeit by a big margin. They negotiate and collaborate, confront and compromise.32 In their review, Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki added:

Integrative leaders have to be more facilitative than Directive leaders and more directive than Facilitation leaders. This does not imply … Integrative creative leadership is an additive function … Integrative leaders cannot abstain from proposing creative ideas [as Facilitative leaders do] … nor elicit [work that conforms rigidly to their vision] … as Directive … leaders do. Integrative creative leaders have little choice but to share with followers the “authorship” of a creative work in a way that neither Directive nor Facilitative leaders can do.33

Integrating Leadership eliminates the problem of lack of creative contributions by others. This ceding of power may even make the work environment less coercive: Because each member of the group makes a useful contribution, the power dynamics of the leadership team shift away from the Integrating Leader.

But the huge challenge of depth and breadth of knowledge remains. I learned this during a visit to one of the world’s best special effects/computer-generated-imagery makers, the Weta Workshop in New Zealand. Among many other movies, Weta contributed to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In addition to being commercial and critical successes, the trilogy collectively won 17 Oscars, including Best Director for Peter Jackson and four Oscars for Weta.

I asked a senior designer, “If Peter Jackson wants something and your expertise tells you that’s not a good idea, what happens?” He described how detailed these conversations get. Bottom line: If top directors ask for something, like orchestra conductors, they know the field well enough to understand what effort, knowledge, and problem-solving will be required to deliver it.

In the creative arts, not far from directors are producers. Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki’s framework described them in passing, but very little of the existing research had focused on them. So the professors lumped them together with other Integrating Leaders. In reality, they are perfect prototypes for leaders of creativity in the digital epoch.

A Producing Leader of Creativity

Producers in the performing arts34 define why something merits creation, shape the overall creative effort, hire and assemble all the talent (including the director), connect them to each other as needed, and ensure they collaborate effectively. Their ability to spark collaborative effort effectively allows the creativity of the talent to shine through—or not. They must understand the skills they need, but unlike the director, needn’t be experts in everything. They must know enough to judge who is good in which field, and how to get the good people to work together.

In contrast to the practices during much of the twentieth century, in recent decades, the breadth of knowledge needed and the costs of production of movies have risen sharply. So the industry has begun practicing their own version of distributed leadership: Today’s movies, unlike those of the past, have multiple named producers.

Effective “Producing Leaders” have the ability to navigate the in-between spaces. They have the Directing Leader’s broad wingspan, but not necessarily the multiple long tails. They provide the Directing Leader’s “creative vision,” aligning the direction and pace of movement. Instead of engaging in command-and-control leadership, they assemble the right people and engender deep collaborations that reduce the potential for destructive conflict. They can effectively use the vast array of tools of the Facilitating Leader and may experiment and develop their own.

Ed Catmull is a great example. Catmull cofounded Pixar and retired as president of Pixar and Walt Disney Studios. He won an Oscar as one of the producers of Pixar’s first hit, Toy Story.

Always interested in graphic arts and animation, Catmull turned to physics in college after realizing he lacked the talent to be a top artist. Realizing that a bachelor’s degree in physics would give him only basic knowledge of that field, he earned a second major in computer science. Laid off by Boeing, he sought a PhD in computer science at the University of Utah. That “unstructured” program offered “a safe environment for people to create” and “a safe place to make failures.” For him, those lessons became “the right way to think.” Other experiences in the program gave him “a new goal in life: to produce an animated film,” a “dream” he achieved with Toy Story.35

Throughout his career he remained connected to academia, publishing his work and encouraging his employees to do so. Among other things, this helped him network with brilliant professionals. Early on, while running a research lab at a university, he realized a potential hire, Alvy Smith, was “more qualified for my job than I was.” He “swallowed his pride and offered Smith” a key job at the lab. Smith became a close friend and cofounded Pixar.36

In the late 1970s, shortly after the release of the first Star Wars movie, George Lucas hired Catmull. Computer animation was in its infancy, and Lucas wanted to do more. Among others, he approached Catmull, whose computer animation of the human hand, done as a class project at the University of Utah in 1972, was one of the earliest accomplishments in the field. Catmull got the job because he honestly answered “an impossible question: ‘Who else should we talk to?’” While other applicants “did the obvious thing” and “didn’t give any names,” he “gulped” and listed everyone whom Lucasfilm had already identified as candidates.37

So Producing Leaders

  • Provide Facilitating Leadership using the vast array of available tools or by creating new ones.
  • Provide “creative vision” like Directing Leaders in a form similar to the concept of strategic intent.
  • Have a Directing Leader’s broad wingspan, but not multiple long tails.
  • Engender deep collaboration among the people they bring together.
  • Additionally, as discussed below, they
  • Have the ability to take the perspective of those not at the decision-making table.
  • Are able to change their minds.
  • Create conditions in which people ask for and give help.

A long tail is neither essential nor useless for Producing Leaders. Catmull’s long tail in computer science had limited direct value at Pixar. Instead, his lifelong breadth of interests in the sciences and the arts and the vast network of brilliant people he had cultivated from multiple fields became key. He also kept connecting dots and learning about areas he didn’t know about.

Table 8.1 captures how the Producing Leader differs from the three aforementioned models.

Table 8.1

How the Producing Leader differs from the other models for leading creativity

Developing the Ability to Lead Creativity in a Digital, VUCA World

Sooner or later, you’ll organize a Pixar-created Facilitating Leadership tool, the brain trust. When you do, remember Catmull’s description of his hiring Smith and his own hiring by George Lucas. They illustrate his deep commitment to two key brain trust principles, “There’s no ego” and “Peers giving feedback to each other.”38 If you don’t, instead of sparking creativity, this powerful tool will inevitably degenerate into a “stage-gate process.”39 Whereas the stage-gate process is a management review that makes go-no-go decisions, in the brain trust, “it’s up to the director of the movie and his or her team to decide what to do with the advice.”40 The separating line is very thin and easily violated, as it once was in Pixar’s own technical areas.

The prior paragraph should reinforce an idea from chapter 5: “You can’t do the right thing consistently unless you actually care it is the right thing to do. No set of rules would have prepared the coder to lead a team that included accomplished women.” In other words, mindsets matter. That’s why each chapter since that one has first addressed mindsets. What mindset do you need to be a leader of creativity?

First, ensure you (can) empathize. Years ago, my family was remodeling our house. We knew exactly what we wanted in our kitchen, but our very accomplished architect stuck with traditional norms. She reluctantly relented when we challenged her, “Do you cook? Well, we do. So why don’t you listen to us?” To her, our lived knowledge had no value. Weeks later, we rejected a top-of-the-line cooktop; moving heavy pots on and off the burners would damage its controls. We told the skeptical salesperson that engineers who didn’t cook had designed it for purchase by people who used designer kitchens not to cook but to flaunt their wealth.

Our architect and those engineers didn’t have to be great cooks. They did have to empathize with cooks: see the world from a cook’s perspective and experience the joys of cooking and the challenge of handling large pots of boiling water. Without empathy, they couldn’t access the lived knowledge and couldn’t create great works.

Catmull’s stories of the breakthroughs that created great Pixar movies are stories of empathy. Eight months before launch, the creative team for Toy Story 2 hadn’t figured out how to make a dilemma believable: Woody, the toy cowboy, was torn between staying back with the boy who loved him or going away with the toy cowgirl, Jessie. Catmull changed the creative team’s leadership. The challenge

… was to get the audience to believe that Woody might make a different choice. … [The new team] solved that problem by adding several elements to show the fears toys might have that people could relate to. … the audience hears … in the emotional song … [that Jessie] had been the darling of a little girl, but the girl grew up and discarded her. The reality is kids do grow up, life does change, and sometimes you have to move on. Since the audience members know the truth of this, they can see that Woody has a real choice, and this is what grabs them.41

Design Thinking demands empathy, though it prosaically describes it as “field research” with experts. Practitioners must walk in their shoes before trying to develop solutions. If you know Design Thinking’s core steps, but can’t apply it reliably, perhaps your problem is empathy.

Genius, however, doesn’t require empathy. If you are a singular genius, by all means, be a Directing Leader. But if you aren’t, if you need others to contribute to creative endeavors, you must be empathetic.

The medical profession now understands that scientific and technical training can attenuate empathy. Studies show that more than two years of medical education produces a decline in empathy in medical students that remains till graduation.42 Patients feel dissatisfied when doctors aren’t empathetic, which adversely affects their health.43

Medical schools have adapted their curricula. They provide empathy training via storytelling and simulations. Ironically but naturally, digital technologies help. Virtual reality can recreate for a 26-year-old female fourth-year medical student the reality of a “74-year-old man with macular degeneration and hearing loss. A dark mass obscuring her central vision and the sound of muffled voices offer her a hint of what it’s like to have these challenging health conditions.”44 Empathy scores are rising.

If a mere two-plus years of analytical, data-driven, scientific—and increasingly digitally intensive—medical training reduces empathy, no one is immune. As the kitchen redesign example shows, we stop empathizing when we “put on our professional faces.” By mediating between us and the real world, digital technologies worsen the problem: They make us increasingly remote from others. We experience less directly.

Enhancing empathy is essential for bringing to the decision-making table the views of people who can’t be there. If necessary, refresh your skills. As for other skills, learning requires explicit knowledge, modeling (observing and copying empathetic people), practicing, and getting feedback. If you are already empathetic, be a role model and provide feedback.

Second, stop seeking uniformity and regularly challenge your own beliefs. In the mid-1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted experiments on conformity. He seeded experimental groups with aides who pressured test subjects. In one experiment, they wrongly insisted two lines were of different lengths; many test subjects quelled their doubts and agreed.45 However, when asked individually, the test subjects gave the right answer. Even when subjected to pressure, the vast majority of them gave the right answer at least once. So the real lesson isn’t that people conform, but under the right conditions, they can resist the pressure to conform.

Worshipping at the altar of process and productivity has bred the pursuit of uniformity into the DNAs of people and companies. This criticism doesn’t mean medicines shouldn’t be made in sterile conditions or cars manufactured to six sigma quality standards. It does mean that after addressing such legitimate needs, you shouldn’t seek uniformity everywhere else.

You can help your people change. Instead of blindly following standard practices, ask them, “What could we do?” Add James Ryan’s brilliant questions: “I wonder why …?” and “I wonder if …?”46 Practice these on inconsequential issues, so you can apply them to consequential ones.

In addition, be open to changing what you think and do yourself. If you aren’t, why should any creative person trust you? Ask yourself three simple introspective questions regularly: Which beliefs must I rethink? Which habits that made me successful must I unlearn? Which (new) capabilities must I (acquire)/relearn? Rethink. Unlearn. Relearn.

Practice resisting the temptation to tell. A leader who expresses definitive opinions and preferences too soon inevitably announces that everyone else’s thinking isn’t welcome. Doing so is particularly problematic when dealing with talented people. They will abandon you, and left with sycophants, you’ll sink into groupthink. So learn to hold your tongue. Practice encouraging others to speak by asking simple questions: “What don’t we know about this?” “How would someone in Company X (or another industry or country) have framed this issue?”

Creating Conditions for Creativity in Organizations

To lead people to be creative, you need to be inclusive to bring in a range of lived experiences (chapter 5) and diverse knowledge bases (chapter 6). Drawing on the lessons of strategic intent (chapter 6), you have to provide creative vision. You must foster collaboration (chapter 7). The next key issue is this: How can you create the conditions that foster creativity?

First, redefine your own role to connect and encourage. Andrew Hargaden and Beth Bechky’s study47 of six leading companies that do creative work uncovered four necessary conditions for groups to be creative: (a) People ask for help; (b) people give help; (c) they collectively reflect on, and reframe, challenges; and (d) the prior steps are reinforced, so they happen routinely and effortlessly. These conditions produce rich discussions that generate ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have emerged. Ironically, many executives who desire creativity consider the first condition, help seeking, a weakness.

To help your people feel comfortable seeking help from, and giving help to, others, you need to start with yourself: Be a role model. Catmull addressed the importance of this:48

[O]nce people get over the embarrassment of showing work still in progress, they become more creative. …

We make a concerted effort to make it safe to criticize by inviting everyone attending these showings to email notes to the creative leaders that detail what they liked and didn’t like and explain why. …

The bigger issue for us has been getting young hires to have the confidence to speak up. To try to remedy this, I make it a practice to speak at the orientation sessions for new hires, where I talk about the mistakes we’ve made and the lessons we’ve learned. My intent is to persuade them that we haven’t gotten it all figured out and that we want everyone to question why we’re doing something that doesn’t seem to make sense to them.

If you don’t practice and encourage help seeking, why should anyone seek or offer help? Have you excised “Don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions” from your vocabulary? If not, you’re stopping people who need your help. Rethink everyday practices that worked brilliantly in the predigital epochs. An “open-door policy” is supposed to show you are a helpful boss but is useless for people based a half-world away. They work while you sleep. How will you address this reality?

Common questions in team meetings—for example, “Everything OK? When will you be done?”—send a powerful signal: “This is your responsibility!” Drop those questions in public. Do your network analysis and proactively point out who could help whom. You’ll have succeeded when people ask for and give help online or in person without your pushing them to do so.

Reflection and reframing, a group activity, happens spontaneously and serendipitously. It thoughtfully replaces help-seeking questions with better ones that move the search for answers toward more fruitful directions. For example, at Design Continuum, a leading consultancy, one person’s memory of a prior project involving intravenous fluid bags became the inspiration for the inflatable air bladder in Reebok’s form-fitting Pump shoe.49 At a major yogurt maker, the question “How can we increase sales 35%?” morphed into “How can we make eating yogurt fun?” The ensuing redesign of single-serve containers improved their visual appeal, made consumption easier, and enhanced sustainability; these produced the desired sales increase.

While saying “Let’s collectively reflect and reframe” doesn’t work, you can create the conditions that produce unplanned magic. Start with people with diverse expertise, lived experiences, and knowledge. Each may have experienced something or may know something or may remember something or may ask an outlandish question that turns out to be relevant to the issue at hand.

Make it easy for them to contribute so that “the private knowledge of individuals becomes the public knowledge of many.”50 To this end, enforce a lesson from improv comedy: No one’s comment can begin with “but”; it must build on the immediately prior idea by beginning with “and.” Add the other open-ended questions introduced earlier: “Could we …?” “I wonder why …?” “I wonder if …?” Forbid these eight dreaded words: “We tried that before and it didn’t work.” When goals change, conditions/context change, or available resources change, what may not have worked before may work beautifully.

In the digital epoch, distance is a key challenge. Those located far away may have very diverse experiences; you need to include them in reflection and reframing. A study of design and innovation in virtual teams spanned over four hundred people on seventy teams in multiple industries.51 It found that unless a climate of psychological safety prevails in group communications, geographic dispersion, digital communication, staffing changes in dispersed teams, and national diversity (which includes identity and behavioral diversity) reduce innovation. So focus on what you have to do to improve psychological safety in such situations.

Second, consider whether you need to change your sources of validation. Not changing them regularly insidiously blocks creativity by stopping a broad search for answers before it has a chance to start. It has many faces; consider these two common ones: Do you often ask, “What are our competitors doing?”52 Unless you look at world-class performance in specific areas, that question, the essence of benchmarking, conditions you to copy competitors. Do you routinely seek advice from consulting companies with strong industry practices? You may save money, because they know your business and “won’t learn on your dime,” but you squander more by losing your uniqueness.

Third, create space and time for creativity. Creative work needs focused time. Unless you are an orchestra conductor, multitasking or splitting attention can stymie creativity. Creative work may also require physical distance—going on a retreat—or psychological distance—abandoning the effort for a while to give time for ideas to percolate and gel in people’s minds.53 While resource and time constraints can drive creativity54 and are even necessary,55 unnecessary constraints can kill it.

Connect these ideas with the importance of help seeking and help giving. How can anyone give help spontaneously unless he or she has the space and time to do so? Worldwide, companies are stretching people beyond reason. A 2013 survey showed that American executives and professionals worked an astonishing 72 hours a week, mostly because of “useless meetings and emails, inadequate technology, disorganized or incompetent C-suites, and unclear decision-making authority.”56

Take a hard look at the conditions you create for your people. We force people into cubicles or have them sit at shared tables. We constantly interrupt them via electronic media. We demand progress reports merely because we feel the need to be in control. We … you know this endless list already.

Fix what you can and explain why you couldn’t fix the rest. Remember the lesson of procedural justice (chapter 5): Reasonable people accept decisions with which they disagree if they feel their inputs were considered and the decision-making process was fair. Also remember that this isn’t a “once-and-done” exercise; you may be able to change in the future conditions you can’t change now.

Fourth, rethink how you hire people. In general, hiring people who are your clones is never very good for creativity. Yet, executives routinely go back to their own schools to recruit the next generation of managers and professionals. They convince themselves that those schools must be amazing since they themselves attended them. Maybe they are, but different philosophies of education teach different approaches to tackling problems.

Jane Margolis’s research on why American women stopped opting for computer science majors revealed another broadly applicable truth: Aptitude and interest is more important than knowledge.57 When universities separated students who had prior coding experience from those who didn’t, the latter got to acquire it. Many with aptitude quickly overcame their lack of experience and flourished.58 A barrier identified for women also helped men who hadn’t had prior opportunities to code.

Similarly, while “enough” knowledge is needed to fill open positions, executives often go overboard. Think of the last job posting you wrote. How many “must have done” and “must know” statements did you include? Why? Here’s the standard against which you should measure your answer: Did the job requirements change from your specifications within a year? How quickly did your pedigreed new hire come up to speed at that time? If you truly had only an unavoidable handful, you pass. Otherwise, reflect on your motivations.

Guarding against overspecification is important. Those who may lack some knowledge but learn quickly are more likely to ask the “I wonder why …?” and “I wonder if …?” questions that spark creativity than those who uncritically accept received wisdom. As one of the most creative people in history, Einstein, wrote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”59

Finally, if necessary, subvert the performance evaluation system. The Global Survey asked the responding executives whether traditional performance measures were less relevant for thought-driven work. Across the world, 57% “Strongly Agreed/Agreed” they were. However, when asked whether the performance measures in their own companies captured thought-driven work, the same numbers (56%) said they did.

These two statistics disguised significant regional variations. In India and China, 62% and 48%, respectively, “Strongly Agreed/Agreed” that performance systems generally fell short. A further 9% and 27%, respectively, “Somewhat Agreed.” In contrast, 80% and 75%, respectively, had no concerns about their own systems. Continental Europe continued its skepticism; 57% “Strongly Agreed/Agreed” and 18% “Somewhat Agreed” that performance systems generally fell short. Only 26% endorsed their own systems, while another 25% “Somewhat Agreed” they functioned effectively. The gap existed elsewhere, too, though it was smaller.

This exoneration of their own companies by all but the Europeans is hard to reconcile with the respondents’ awareness of the problem. Cerebral, distributed work needs connection and inspiration,60 and employee development, rapid change, and teamwork,61 while traditional evaluation systems track and reward productivity. Indeed, starting a few years ago, many American companies have begun tackling this problem.62 An extensive search (of English-language publications) revealed no similar reform efforts elsewhere. Clearly, this is a largely unrecognized problem.

Even among American companies that have made changes, replacement systems aren’t necessarily better. They focus on separating compensation decisions from “weekly check-ins with managers to keep performance on course” and “quarterly or per-project ‘performance snapshots.’” So they don’t solve the core problem: A “performance review” won’t produce “connection and inspiration”63 regardless of whether it is done yearly, monthly, weekly, or daily, in conjunction with compensation discussions or otherwise. Check-ins to “keep performance on course” are still focused on productivity. They may be necessary but won’t help you lead for creativity.64

Here is a simple, no-nonsense test you can use to assess the quality of your performance evaluation system: Would it have stopped the Asian entrepreneur from resigning?

Performance evaluation systems have a necessary, even legal, role. Unless you are the chief HR officer, you may not be able to change your company’s. Moreover, the prior discussion of corporate leaders wanting creativity, but not necessarily investing in it yet, suggests you have to be courageous: Without doing anything unethical or illegal, subvert the performance evaluation system.

Regardless of standard practices in your organization, set your own people’s goals by asking questions like these: Will this goal reward help-seeking and help-giving behavior? Will it promote collaboration in difficult situations? Will it help create a psychologically safe environment? Will it reward failures that lead to understanding and insights? Will it encourage exploration of new ways of working or identification of latent needs? In addition, switch goals across people who need to collaborate.65 For example, give sales executives an operations goal and operations executives a sales goal. Since neither can succeed if the other fails, they will be motivated to consult each other. Instead of narrow, specific goals, set ones that will require rethinking how work is done and why. Who knows what such creative syntheses will produce?

As noted in chapter 5, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said, “[I]t’s 2015 and the … business of business is improving the state of the world.”66 So executives will not only have to apply creativity to key business issues, but also to addressing the major challenges humanity faces. These efforts will be inextricably intertwined with the use of digital technologies. That simple, obvious fact will make them more challenging: As the next two chapters show, business has to sharply improve on its performance to date in the digital epoch. To do so, it needs “guide rails” for its creativity.

Notes

  1. 1. Ron Ashkenas, “It’s Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement,” Harvard Business Review, May 8, 2012.

  2. 2. Charalampos Mainemelis, Ronit Kark, and Olga Epitropaki, “Creative Leadership: A Multi-Concept Conceptualization,” The Academy of Management Annals 9, no. 1 (2015): 393–482.

  3. 3. IBM, “IBM 2010 Global CEO Study: Creativity Selected as Most Crucial Factor for Future Success,” news release, 2010, https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/31670.wss.

  4. 4. Forrester Consulting, “The Creative Dividend: How Creativity Impacts Business Results,” August 2014, https://landing.adobe.com/dam/downloads/whitepapers/55563.en.creative-dividends.pdf. This Adobe-sponsored study by Forrester Research of “managers and above who influence creative design software decisions” found fostering creativity paid off in revenue grown, market share, and employee satisfaction, but “61% of companies do not see their companies as creative.”

  5. 5. Ronit Kark, Ella Miron-Spektor, Roni Gorsky, and Anat Kaplun, Two Roads Diverge in a Yellow Wood: The Effect of Exploration and Exploitation on Creativity and Leadership Development, working paper, Bar-Ilan University, 2014.

  6. 6. Jennifer Mueller, Jack Goncalo, and Dishan Kamdar, “Recognizing Creative Leadership: Can Creative Idea Expression Negatively Relate to Perceptions of Leadership Potential?,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47, no. 2 (2011): 494–498.

  7. 7. Jennifer Mueller, Shimul Melwani, and Jack Goncalo, “The Bias against Creativity: Why People Desire but Reject Creative Ideas,” Psychological Science 23, no. 1 (2012): 13–17.

  8. 8. Robert Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987.

  9. 9. Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, and Brendan Price, “Return of the Solow Paradox? IT, Productivity, and Employment in US Manufacturing,” American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 104, no. 5 (2014): 394–399.

  10. 10. “23 Economic Experts Weigh In: Why Is Productivity Growth So Low?,” April 20, 2017, https://www.focus-economics.com/blog/why-is-productivity-growth-so-low-23-economic-experts-weigh-in.

  11. 11. Michael Mumford, Shane Connelly, and Blaine Gaddis, “How Creative Leaders Think: Experimental Findings and Cases,” Leadership Quarterly 14, no. 4–5 (2003): 411–432.

  12. 12. Roni Reiter-Palmon and Jody J. Illies, “Leadership and Creativity: Understanding Leadership from a Creative Problem-Solving Perspective,” The Leadership Quarterly 15, no. 1 (February 1 2004): 55–77.

  13. 13. Mumford et al., “How Creative Leaders Think: Experimental Findings and Cases.”

  14. 14. Steve Wheelwright and Kim B. Clark, Revolutionizing Product Development (New York: Free Press, 2011).

  15. 15. Rizova, “Are You Networked for Innovation?”

  16. 16. Ed Catmull, “Inside the Pixar Braintrust,” Fast Company, March 1, 2014, https://www.fastcompany.com/3027135/inside-the-pixar-braintrust.

  17. 17. Andy Boynton and Bill Fischer, Virtuoso Teams: Lessons from Teams That Changed Their Worlds (New York: FT Press, 2005).

  18. 18. “The Deep Dive with IDEO,” ABC News Nightline, 1999, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL65FF22BBC5A7A59C.

  19. 19. Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, “Leading Clever People,” March 2007.

  20. 20. Mark Marotto, Johan Roos, and Bart Victor, “Collective Virtuosity in Organizations: A Study of Peak Performance in an Orchestra,” Journal of Management Studies 44, no. 3 (March 26, 2007): 388–413.

  21. 21. Barbara Slavich, Rossella Cappetta, and Severino Salvemini, “Creativity and the Reproduction of Cultural Products: The Experience of Italian Haute Cuisine Chefs,” International Journal of Arts Management 16, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 29–41, 70–71.

  22. 22. Marotto et al., “Collective Virtuosity in Organizations.”

  23. 23. James G. (Jerry) Hunt, George E. Stellutob, and Robert Hooijberg, “Toward New-Wave Organization Creativity: Beyond Romance and Analogy in the Relationship between Orchestra-Conductor Leadership and Musician Creativity,” The Leadership Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2004): 145–162.

  24. 24. Morag Barrett, “4 Leadership Lessons from Orchestra Conductors,” Entrepreneur, May 20, 2015, https://entrepreneur.com/article/246194.

  25. 25. Robert Mirakian, “A Graduate Curriculum for Orchestral Conductors,” unpublished doctoral thesis, Indian University Jacobs School of Music, May 2015, https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/19825/Mirakian,%20Robert%20(DM%20Instrumental%20Conducting).pdf;jsessionid=3C8DEF4506F3A06F0E616FBB84C9813C?sequence=1.

Pierfrancesco Bellini, Fabrizio Fioravanti, and Paolo Nesi, “Managing Music in Orchestras,” Computer 32, no. 9 (September 1999): 26–34.

“How to Become a Music Conductor: Education and Career Roadmap,” Study.com, https://study.com/articles/How_to_Become_a_Music_Conductor_Education_and_Career_Roadmap.html.

Sumarga Suanda, “How a Conductor Prepares for an Orchestral Performance,” October 7, 2015, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/cmbc/2015/10/07/how-a-conductor-prepares-for-an-orchestral-performance/.

Courtney Lewis, “Conducting Electricity: Hearing the Entire Symphony Takes Years of Practice,” Florida Times-Union, posted April 29, 2018; updated April 30, 2018, https://www.jacksonville.com/entertainmentlife/20180429/conducting-electricity-hearing-entire-symphony-takes-years-of-practice.

  1. 26. Krista Hyde, Jason Lerch, Andrea Norton, Marie Forgeard, Ellen Winner, Alan C. Evans, and Gottfried Schlaug, “Musical Training Shapes Structural Brain Development,” Journal of Neuroscience 29, no. 10 (2009): 3019–3025.

  2. 27. Clemens Wöllner and Andrea Halpren, “Attentional Flexibility and Memory Capacity in Conductors and Pianists,” Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 78 (2016): 198–208.

  3. 28. Marotto et al., “Collective Virtuosity in Organizations.”

  4. 29. Helen Rosner, “One Year of #Metoo: A Modest Proposal to Help Combat Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry,” New Yorker, October 10, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/one-year-of-metoo-a-modest-proposal-to-help-dismantle-the-restaurant-industrys-culture-of-sexual-harassment.

  5. 30. Nicholas Gill, “Culinary Women Serve Up Their Own #Metoo Moment in Sweden,” Guardian, March 2, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/mar/02/culinary-women-serve-up-their-own-metoo-moment-in-sweden.

  6. 31. Mainemelis et al., “Creative Leadership.”

  7. 32. J. Keith Murnighan and Donald E. Conlon, “The Dynamics of Intense Work Groups: A Study of British String Quartets,” Administrative Science Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1991): 165–186.

  8. 33. Mainemelis et al., “Creative Leadership.”

  9. 34. Mainemelis et al., “Creative Leadership.”

  10. 35. Kelly Lindberg, “The Imaginer,” Continuum: The Magazine of the University of Utah, Spring 2013, https://continuum.utah.edu/features/the-imaginer.

  11. 36. Nic Vargus, “Pixar’s Ed Catmull on Taking Risks and Checking Your Ego,” September 7, 2018, https://slackhq.com/pixars-ed-catmull-on-taking-risks-and-checking-your-ego.

  12. 37. Vargus, “Pixar’s Ed Catmull on Taking Risks and Checking Your Ego.”

  13. 38. Ed Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Creativity,” Harvard Business Review, September 2008.

  14. 39. “Conducting Successful Gate Meetings,” Project Management.com, updated February 13, 2017, https://project-management.com/conducting-successful-gate-meetings.

  15. 40. Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Creativity.”

  16. 41. Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Creativity.”

  17. 42. Mohammadreza Hojat, Michael J. Vergare, Kaye Maxwell, George Brainard, Steven K. Herrine, Gerald A. Isenberg, Jon Veloski, and Joseph S. Gonnella, “The Devil Is in the Third Year: A Longitudinal Study of Erosion of Empathy in Medical School,” Academic Medicine 84, no. 9 (September 2009): 1182–1191.

  18. 43. Helen Riess, “The Science of Empathy,” Journal of Patient Experience 4, no. 2 (June 2017): 74–77.

  19. 44. Beth Howard, “Kindness in the Curriculum,” AAMC News, September 18, 2018, https://news.aamc.org/medical-education/article/putting-kindness-curriculum.

  20. 45. Soloman Asch, “Studies of Independence and Conformity: I. A Minority of One against a Unanimous Majority,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 70, no. 9 (1956): 1–70.

  21. 46. James E. Ryan, Wait, What? And Life’s Other Essential Questions (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).

  22. 47. Andrew Hargaden and Beth Bechky, “When Collections of Creatives Become Creative Collectives: A Field Study of Problem Solving at Work,” Organization Science 17, no. 4 (2006): 484–500.

  23. 48. Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Creativity.”

  24. 49. Hargaden and Bechky, “When Collections of Creatives Become Creative Collectives.”

  25. 50. Amit Mukherjee, “The Effective Management of Organizational Learning and Process Control in the Factory,” unpublished doctoral thesis, Harvard University, 1992.

  26. 51. Cristina B. Gibson and Jennifer L. Gibbs, “Unpacking the Concept of Virtuality: The Effects of Geographic Dispersion, Electronic Dependence, Dynamic Structure, and National Diversity on Team Innovation,” Administrative Sciences Quarterly 51, no. 3 (September 2006): 451–495.

  27. 52. Michael A. Roberto, Unlocking Creativity: How to Solve Any Problem and Make the Best Decisions by Shifting Creative Mindsets (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2019). Roberto calls this the “benchmarking mindset.” A related issue is the “prediction mindset,” which only pursues opportunities that are highly likely to succeed.

  28. 53. Roberto, Unlocking Creativity.

  29. 54. Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja. Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012).

  30. 55. Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Creativity.”

  31. 56. Jennifer J. Deal, “Welcome to the 72-Hour Work Week,” Harvard Business Review, September 13, 2013.

  32. 57. Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).

  33. 58. Clive Thompson, “The Secret History of Women in Coding.”

  34. 59. Albert Einstein, Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms. Covici-Friede, 1931.

  35. 60. Max Nisen, “Why GE Had to Kill Its Annual Performance Reviews after More Than Three Decades,” Quartz, August 13, 2016, https://qz.com/428813/ge-performance-review-strategy-shift.

  36. 61. Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis, “The Performance Management Revolution,” Harvard Business Review, October 2016. This article also has a nice summary of the evolution of performance appraisals in the United States, starting with the efforts of the US Army during WW I.

  37. 62. Kris Duggan, “Why the Annual Performance Review Is Going Extinct,” Fast Company, October 20, 2015.

  38. 63. Max Nisen, “Why GE Had to Kill Its Annual Performance Reviews after More Than Three Decades,” Quartz, August 13, 2016, https://qz.com/428813/ge-performance-review-strategy-shift.

  39. 64. Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, “Reinventing Performance Management,” Harvard Business Review, April 2015.

  40. 65. Amit Mukherjee, “It May Be Time to Get Rid of ‘Smart’ Management,” Forbes, January 12, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2016/01/12/it-may-be-time-to-get-rid-of-smart-management/#3f7632273c07.

  41. 66. Hope King, “Salesforce CEO: I Didn’t Focus on Hiring Women Then. But I Am Now,” CNN Business, June 12, 2015, https://money.cnn.com/2015/06/12/technology/salesforce-ceo-women-equal-pay/index.html.