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Creativity is our ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems and produce novel value. And that’s the case whether you’re an accountant, an attorney, a farmer, a plumber, a coder, a teacher, or an artist. We need to be thinking about how to build the overall creative capacity in our organizations. We must intentionally design the space and the time for both the wonder and the rigor. And there’s three areas that I want to take a look at. One area is in our hiring practices. The second area is in the biggest artifact, the ways that we meet. And the third is to really explore play in new ways.
Hiring
As organizations, we also have this opportunity and responsibility to build the creative capacity for our organizations in order to innovate on a consistent and sustainable basis. One of the places to start is in who you’re hiring. Admittedly, most of us have been educated in a way to solve for the answer, not to engage in trusting the process. Who might be some unusual suspects of people to hire? So not necessarily people who came from the same sorts of schools, who studied the same sorts of backgrounds and disciplines but show up with a very different lens. This really builds cognitive diversity. Building a creative capacity thrives on cognitive diversity.
What if we began to do very different sorts of interviews? There’s an organization called Leadership and Design, and one of the very different things they do in their interview process is that there’s a moment after the Q&A and after the face-to-face conversation where they invite the interviewee during the lunch break to take their smartphone device, take a couple snapshots of images and moments around the physical environment where they are, and then to share back why they took those photographs. What’s the meaning behind it? And they’re actually getting to a very different level of conversation and interaction with this potential candidate beyond where they went to school, their past work history, and their qualifications. You get an opportunity to explore those “what if” questions. You get an opportunity to explore their aptitude for experimentation and their intuitive nature.
Meeting
The second area that I want us to zoom out on is the artifact of every organization called the meeting. What if we began to explore new ways to meet – we mixed up who gets to lead the meeting? We can take a great lesson from the way jazz musicians work, where jazz musicians toggle back and forth between solo and support. So, for example, the great jazz drummer, Art Blakey, who was the leader of his quartets and quintets, as the drummer, typically sat in the background and had no problem letting other musicians take the lead. What if we did that in our meeting structure and let newer people, younger people, less tenured people every now and then take the lead and understand what we could learn from them?
Play
I’d love for us to reexamine the role of play in our organizations. When you think about it, when we are at play, we are actually elevating all of these really important executive leadership skills. Skills such as collaboration, experimentation, actively listening, asking new and different sorts of questions, anticipating what’s next, and negotiation.
So if we went beyond play just as having a ping pong table but really having people out for recess, which by the way, Geraldine Le Borne used to do when she was at the helm of Nickelodeon, we get to know one another in very different ways, and we get to activate those skill sets, those soft skills which are incredibly hardcore, especially in this time of the fourth industrial revolution.
Creativity is a competency because it’s something that we can exercise and we can get better at. So this doesn’t allow you to be let off the hook and say, “well, I’m just not a creative type.” And you now know that you’re not going to say that because you can’t sing, paint, draw, or dance. We are no longer going to conflate creativity with artistic practice.