Learning to be more creative

I haven’t yet read Jonah Lehrer’s new best-selling book on creativity, Imagine: How Creativity Works, but I have read his extended article in last week’s Wall Street Journal, and I’m not impressed.

He starts from the proposition that “there’s no such thing as a creative type” and that “anyone can be learn to be creative”. It is not an encouraging thesis.

Basically it’s an extension of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours insight. And while it’s true that everyone can improve their connection-making skill (this being at the heart of all creativity), nevertheless it’s quite observable that some amongst us have creative skills of a quite different order.

Think Shakespeare, Mozart, Einstein, Edison, Turing… To be frank, even with a million hours of skill-building, I’m unlikely to achieve their level of, well, genius. And to deny this strikes me as, well, blind.

I have been training people in creative thinking over several decades now, and I notice consistently that the students who have lost their creativity (or suppressed it or never seemed to have had much anyway) can indeed up their game substantially. However they never catch up with the ones who have real self-confidence in their connection-making capabilities.

The latter make massive progress in a structured training session, because they are enabled to hone skills that already exist, taking them up to a whole new level. Whether the basis for their special talent is nature or nurture seems to me to be of secondary importance.

Blurting the truth

Reports in the Sunday Times of Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson’s new Chelsea home brings to mind the disastrous interview I did with another advertising legend, Frank Lowe, also in Chelsea.

He was looking for someone to head up his then burgeoning international agency business and I’d been recommended.

I arrived at his elegant terraced house and was shown into the “front room”. I marvelled at the extraordinary glass dome three stories above and the enormous fireplace. It reminded me of something, but what was it? Ah, yes - Orson Welles and “Citizen Kane”.

After a wait of thirty minutes or so, Frank finally appeared. “What do you think of the house?” he enquired.

“Seems to have been designed by a megalomaniac,” I blurted.

“Yes,” he said. “I designed it.”

I wasn’t offered the job.

It was one of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” moments for both of us: he knew instantly that I was not right for him. But, before he showed, I already knew that it was not for me.

Have you had instantaneous “Blink” moments - ones where you have blurted the truth?

“Power Distance” and Innovation

In his recent book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the role that “Power Distance” has played in a whole series of air disasters. Basically, the real problem in each case was not equipment failure, but communication failure - usually the inability of subordinates (such as the first officer) to tell the Captain clearly that he was screwing up.

Power Distance is a concept developed by Geert Hofstede as a result of years of research into management relationships around the world. It measures the extent to which less powerful managers feel they can challenge and confront more senior managers.

At one extreme are highly consensual societies, such as the Nordic countries, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the Netherlands, Israel, the USA, Britain and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. In these countries it’s expected that managers should and do speak up clearly to their superiors when there’s a problem (or an opportunity).

In the mid-range are many central and southern European countries (including France and Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal, the Czech Republic and Hungary), plus several in South-East Asia (Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan). In these countries a manager may think twice before challenging.

Up towards the autocratic end are China, India, Russia, Singapore, Korea and the Philippines, many of the Islamic countries (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Iraq, Indonesia, with Malaysia at the very top of the list), and several in Latin America (Mexico, Brazil among them). In these cultures a manager often feels best advised to keep his/her mouth firmly shut rather than rock the boat.

Of course, Power Distance has a profound influence on innovation. For example, if a senior manager in a country with a high score pours cold water over a new idea, it’s far more likely to be fatally damaged. This makes the development of breakthrough new products, new strategies, new ways of working far trickier. And techniques like open brainstorming, which can work so well in an open climate, are nowhere near so useful or effective. Participants often prefer to hide rather than speak up.

Over the years I’ve had to discover by trial and error innovation practices that work better in high Power Distance societies. But it’s never easy!

Have you discovered techniques that work well?