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CHAPTER ONE

THE MYTHS OF CREATIVITY
AND INNOVATION

Myths are fascinating. If you believe a myth just enough, it becomes a “truth.” But in reality, it is still a myth. To better understand the “myths” surrounding creativity and innovation, let’s draw perspective and insight from someone whom you might not put on your short list of creative people. But he was. Albert Einstein. To hear Einstein talk about himself, he was not a creative genius; he just believed in himself and felt he worked harder than others to solve problems. He had three things to say about himself:

Follow your curiosity: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” Curiosity helps to fuel our imagination. When we ask questions of others, we can find out important information to help us solve problems, open new doors, and form connections. When we ask questions of ourselves, we can shake up our beliefs, reveal our innermost desires, and make positive change. Curiosity becomes the alchemy for innovation.

It’s worth pointing out that you don’t necessarily have to have existing problems you want to solve, doors you want to open, or connections you want to make right now. Being curious all the time discovers and saves up all the ingredients for when you do have to perform some alchemy later.

Imagination is powerful: “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. Imagination is more important than knowledge.” With one idea, an empire can be built. Take, for example, Walt Disney, a true master of imagination. He built an empire on the back of a mouse. When Universal Pictures took his original animation character, a rabbit named Oswald, he was stunned. Faced with what he felt was betrayal, he and his Disney Brothers Studio worked even harder and readapted the rabbit character into a mouse called Mickey. While not initially successful, within six months he produced the first animated movie with music and sound effects and it was an instant hit. Imagination and creativity opened the doors of possibilities; today Disney/ Pixar is the leading animation company in the world.

Perseverance is priceless: “It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” If you have a goal at work or in your life, you’ll be faced with obstacles, but by staying with problems longer, as Einstein says, it can mean the difference between failure and success. Another amazingly creative inventor, Thomas Edison, said it perfectly. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” I have seen and worked with countless entrepreneurs who ultimately persevere not so much because of their intelligence or luck, but because they outwork everyone else.

As simple as Einstein makes things—after all, he reduced the complex relationship of matter and light to energy in the most elegant and famous equation in physics—the first step is to not limit yourself into believing you are not creative. That means not believing these longstanding myths.

THE MYTHS OF CREATIVITY

Creativity is something that everyone has inside of them. And yet the common belief in our society is that some people are just born creative and the rest of us are not. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let’s examine some of the common creativity myths.

The Flash of Insight

New ideas sometimes seem to appear as a flash of insight. But research shows that such insights are actually the culmination of working on the problem for a period of time. Everyone remembers the Wright brothers’ first successful flight, just not the previous three years of experiments and failures. We remember what worked and what did not work, and we build on it. This thinking is then given time to incubate in the subconscious mind as we connect threads before the ideas emerge as new “just thought of it” innovations. As Steve Jobs put it:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it—they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

The Creativity Gene

Many people believe that creative ability is a trait inherent in one’s DNA or genes. That, in fact, if your parents or relatives were creative artists or designers, then you will be creative. But the evidence does not support this belief. In 2009, researchers published a study in Harvard Business Review where they concluded that creativity is 20 percent inherited and 80 percent learned behavior. People who have confidence in themselves and work the hardest on a problem are the ones most likely to come up with a creative or innovative solution. Would you necessarily get a creative person from parents who were an attorney and nonprofit evangelist? What if all he did was program computers? Yet, was Bill Gates, Microsoft’s cofounder, creative? You bet.

The Original Idea

According to Ecclesiastes, which dates to the third century BC, there was already “nothing new under the sun.” While some intellectual property (IP) attorneys might argue that that’s not true and that a person can own a creative idea, history and empirical research show more evidence that new ideas are actually combinations of older ideas and that sharing those ideas helps generate more innovation. “Innovation and Iteration: Friends Not Foes,” written by Scott Anthony for the Harvard Business Review (May 12, 2008), illustrates this point exactly. He showcases several new product examples in Silicon Valley that were derivatives of other iterations before they achieved a level of innovation. We needed to develop a flip phone, then a smartphone, to come up with a smartwatch.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Isaac Newton wrote to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, echoing, appropriately, an idea first expressed four centuries earlier.

Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, talks about how critical “the creative team” is to the growth of an idea that forms an amazing film. To paraphrase him, no one might remember who offered up the single idea for a rat that could be a chef, but Ratatouille became a great movie due to thousands of additional ideas from an amazingly creative team. So, share and spark as many ideas as you can and see where it goes. Don’t worry about trying to come up with something brand new. Instead, create something amazing.

The Innovation Expert

Many companies today still rely on a technical expert or team of experts to generate a stream of creative ideas. Naturally, the experts will fulfill that expectation by providing answers based on their past experience. Therein lies the problem. People with the most in-depth knowledge and experience typically prefer the methods that have made them successful in the past and dismiss new approaches they have not tried before. Instead, research suggests that particularly tough problems often require the diverse perspectives of an outsider or someone not limited by the knowledge of why something can’t be done. So-called beginner’s mind refers to the propensity to approach each situation with openness and few preconceptions, no matter how many times you’ve encountered it before. Tom and David Kelley make this very clear in their book Creative Confidence, which is based on the principles of their creative consultancy firm, IDEO.

Rewards Drive Creativity

The expert myth often leads to another myth, which argues that larger incentives, monetary or otherwise, will increase motivation and therefore increase innovation. Incentives can help, but often they do more harm than good, as people learn to game the system. In Drive, Daniel Pink highlights the rather stunning amount of counterintuitive research that suggests that money can actually make people less motivated to do creative work. That is, once people have a base level of money that makes them comfortable, using monetary incentives to get them to do creative work not only fails, but leads to worse performance. Creativity and innovation, it’s been shown, are their own reward.

The Lone Inventor

Just as the great men of history weren’t the only ones to make history, the great innovators didn’t create their works alone. Most people, for instance, believe Steve Jobs created Apple. I liked Steve Jobs. Our marketing agency worked with him at NeXT, Pixar, and Apple. But there was a core team that really helped start and accelerate Apple. Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula were incredibly important. Wozniak was the technology expert and Markkula supplied the marketing and sales expertise. Creativity is a team effort, and recent research into how to incorporate creativity in a company’s culture can help leaders or entrepreneurs assemble amazing teams.

The Prerequisite Brainstorm

Many company managers today preach the use of brainstorming as a way to spark creative ideas that might yield innovative products or services. Unfortunately, very few of the “corporate” brainstorming sessions I have ever attended yielded anything but the frustration of wasted time. The real genius of brainstorming isn’t the number of ideas listed in a short period of time. Instead, it’s the many various combinations of ideas that can develop when individuals share their own thoughts with each other. Those combinations could never occur apart from interaction. To make brainstorming really effective, use a brainstorm tool, a time-based framework, and clear rules. And try to generate as many “conversations” and ideas as possible. In the early moments of brainstorming, the quantity of ideas always trumps quality.

The Happy Company

Believers in this myth want everyone to get along, believing that this “happy” environment might foster innovation. That’s why we see so many “creative” companies build workplaces where employees play foosball and enjoy free lunches together. But breakthroughs leading to innovation come from creative dissent. In fact, many of the most creative companies have found ways to structure dissent and conflict into their environment to better push their employees’ creative limits and to question what is possible without any regard to past and present solutions. You have to embrace that the world is changing and that you need to adapt, create, and innovate. That kind of thinking would have helped Borders bookstores and Blockbuster.

More Resources = More Creativity

Another popular notion is that constraints hinder our creativity and the most innovative results come from people who have “unlimited” resources. Research shows, however, that creativity loves constraints. In our own agency, we did the best work when we had limited time and client resources. You had to be more creative just to make everything work harder. I have often said our marketing teams were more creative on $5 million accounts than $100 million accounts. Today, when working with startups, I am amazed at the creativity you have to have when you only have $25,000. Perhaps companies should do just the opposite—intentionally apply limits to leverage the creative potential of their people.

If you believe your company’s or startup’s success depends on your being more creative than your competitors, don’t just blindly follow these creativity myths. Instead spend the time needed to understand and nurture the components of creativity in your environment. How creatively are you or your company pursuing innovation? Or are the myths of creativity holding you back? At the same time, don’t fall prey to these innovation myths.

THE MYTHS OF INNOVATION

I honestly don’t know if most people could actually explain or define the “process” of innovation. Can innovation be predicted? Can you innovate on purpose or on demand? I don’t think so. And yet innovation occurs every day. That means that quite a few people out there either don’t know or care about any myths of innovation. So, let’s examine and debunk the top ones.

We Know History

So much of what we think we know comes from our knowledge of history about anything. But do we know the real history of any major innovation? Writers and historians tend to shape history as if it were a creative story: chronological, precise, with characters overcoming conflicts and their own limitations. The problem with that is it puts us into a limited and defined area. We then believe in something so strongly related to the history of that innovation that we may actually not examine the real failures, which led to the innovation. For any major innovation you may know in your industry, examine its real history.

The Innovation Formula

The challenge with being innovative, especially in a given marketplace, is the many factors that are beyond your control. You can do everything right and still fail. Industry analysts and technology leaders would have us believe they can see the future of innovations that they believe will actually occur. Is there an innovation formula? Really, that’s impossible. Innovation is not predictable. It’s like understanding Moore’s Law (which says the power of computing doubles every two years) and somehow knowing what technology device to manufacture that consumers will love. While innovation will never cease, you can’t really use a methodology or formula to innovate. You just keep iterating or improving current ideas until you create or stumble to a breakthrough.

New Ideas Are the Best

As humans, in general, we are pretty conservative and don’t embrace new ideas easily. Don’t believe me? The next time you are in a meeting, sing your answers to questions. How accepting would your peers be? Conformity is deep in our biology. While talking about creativity is very popular, actually being creative scares people. The thing we need to understand is that most great ideas were rejected, often for years or decades. You may remember the debacle that followed when Coca-Cola tried to introduce “New Coke” and customers howled until the company removed it from the marketplace. Or that we needed illegal music download companies like Napster for the entertainment industry to begin embracing digital music. The history of innovation is a tale of persistence against rejection. The likelihood is that no one will initially like your creative idea. So, remember to be persistent.

Great Ideas Are Rare

If you think it’s hard to come up with lots of new ideas, just go to a kindergarten class when they are creating something. They will invent dozens of things in an hour. In less than forty minutes, students in my Creativity and Innovation class at SDSU will create fourteen new products that solve a real problem. The truth is humans were designed to be creative. The problem is the societal norm of adult life demands conformity, and so we sacrifice our creative instincts in favor of accepted social status. Think back to your elementary or high school class when you raised your hand and provided what you thought was a pretty creative answer to a problem. And the class laughed and the teacher said your idea was not possible. How long was it before you raised your hand again in that class? Good ideas are everywhere; the tough part is getting people to believe and then act on them.

My Manager Knows More Than Me

Many people believe that their senior managers are better at everything than they are. Because this thinking is wrong in so many ways, creativity takes a real beating. To rise in a company demands hard work and good political judgment, yet innovation requires a willingness to defy convention and take a risk. Risk takers are harder to promote in most organizations, yet essential for progress. To blindly assume your senior management leadership is the best at leading innovation is a mistake. It sure did not help BlackBerry. Here is a quote from the company’s then founder and CEO: “How much presence does Apple have in business? It’s vanishingly small,” Mike Lazaridis said in an interview with the Guardian newspaper when Apple revealed the iPhone in 2007. Enough said.

The Best Idea Wins

It’s tough to admit but the best ideas don’t always win. Why? We love the “myth” of the winner. Edison invents the lightbulb? Not really, as he lost a patent lawsuit to a person named Joseph Swan. The Europeans invented the firearm? Not really. The Japanese did years earlier, but their culture embraced the symbol of the sword. Betamax videotape was far superior to VHS and so it would succeed as the best idea, right? No, VHS was poorer in quality but the tape format was three times longer and that’s what consumers preferred. In the 1930s, major cities in the United States had public transportation—trolleys and tram systems modeled on successful designs from Europe. So you would expect we would further innovate on that success and build the world’s best public transportation systems? Not really. Turns out we liked cars. The best idea does not always win. If you have a great idea, fight for it.

Solutions Are More Exciting Than Problems

Einstein said, “If I had twenty days to solve a problem I would take nineteen to define it.” There are many creative ways to think about a problem, and different ways to look at a potential solution. However, we are impatient, and so we love to quickly look at potential solutions when trying to solve a problem. The problem with that approach is that we tend to overlook what we no longer see. If you really want to be creative and perhaps even innovative, take your time and really define or agree on the real problem. That is the most critical thing you can do before embarking on the solution mission.

There is just one more myth to debunk: the one that says your potential creativity is determined by whether you have a dominant left or right brain.

Right Brain vs. Left Brain

From self-help and business success books to job applications and smartphone apps, the theory that the different halves of the human brain govern different skills and personality traits is a popular one. No doubt at some point in your life you’ve been schooled on “left-brained” and “right-brained” thinking—that people who use the right side of their brains are more creative, spontaneous, and subjective while those who tap the left side are more logical, detail oriented, and analytical. Too bad it’s not true. However, since so many people believe this myth, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we are told at a young age we are creative, we lean in and try to become an artist or designer. Even if we are really not that creative, we work harder, believing success is right around the corner. If we are told we are not creative, we then focus on less creative opportunities, thinking we will never succeed in a “creative” profession. Well, this “myth” has existed for hundreds of years, but newer research studies and scientific experiments dispute it.

The brain isn’t as clear-cut as the myth makes it out to be. For example, the right hemisphere is involved in processing some aspects of language, such as intonation and emphasis. In one such study done in 2012, University of Utah neuroscientists scanned the brains of more than 1,000 people, ages 7 to 29, while they were lying quietly or reading, measuring their functional lateralization—the specific mental processes taking place on each side of the brain. They segmented the brain into 7,000 regions, and while they did uncover patterns for why a brain connection might be strongly left- or right-lateralized, they found no evidence that the study participants had a stronger left- or right-sided brain network.

How, then, did the left-brained/right-brained theory take root? Experts suggest the myth dates back to the 1800s, when scientists discovered that an injury to one side of the brain caused a loss of specific cognitive abilities. The concept gained ground in the 1960s with the Nobel Prize–winning “split brain” work of neuropsychologists Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. The researchers conducted studies with patients who had undergone surgery to cut the corpus callosum—the band of neural fibers that connect the hemispheres—as a last-resort treatment for epilepsy. They discovered that when the two sides of the brain weren’t able to communicate with each other, they responded differently to stimuli, indicating that the hemispheres have different functions.

But the research was limited and drew no real conclusions. However, psychologists picked up on this research and continued to promote the myth of right-brain versus left-brain creativity over the next thirty years. Pretty soon we had personality and job occupation tests that, based on the results, told us what we were potentially good at concerning a job or career. How insane. How many of us remember that disruptive, super funny, or creative student who was “counseled” by schoolteachers to go to an automotive or IT school instead of college? Heck, that person probably could write a show like Breaking Bad. Oh, he did. Vince Gilligan, the creator of the hit show Breaking Bad, grew up with parents who were a schoolteacher and insurance claims adjuster in Richmond, Virginia. But his best friend’s mother lent him a film camera and encouraged him to shoot films and enter them in local competitions. Turns out he was pretty good.

Okay, here’s the truth. As research has proved, we use both sides of our brains to do both creative and analytical thinking or tasks. So, you are not technically left- or right-brained. You can be as creative as you want to be. Just adopt the right mindset and exercise your “creative muscles” regularly.

THE CREATIVITYWORKS FRAMEWORK

I spent my entire career having to be creative and leading teams to come up with some innovative solutions. Without even knowing it, I was essentially using the core elements of a creativity framework that I use today in my Creativity and Innovation course at San Diego State University. I looked at the common themes in creative people and companies. What I discovered was what led me to create the CreativityWorks Framework and its key components of mindset, environment, habitat, and brainstorming tools. Let me explain each briefly before going into more depth on each one in the following chapters.

Mindset: To be creative, you have to consciously believe you are creative. You have to have a growth mindset, one that is in a continual state of learning or acquiring more knowledge and open to new ideas.

Environment: I define environment as having two key attributes in my creativity framework: leadership and culture. Think about your current work environment or one in the past. Was the leadership open to new ideas? Did the company’s leaders embrace creativity and innovation? Related to leadership, what is or was your work environment culture? Were ideas shared openly? Was there a formal hierarchy or did the best idea win? You cannot have creativity unless you have a great environment.

Habitat: I define habitat as the physical customer or employee workspace. For example, our marketing agency offices were open, colorful, and free-flowing. You felt creative just walking into one of our offices. If you feel creative, you are more likely to be creative. Google offices are an amazing cornucopia of color and imagination at work with cocoon pods for small meetings and slides that connect floors. Pixar allows employees to decorate their office spaces and model them after their favorite movie or character. Pretty cool, right? No, pretty creative.

Brainstorming Tools: Brainstorming without using a given framework or tool is a waste of time. I will introduce you to some amazing brainstorming structures and tools in upcoming chapters and suggest a brainstorm format.

If using a framework is intended to have you be more creative, how do you define the difference between creativity and innovation? One of the key definitions we use in class is that creativity is the generation of ideas to a potential problem while innovation is the actual implementation of a new idea to solve a problem. It’s incredible to me that by using this framework in my class, students can come up with an amazing array of creative ideas and potential solutions. In one class exercise led by a former IDEO employee, the creative solution to a problem presented by a student team was so potentially innovative, the guest lecturer leaned over to me and quietly said, “That’s a multimillion-dollar solution if implemented.”

CREATIVELY DEFINING THE PROBLEM

As a director in the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center at San Diego State University, I meet quite a few company CEOs/founders, startup entrepreneurs, and student wannabe entrepreneurs. When these student entrepreneurs meet me to pitch their idea, I often stop them before they get started and simply say this: “What problem are you solving?” If they say “Huh?” then I know we have yards to go. That’s okay. After all, I am on a college campus and the acquisition of knowledge is at our core purpose. I sit down with them and ask how much due diligence they have done to accurately analyze and define the problem. I might ask the following questions:

What have you done to clearly clarify and identify the problem? How many “why” or “why else” questions have you asked?

How exactly have you researched the problem? Have you talked to any customers?

Have you framed a creative challenge around the words “How could I . . .” without using evaluation criteria?

Based on an understanding of the problem, how many ideas have you created that could potentially solve the problem? Did you hold a brainstorming session?

How did you evaluate your best ideas? Have you thought about combining any of your ideas to solve the problem?

Do you have an action plan with simple steps to test your best idea?

Have you tested your idea? What is the least costly and least risky way of testing your idea?

I like to really emphasize to these future entrepreneurs how critical it is to correctly identify the problem before you start throwing solutions around like confetti. Identifying the problem is also a core mantra of my Creativity and Innovation course. We spend an inordinate amount of time in my class discussing and agreeing on the problem before we begin any creative brainstorming exercise that involves generating solutions.

I will end this chapter with this quote.

The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.

—ABRAHAM MASLOW