Habit 1
Start an electric conversation
How to create The Spark in your business
You’ll learn:
“Creativity is contagious, pass it on.”
Albert Einstein, physicist1
In 1999 the whisky brand Johnny Walker was in decline. It challenged the advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) to come up with a novel way to sell its product. It wanted to develop an enduring brand idea that could transcend borders and adapt to local as well as global markets. At that point in time any campaign about whisky always featured two schools of clichéd imagery: either traditional ‘heather ‘n’ kilts’ to represent Scottish heritage or the conceit that ‘whisky = success’ rammed home by footage of successful businessmen sipping whisky while staring into the middle distance on the back of a yacht.
BBH realised Johnny Walker desperately needed a new, more youthful group of customers. Research into the attitudes of younger consumers sparked some electric conversations. From these a big idea came forth. They discovered younger people had shifted in their view of success. For them success is not a place, it’s a journey – you never arrive. From the universal idea of personal progress, the ‘Keep Walking’ solution was born: the award-winning campaign featuring down-to-earth personal progress stories of younger people. It’s since been adopted by 120 countries. Meanwhile, Johnnie Walker’s value and volume sales have risen 48 per cent and 94 per cent respectively, as the whisky market has declined by 8 per cent. The campaign has helped deliver over $2.2 billion in retail sales and is still being evolved into new reincarnations by the BBH team. BBH’s founder and creative director, Sir John Hegarty, told me: ‘That’s how intelligence, insight and strategy gives you the confidence to jump further with an idea – it leads you to better creative execution.’
Bottled lightning
Creativity is the electric moment when one person illuminates his or her consciousness with the spark of a new idea. A spark can happen when two or more people collide in a creative way. In a business, most sparks fizzle out quickly for good or bad reasons. Good reason: the sparks are judged correctly not to be strong or bright enough. Bad reason: a clumsy, neglectful or actively hostile environment to any idea which challenges the status quo.
A small number of ideas are so strong they survive and grow to become bolts of lightning that attract attention across the business. Still fewer go on to become highly profitable. Some even change the world. That’s innovation: the sparks that grow into bolts of lightning that, against the odds, are bottled by a business.
Creativity – transforming the cash spent on salaries into ideas; and innovation – turning those ideas back into cash, is the Holy Grail of business.2 Making it happen is tricky. To be skilled at facilitating commercial creativity is, arguably, the most difficult leadership role of all. But it’s also one of the most valuable and rewarding things to do. Following the habits in this book will make it easier.
You can’t predict lightning
Lightning is one of the oldest observed natural phenomena on Earth. It’s a huge spark of static electricity – the kind that sometimes shocks you when you touch a doorknob. It’s surprisingly common. About a hundred bolts strike the Earth’s surface every second – and their power is extraordinary. Each bolt contains up to one billion volts of electricity. Like human inspiration, it’s not possible to predict when and where lightning will strike. But we do know a lot about the unique atmospheric conditions in which lightning is more likely to strike.
Managing for creativity is the same. You can’t mandate creativity, or the mix of skills and attitudes that produces it. Demanding that people are creative to order is a little bit like someone shushing a crowd of people, turning to you in the pregnant silence that ensues, and saying: ‘Go on, do that funny thing you do!’ In 1991, an American girlfriend actually did this to me in front of a group of friends she wanted to impress in the United States. I can assure you, the result was not amusing for anyone. Mine was a spark of humour, not a bolt of lightning, and should never have been subjected to public scrutiny. Trying to manage spontaneous humour, creativity or, indeed, lightning is awkward, difficult and prone to failure if the atmosphere is not right. So, if creativity can’t be mandated, what can you do?
You can’t order people to be creative any more than you can order people to be happy, fascinated or in love. But you can lead a business culture which, like the charged atmosphere in a thunder storm, produces the lightning strike of ideas. My ten organisational and leadership habits create the organisational energy for The Spark to happen - week in, week out.
Leaders inspire creativity when they strike up electric conversations.
How to kick start an electric conversation
Do you know that rare and special moment when you see, hear or feel something so exciting that the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end? It might be an image you’ve just seen, or a discussion that overflows with excitement – so much so it’s taken on an interesting life of its own. You lose track of time and become completely engrossed with the subject at hand. It feels like you’ve received an invitation to join an intriguing journey that might lead to a fleeting glimpse of clarity – or an even more interesting question.
That’s what an electric conversation feels like.
For a moment, reflect on the most important milestones in your life: a career move, a new relationship, a big idea, getting involved with some volunteer work or a completely new direction. Chances are it began with an electric conversation with a friend, family member or collaborator. The genesis of your greatest achievements will have occurred in an instant when an idea rose unexpectedly to the surface of your consciousness and grabbed you firmly by the scruff of the neck. This catalysing insight will have led you to something truly amazing. Most people will recognise these conversations from some time in their life. Fewer people experience it at work because, in business, electric conversations are killed more often than encouraged.
It is these inspiring, direction-making, profit-creating conversations that this book is about. Electric conversations lead to the lightning strike of new ideas. They are the smallest building block of the creative business. They happen in an instant, or over years; between just two people, or a whole team. Whatever the circumstance, electric conversations drive change. They change the direction of your life – and the lives of people around you. From a business perspective, they couldn’t be more important; they are behind every profit-making business idea in human history.
Electric conversations help companies benefit from scale. One person alone in a garden shed might do brilliant things. But a business has an advantage over that lone inventor – it has more people. Creative businesses are complicated and simple, all at the same time. Simple, because in essence, they are purely a number of talented people coming together supported by investment to pursue certain goals. They are complicated because of the inherent challenges in generating the conditions in which creative alchemy occurs. This book illuminates the path to developing an energised culture through passionate people, collaborative teams and the power of electric conversations.*
Different businesses in different industries will need differing levels of creativity – and a different emphasis on creativity in their organisation. You can see from Figure 1.1 how the elements of passionate people, energised culture and collaborative teams build towards a situation in which electric conversations are happening right across your business.
figure 1.1 Electric conversations
Source: Professor John Bates, London Business School who emailed me a version of this 2 × 2 model after we discussed The Spark, December 2013
I’d advise any business in the world to make the effort to go the whole nine yards and lead your team to encourage electric conversations in the top right-hand box. The transformation of your business will be more than worth the managerial effort.
Use The Spark to focus upon the top priority in your business to encourage more electric conversations. The best route for you might be changes to your management style, more passion. and energy in your team – or the need for a more collaborative attitude. Whatever it is, use The Spark’s structured approach as a catalyst for beneficial change.
Inspiring collisions
It’s worth setting the boundaries of what electric conversations can achieve because they are not the idea itself – or business innovation in its entirety. They are the road towards these things. It might take months for great ideas to emerge from electric conversations. They also don’t negate the importance of individual flashes of brilliance. Psychological research shows people have a lot of great ideas when they are alone in what scientists call a state of ‘low cortical arousal’ (the rest of us call it day dreaming). In other words: you have ideas when you’re not trying to. When I ask executives on the leadership development programmes I deliver around the world when and where they have their ‘aha! moments’ they often reply: ‘In the shower’ or ‘at the gym’ or ‘walking my dog.’ These are the few times in busy modern lives when we have precious minutes to switch off and allow our brains to give us some creative feedback.
Electric conversations play a part in these lonely moments of insight. This is because all of our ideas come from a magical and unique blend of external influences: books, poems, speeches, films, inspirational thinkers and leaders. We learn through day-to-day collisions with new stories, information and ideas. Your inspiration is as unique as you are: the director Woody Allen is inspired by New York City; the award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel by the Tudor period in England’s history; I’m often inspired by food, chefs and great restaurants. Electric conversations are a fundamental way for businesses to encourage employees to collide with new ideas: the only way to ensure their company’s knowledge gets around – and adds up to more than the sum of the parts.
What inspires you? How can you bring that inspiration into the office every morning?
Electric conversations and flow
Electric conversations make you happy. A Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (in case you were wondering, you pronounce it: ‘Me-hi Chicksent-me-hiee’), resolved to try to find out what made people happy. First, he interviewed hundreds of artists, athletes, musicians, chess masters and surgeons and asked how they felt when they were engaged in their specialist calling. He then arranged for thousands of ordinary people to wear a pager and describe how they were feeling, and what they were doing, when the pager went off randomly throughout the day.3 (A pager, you ask? Well, it was the eighties.)
From this research, Csikszentmihalyi developed an optimal state of being he called ‘flow’. When people are in flow they are so involved with an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable they will do it even at a great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it. Flow is about joy, creativity and total involvement; a place where problems disappear and there is an exhilarating feeling of transcendence. Athletes call it ‘being in the zone’; artists have described it as ‘rapture’; and some mystics talk of ‘ecstasy’. Electric conversation is about more than one person getting into a flow state together. For business leaders, the big insight is this: people will seek out electric conversations because they’re enjoyable – not because they’re being paid.
What gets you into a state of flow? It might be reading, skiing, sailing, playing chess, throwing a frisbee, talking with friends in the pub, yoga, writing, drawing, to name but a few. To understand flow at a personal level, remember that feeling. Then you’ll be able to recognise when it’s happening at work – and try to make it happen more often.
Key characteristics of electric conversations
Electric conversations are one key way that a business can ensure its employees are providing each other with a steady stream of ideas, inspiration and challenge. They are as much about energy, emotion and raw passion as intellectual stimulus. Sometimes they even provoke a physical sensation not unlike a small electric charge: the hairs on the back of your neck literally stand on end. That’s why you need to listen carefully to your own instinct to know when an electric conversation has begun. Figure 1.2 shows six basic characteristics of an electric conversation so that you can try to have more of them – and recognise them when they start.
figure 1.2 Six key characteristics of an electric conversation
High-voltage examples
Research shows that jazz ensembles, improvised comedy and theatre troupes use versions of electric conversations to produce magical performances without a pre-prepared script.4 We can also look to recent history for some compelling examples of electric conversations:
- John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles are one of the best-known and most successful musical collaborations in history. Between 1962 and 1969 the partnership published approximately 180 songs. Early on they would collaborate extensively when writing songs working ‘eyeball to eyeball’ – the ultimate musical conversation. Later, when the joint electricity faded a little, they worked alone but still published the material under the legendary team name: Lennon & McCartney.
- Scientists Francis Crick and James Watson conducted a world-changing electric conversation at Cambridge University, investigating the fundamental building blocks of life. Famously, they often retreated to the local pub – The Eagle – to continue their discussions. One lunchtime in February 1953 Crick interrupted pub patrons to announce that they had ‘discovered the secret of life’. Nine years later, the duo were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of the structure of DNA – recognised as one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
- Sometimes electric conversations are inspired by necessity. In 1970 a NASA ground crew conducted one under a global spotlight and intense pressure. James Lovell, the commander of the spacecraft Apollo 13, uttered the immortal line over the intercom: ‘Houston, we have a problem.’ An oxygen tank had exploded, stranding the spacecraft hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth. Flight director Gene Kranz challenged ground controllers to do the impossible: to use their ingenuity to somehow help bring the astronauts home safely. Apollo 13 splashed down safely four days later.
15 Minute Experiment. Start an electric conversation today. What’s the worst that can happen? You have a normal conversation. What’s the best that can happen? You dream up a new idea that changes your business – or your life – for the better.
Electric conclusion
Leading commercial creativity can seem daunting. This is because it requires a number of interdependent approaches described by the habits in this book. But it helps to realise that a large part of changing your culture is about transforming the nature of your day-to-day conversations. That’s the end of the process – but it can also be the start. So, start an electric conversation, right now.
CLEAR steps to change
Communicate
Start an electric conversation today. Think of the most important question facing your business, the thing that makes you scared and hopeful all at the same time. Invite a hand-picked group of people to a no-holds barred creative conversation. Use Figure 1.2 to guide your approach. This is a golden opportunity for you to show those around you what an electric conversation should look, sound and feel like. Remember to listen more than you speak, to facilitate a flowing discussion where all are involved, and to summarise what was achieved.
Learn
Think about the most electric, idea-laden conversation you ever had in your life. What was the context and conditions that made it possible? How can you recreate that with the people around you? Grab a blank sheet of paper and brainstorm some things guaranteed to kill electric conversations in your team – anything from ‘too much hierarchy’ to ‘room too stuffy’. Then write down the opposite – the conditions that seem to encourage them. Narrow down your list to the three things on each side of the sheet that you can do something about – then make the changes required.
Energise
Where in your team or business are electric conversations needed most? Is it in your regular weekly management meeting or a monthly board ‘strategy’ meeting? Perhaps, if your business is cyclical, it is in a certain time period in your calendar year – or when your team is developing ideas for a new product or client pitch? Or, are electric conversations urgently needed in after-project or pitch review sessions to improve how you do things in the future? Whenever it is for your business or team, focus on when and where the electric conversations need to take place and how you can help to start them.
Act
Think about how you can redesign a meeting to encourage more electric conversations. Are there any guidelines for how your most important regular meetings are facilitated? Can you encourage people to focus the ‘big question’ or hoped-for outcome of your regular management meeting to encourage a more free-flowing and inspiring debate? Right now, who talks the most and who says nothing? How can you encourage more participation through the group? Who is not invited that might come along in the future on a temporary or permanent basis to shake things up a little?
Respond
Change the game in your regular management meetings for one month and then review if things improved. Ask the members in the group individually: What worked? What didn’t work? What still needs to be done? Reset and make any changes needed for another month until your management meetings are crackling with energy – rather than being a chore to be avoided.
1 Caponigro, J.P., 2013. 25 Quotes on Creativity [online]. Available at: <www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/blog/11317/25-quotes-on-creativity/#sthash.XGJzLxR0.dpuf>.
2 Thanks to Gordon Torr.
3 Csikszentmihalyi, M., 2002. Flow. London: Rider. p.4.
4 Sawyer, K., 2007. Group genius: The creative power of collaboration. New York, NY: Basic Books.
* Source: Professor John Bates, London Business School