Chapter 3: Where has creativity died?
Probing the possible murder sites
Imagine you’re walking towards a playground park bench to eat your lunch. Suddenly your phone buzzes with a secret ring tone, alerting you to the fact that you are about to sit next to a registered sex offender, or maybe even a murderer. This is not a scenario from a horror or science fiction movie. The technology has been around for a while. It’s already possible to download an iPhone/android app that tells you how many criminals there are within a set radius of where you are. Tested recently at one city location to cover a designated area, it detected two Vs (violent criminals), four Ts (people convicted of theft/robbery), 50 Ms (those convicted of multiple crimes) and about 12 Os (people with traffic offences or other legal black marks against their name). This could make you feel quite paranoid. What are all these criminals up to? One blogger commented, ‘After living here nearly 15 years I’m probably going to start locking my door at night … Good heavens! My city is overrun with rapists and paedophiles. I’ve got to stop looking at this map!’
In the UK a group called Charity Crime Stoppers has compiled a map of ‘hotspots’ where Britain’s most hardened criminals live. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the busy cities are the top hotspots. According to shadow home secretary Chris Grayling, ‘The most persistent offenders often come from the most challenging and deprived areas of our biggest cities. It underlines how those areas are disproportionately affected by crime’.1 Police use these stats when deciding where to allocate resources and focus on prevention and education programs.
In the same way, the more we know about where our creativity murderers can be found, the better prepared we will be for finding ways to prevent and deal with their activities. So it will be helpful to find out if there are any particular places in the organisation that are likely ‘hotspots’ where the villains hang out.
Locating the crime hotspots — from the boss’s office to the coffee shop
Most burglars are lazy and will use the easiest way to get into their target location.2 Their preferred method of entry is the same as ours — walking through the door. Creativity murderers also prefer to simply walk in through the front door of our living rooms or workplaces and then happily park themselves in their favourite spots. As they can be well disguised or quite charming, they will often get away with this.
An interesting (often entertaining) exercise is to go through the murderer section of this book and to speculate whether each murderer has entered your organisation undetected — and, if so, where his favourite hangouts might be. You can also try to match the murderer and the weapon with the most likely location. You will first need to consider ‘whodunit’ — was it, for example, X.S. Stress using Drowning Dread in the boss’s office? Or Beau Rock-Racy with Crushing Coercion in the accounting department? In our workshops we use our simulation board game with these characters to spark discussion on this, then groups vote on the most likely culprits, weapons and places — which can vary greatly from organisation to organisation, and even team to team.
In considering the places where the creativity killers are most likely to be found, it is interesting to think back to your school days. Do you remember where the tough kids used to hang? In our case, thinking back, it was not in the most glamorous or desirable of locations — they actually used to congregate in the toilets! The junior students would often hold their bladders all day rather than risk having to face the smoking and swearing seniors in the lavatories. On the other hand, the school library, quiet and boring but peaceful and calm, where the timid could escape (especially if being bullied), was reserved for the nerds. In our research we have found that in work organisations creativity killers tend to skulk in those areas that are more rigid and structured and less open and playful.
Our online survey has uncovered some of the major environmental factors involved in the death of creativity, according to the participants. Many indicated that the higher up one goes in the organisation (for example, the CEO, boardroom, executives, accounts and HR), the more likely it is that creativity will be killed. Comments have included: ‘HR and finance have been the two most regulated fields in my line of work that have restricted creativity’ and ‘creativity is killed anywhere where people are listened to and valued because of their rank rather than their talent and ability.’3
The other important environmental factor to consider is the social environment. In school you have the bullies or tough kids (we’ll call them toilet culture kids to give you a specific image) at one extreme and the nerds (we’ll call them the library culture kids) at the other, but most kids sit somewhere in the middle. These kids are often easily influenced one way or the other by the toilet culture or the library culture. It’s up to the school to set a positive tone and create a constructive culture, establishing places that are conducive to their mission. Like the swinging voter, the influence of the swinging student can be immense if tapped effectively. Peer pressure doesn’t finish when we leave school. We like to please the people we hang with, and if this means being controlling or cynical or narrow-minded, many of us will do it. If it means encouraging others, we’ll also do this — as long as the incentive is there. If creativity is shut down by those around you, it’s hard to entertain new ideas, but if it’s encouraged, all will participate enthusiastically. There are toilet and library cultures everywhere.
In the organisation too it is possible to create a positive environment that ensures there is a constructive bias towards creative thinking and away from the creativity killers that can dominate. Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of the ‘tipping point’4 is as relevant to team dynamics as it is to other areas.5 Sometimes a small change in personnel in a team can change the whole environment. Underlying any organisation is a culture that will encourage either the criminals or the resuscitators to thrive.
Consider the NAB and ANZ banks. Both institutions have publicly stated they are keen to change the way their organisation functions. Both are using a similar approach to change (NAB’s program is called ‘Breakthrough’, ANZ’s is called ‘Breakout’). Both programs have been designed directly or indirectly by management consultant McKinsey. And both are focusing on the social behaviours that need to adapt to bring about a positive cultural change. As identified by NAB program architects, the sorts of influential values that will set these behaviours and establish a positive cultural change include trust, transparency, accountability and empowerment.6 Where this doesn’t happen, or where destructive competition and distrust dominate the organisation, creativity cannot survive.
So how to deal with the toilet culture in the school or work organisation? Try taking your meetings there, and turn them into an object lesson! One creative regional executive for Greyhound decided to turn up at a problem bus station unannounced and hold an impromptu staff meeting in the toilets to highlight the fact that they needed to place more emphasis on keeping the toilets clean.7 A clear object lesson with undoubtedly high impact. In another, similar object lesson, a private school conducted a meeting in the toilets with similarly spectacular success. A group of 12-year-old girls had been regularly congregating in the toilets and leaving lipstick imprints on the mirrors. Whenever the cleaner removed the prints, more would appear the next day. The Principal’s efforts to discipline the girls failed, and the lip prints continued to appear — until she finally came up with a creative solution. She called the girls into the bathroom with the cleaner, and explained how much effort it took to clean the mirrors. And then she asked the cleaner to demonstrate. The cleaner took out a squeegee, dipped it in a toilet bowl, and cleaned the mirror with it. The problem ceased after that!
This chapter will navigate some of the general areas you will find in most organisations and institutions, government and private, at all levels. See if you can work out where the creativity killers may be hanging in your organisation!
Potential murder site 1: the boss’s office
The killers have definitely left their marks here. CEOs and other high-level managers are generally struggling to keep up with increasingly volatile and complex business environments, and they need to focus on bottom-line business issues. The IBM study8 revealed that fewer than half the global CEOs surveyed believe their organisations are prepared to handle the massive shifts in the way business needs to be run. They are challenged daily with trying to deal with such major areas as new government regulations, changes in global economic power centres, accelerated industry transformation, growing volumes of data and rapidly evolving customer preferences. Creativity is undoubtedly needed here, but with the need to conform to such broad expectations there is often simply no room to think creatively.
One CEO of a large organisation we surveyed described the frustration of having to run a company according to board mandates, and the impact it had had on his own creative confidence. He explained how the more creative outlook he started with had fallen by the wayside as he had been required to meet ever stricter guidelines. ‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘I had no barriers, I did not know any better, I was not programmed, I did not care what people thought, I had no downside — the world was my canvas. But now I realise that although I have much more to offer and much more drive, I am limited by board mandate.’9
Bosses at every level and in every organisation are having to deal with the pressures from above and below, and will need to come up with creative ways to reshape the future.
Potential murder site 2: the boardroom
Many employees don’t realise that everyone has a boss. Gossip and scorn are often directed upwards, and most assume that the buck stops in the CEO’s office. But CEOs have one of the loneliest jobs in the world, as they too are accountable. The CEO needs to direct a company and keep it profitable and report to a board. The board, in turn, has to ensure that the decisions made satisfy their stakeholders. So almost everyone is accountable to someone else. The Pressure Pack, the Fear Family and the Pessimism Posse tend to frequent board meetings. You will also often find the Insulation Clique and Narrow-minded Mob there. With such a heavily weighted crowd holding court, saying something out of line or suggesting something new and creative is often not worth risking. Creativity is entertained only if it can offer short-term gain and bottom-line financial benefits. There’s usually too much pressure to even think about radical innovation and transformation that might rock the boat.
Potential murder site 3: accounts/finance
There once was a business owner who was interviewing candidates for a division manager position. He decided to select the applicant who could best answer the question: ‘How much is 2 + 2?’ The engineer pulled out his slide rule, shuffled it back and forth, and finally announced, ‘It lies between 3.98 and 4.02’. The mathematician said, ‘In two hours I can demonstrate it equals 4 with the following short proof …’ The attorney stated, ‘In the case of Svenson vs the State, 2 + 2 was declared to be 4’. And the trader asked, ‘Are you buying or selling?’ The accountant looked at the business owner, then got out of his chair and went to see if anyone was listening at the door and pulled the drapes. Finally he returned to the business owner, leaned across the desk and said in a low voice, ‘What would you like it to be?’
The term ‘creative accounting’ is frequently used to describe how individuals and companies utilise accounting practices to minimise their tax and overstate their assets or understate their liabilities. An accountant has been defined as ‘someone who solves a problem you didn’t know you had in a way you don’t understand at a price you can’t afford’. And yet accountants don’t consider themselves to be creative!
Enron is frequently cited as epitomising creative accounting and is a good example of what happens when the practice is taken too far. The company’s auditors, Arthur Andersen, were at the time one of the most respected accounting firms in the industry, so everyone was surprised that the fraud had gone so far. Those who know how widespread this sort of accounting fraud is believe they were just unlucky to get caught.
Apart from this more dubious form of creativity, ‘accounting’ and ‘creative’ are not often used in the same sentence. The accounting department must be ‘precise’ and rigorously ‘correct’, so it must follow rigid systems and procedures within set guidelines. And it must diligently serve the god of profit. Business consultant Jim Collins believes that while profit is critical for the survival of an organisation over the long term, it’s like oxygen — something we need to live but not what we live for.10 The potential rift between purpose and profit as the main motivation must be effectively resolved for creative thinking to survive and thrive in this part of the organisation.
Potential murder site 4: executive offices
Powerful people have difficulty seeing from any perspective other than their own, according to a recent study.11 When the study asked participants to use a finger to draw a capital ‘E’ on their forehead, it was found that the most powerful people were drawing the letter from their perspective and had trouble imagining how others might see it. It was concluded that power leads individuals to assign too much weight to their own viewpoint.
Executives need to be careful that their language doesn’t alienate others and prevent them from contributing to the organisation. Here’s how philosopher Sam Keen sees one of the problems:
Every institution and profession … has its lingo. It is the nature of professions and organizations to invent special languages that are understood by insiders but are otherwise opaque; to be a professional is to speak in code. For the uninitiated, reading internal documents is like deciphering code. It is not uncommon for professionals of all kinds … to use obfuscation, complexity, and mystification to claim knowledge — and thereby power — unavailable to the layperson.12
Potential murder site 5: research and development
The movie Fast & Furious 5 (or Fast Five)13 was highly successful financially, breaking several box office records with a new type of ‘car chase’ plot focusing less on car racing and more on a heist — the target a corrupt police station. As the criminal team watch the police station and ponder whether they can break into it, most of them believe it impossible. But our trusty hero Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) explains to them that most police stations and jails are designed to keep people in, rather than to keep them out, and he believes this weakness can be exploited. Naturally the criminals eventually achieve their goal and do drive off into the distance in a high-speed chase (the whole purpose of the movie). The film reverses the good guys/bad guys archetype by locating the bad guys in the police station, offering the interesting message that sometimes the criminals will be found where you least expect them.
In the business organisation, the R&D department would probably be the last place a CSI team would look for the creativity killers. After all, creativity is supposed to originate there. The death of creativity in the R&D labs may seem unlikely, but maybe that is the department’s greatest weakness — no-one would pick it as the crime scene. Imagine interviewing an R&D person who declared she was not creative. It would be like a hotel saying they don’t have beds!
We expect the R&D department to be an incubator for creativity (and sometimes even that it will be the only place creativity thrives). But murderers such as apathy and insulation can still easily strike here. One problem with keeping R&D as a separate department is that it can be divided into the ‘rainmakers’, who come up with most of the creative ideas, and others not assigned this role, who can be overlooked and not encouraged to develop creative ideas. Also, in a sense the creativity here can dampen creative enthusiasm in other parts of the organisation. If the average person believes that creative thinking is the role of R&D, they’ll continue to battle on inefficiently in their own work. So while creativity may not have been killed in the R&D department, it may have been snuffed out surreptitiously and unknowingly elsewhere because of the mere existence of the R&D role.
Another problem is that although the R&D department may breed fabulous ideas, these ideas are not guaranteed implementation. Many of those who work in this department complain that they are only a single isolated department and their creative ideas are frequently cut down by others. All the people in R&D we have interviewed felt constricted by other departments. Because the department’s success is difficult to evaluate by standard measures such as turnover or revenue, when there are strong financial pressures the department as a whole can be depleted in terms of resources and reach. The sporadic nature of this function and the fact that it is not driven by standard market factors are significant issues to be taken into account in this respect.
If R&D want creativity and innovation to flourish and to influence the whole organisation, they will need to ensure they are not simply buried in their own projects. They may need to pop over to PR and sales to pick up a few pointers on how to ‘sell’ their new ideas internally, ensuring there is buy-in for them. Many salespeople can tell you about great ideas that never made it past the cutting-room floor because of poor communication or persuasion skills. R&D needs to master the power of influencing, which may be the very thing they were trying to avoid in their research role!
One research person we spoke to explained that R&D need constant resourcing and creative development, rather than being just shoved in a room and told to produce results. But if they want to be a bastion of creativity, and if R&D want to ensure that their hands are clean when it comes to creativity murder location, they will need to make sure their doors are wide open for ideas to flow in as well as innovations to flow out. They will also need to ensure that others in the organisation don’t feel threatened by their expertise in the area and instead are welcomed as creative collaborators.
The Fast Five movie heroes broke into the police station so easily because no-one had expected or planned for such a stunt. Be careful that the murderers don’t just as easily get into R&D.
Potential murder site 6: sales and marketing
Creativity murderers in sales and marketing have a clever method for killing it off here. They simply pit different S&M teams against each other or against other departments in the organisation and eventually, like in an old mob movie, everyone kills each other off.
S&M are often creative in their sales approaches and marketing ideas, but time and time again they hit a brick wall when it comes to execution. When the finance department puts the pressure on to meet financial targets or to cut spending, inevitably the enthusiasm in S&M is dampened and creative ideas die. The paradox is that any S&M people worth their salt need to make the numbers, but it can end up being a constant weight around their necks. In a typical scenario sales blames marketing for failure yet takes the credit for success. Fifty-four per cent of sales teams believe they could reach their sales targets more easily if marketing was able to produce more compelling marketing messages; 34.4 per cent of marketers, on the other hand, believe their sales teams need to follow up on leads more consistently, and 26 per cent feel the messages and tools they create are under-utilised by the sales teams.14 The rivalry and lack of trust within S&M teams is such a problem that 80 per cent of marketing expenditures and sales collateral is often wasted.15
Who killed creativity in the S&M department? This was a clever murderer who set the stage and then sat back and watched. The murder scene can easily turn into a full-on brawl with a bloody outcome. Where this is not controlled, brainstorming can easily become ‘blamestorming’. Team members will start to find it is easier to critique than to create.16 When the opposite happens, though — when S&M and the other departments can get together and share creative ideas — then revenues increase and blue oceans appear.
Wal-Mart, for example, came up with some creative ideas about supply and demand. By taking time to examine their databases in 2004, for example, they noticed that a large number of torches and batteries were sold, which was not a surprise, but at the same time sales of the sugary sweet American breakfast snacks called ‘Pop-Tarts’ went through the roof. The retailer never would have expected to stock up on an item like this before a hurricane (and associated blackouts), but some creative analysis utilising the sales team in collaboration with the supply chain and analysis teams helped to identify a sales opportunity. Perhaps it is no surprise that with creative ideas like this Wal-Mart has a revenue of around $400 billion — more than the GDP of many entire countries. With more than 2 million employees handling over 200 million customer transactions each week and more than 8400 stores to keep track of worldwide, it’s a small miracle that they are able to keep track of such data, but it’s obviously a great contributor to their success. A simple creative idea assisted by modern technology changed a whole business model and benefited the business immeasurably.17
Potential murder site 7: the coffee shop
A coffee shop can be a focal point for meeting and sharing ideas. In a busy city, where there are many opportunities for the cross-pollination of information, the coffee shop has become the hub. Some coffee shops are too open and exposed for the creativity murderers to hang around, and many actively welcome creativity. The problem can be that many people will be too influenced by members of the Pressure Pack to even make it to the coffee shop. When we are too busy to meet and catch up, we miss out on opportunities to get together to share creative ideas.
The communal coffee pot at break times used to provide an opportunity to connect with work colleagues and friends during the day. Casual gossip and tasty titbits of organisational information were important to keep communication open and foster relationships within the organisation. But as people now make their single cup of coffee, grab a cup of water from the water dispenser or duck out to Starbucks to pick up a convenient takeout drink, they are rapidly becoming socially disconnected. A sign of the changing times came when Microsoft in the US threw out all their coffee filter pots in 2010 and replaced them with single-cup coffeemakers. So bringing back the communal coffee get-together could help to foster collaborative creativity.18
This ‘soft issues’ agenda has become so important that executives in the organisation are starting to sit up and take notice. More than 20 years ago American psychologist Edgar Schein, in his book Organisational Culture and Leadership, first noted that these hidden subtleties of the corporate culture need to be recognised.19 Global managing partner for McKinsey Ian Davis has also emphasised that leaders need to understand how to use this ‘soft power’. If they can learn to manage the complex internal and external issues inherent in today’s contemporary organisation, they can also foster creativity and innovation. Perhaps it’s time for more people to wake up and smell the coffee!
Potential murder site 8: the lecture room/classroom
When it comes to learning, or to training and development, we need to change expectations to recognise the fact that life is ambiguous, to accept the reality that there may be many ‘right’ answers depending on what you are looking for. The ‘one correct answer’ approach kills creativity because people stop searching as soon as they have found that answer. So the curiosity that should spark an ongoing love for learning is quickly snuffed out. And like an old house that has been gathering mementoes for years, our minds will become cluttered with useless information, and we will not have the mental space or energy to break out and explore. As creativity consultant Roger Von Oech says in his book A Whack on the Side of the Head, ‘We never have an opportunity to ask the questions that lead off the beaten path in new directions. If we’re repeatedly successful, we’re tempted to believe that we’ve found the formula for success and are no longer subject to human fallibility’.20 Tim Harford describes this approach as taking ‘predictable steps along a well-chosen pathway’ and laments how educational institutions such as Harvard have become bastions of ‘short-term gratification’.21
Becoming a true learning organisation is not a passive process. As company structures become more established, the drive to learn and grow will die unless there is an active initiative to ensure it continues.22 And if there is only a single-loop learning approach, problems will continue to re-emerge in the future if they are not dealt with properly in the short term.23
Unfortunately — perhaps shockingly — many participants in our survey indicated that HR also kills creativity. Instead of supporting and promoting creative development, which you might expect to happen in the HR/training arena, there can be a focus on jumping through the hoops to keep up rather than thinking and planning ahead for future growth opportunities.
Potential murder site 9: the playground
When the next generation of kids arrives on the office floor we may be in for a shock. According to Susan Linn (author of Consuming Kids), children are now taught that what will make them happy is what the big corporations produce. Young children have no interest in carving their own Harry Potter wand from a stick but demand the cleverly branded plastic wands they have seen advertised on TV, she says. Linn believes they are now learning about the world based on what’s best for corporations rather than what’s best for them, and that can’t be good. Play has changed dramatically from the time when children invented their own play world — an age when Plato’s famous words, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’, rang true — to a world invented by adults with often insincere motives,24 where children no longer need to create.25
The playground should be a hothouse of creativity, an open environment for exploration and free experimentation, but it may no longer be providing that opportunity. Free play should create a mental state in which it is possible to feel safe and secure and to explore ideas without restrictions. But ‘free play’ is being transformed into ‘controlled play’.
Research clearly shows that individuals who had less play time as children are less creative as adults. Children (and animals) who do not ‘free play’ when they are young may grow into anxious, socially maladjusted adults.26 Free play is one of the conduits needed to ensure brain resources are diverted away from dealing solely with the primitive survival functions so they can access creative thinking. Today our organisations may not be providing that opportunity. When the life of ‘Texas Tower’ mass murderer Charles Whitman was studied in detail, it was found that he had been severely deprived of play as a child, which was deemed to be a significant factor in making him vulnerable to the crime he committed. Such deprivation has also been found as a critical factor in a number of other similar crimes, including the Virginia Tech massacre.27
Opportunities to take work breaks, to make time for free thinking and ‘play’ — and designing places of learning and work to encourage these — will be critical for future creative development. In fact, there is unexpected evidence that this shift may already be happening. A new theory highlights an interesting social trend. It is believed that adults are now hanging on to the behaviours and attitudes traditionally associated with youth as a survival mechanism.28 This immaturity is thought to be enabling adults today to think and respond creatively to changing contemporary demands. Where maturity, wisdom and experience were once valued qualities in a predictable ‘fixed’ environment, an open, youthful mindset seems to be a better coping strategy for dealing with a rapidly changing environment. ‘What is required in the new economy is child-like receptivity and cognitive flexibility,’ writes Jennifer Viegas regarding this theory. ‘In other words youthfulness and playfulness may be adaptive responses to change where jobs, skills and technology are all in a state of flux. This could certainly explain the apparently adolescent behaviour of innovators like Richard Branson and Steve Wozniak and, if true, has profound implications for everything from HR policy to office design.’
Professor of theoretical medicine Bruce Charlton believes society no longer formally prepares young people for ‘adulthood’ through rigorous initiation ceremonies, so it is not unusual for children to retain many of their childlike habits into adulthood. The ‘psychological neotony’ of ongoing education encourages a certain flexibility of the mind and openness to new ideas. Those who continue to maintain an open mind after they have finished their formal education are generally surviving and succeeding best.
Any time, any place
Of course the murder sites are not limited to single offices, departments or locations. It would be too narrow-minded to assume that the death of creativity is restricted to a particular place. Any number of them can turn up in any location at any time, frequently moving between them, sometimes settling into the one place, and sometimes making a casual visit only; sometimes accompanying specific people or situations or systems, and always drawn by a combination of different factors.
Often specific locations or departments will finger-point, blaming other departments for the death of creativity. Those in the field, for example, will often say the killers are found at head office, and this ‘blame game’ can erode team effectiveness. More than 50 per cent of virtual teams fail to reach their objectives, usually because they feel constrained or shut down by a function they perceive to be out of touch with real needs and experiences.29
Many organisations eventually develop ‘silos’, where others can be easily ‘boxed in’ or ‘walled in’ by prejudices and expectations, and blame can then be more easily hurled ‘over the walls’. Some say that Sony lost the music industry race to Apple after such an incredible head start because it developed silo departments with no common positive vision. ‘Sony has long thrived on a hyper-competitive culture, where engineers were encouraged to outdo each other, not work together,’ reflected one employee. Meanwhile at Apple the more a positive, collaborative culture was established the more creative they became, and the boundaries between departments soon evaporated. An Apple employee highlights the contrast: ‘We were all working together late at night, and it was highly energized. It was just an incredible team project. There were no boundaries. The software guys, the hardware guys, the firmware.’30
British burglar Stuart McCormick was recently convicted and imprisoned for a single offence, but then owned up to a further 505 previously undetected crimes! By finding where criminals like to hang then isolating and dealing with these offenders, it may be possible to uncover and deal with a range of deeper, previously unnoticed issues. It would be nice to have an app that alerts us with a secret ring every time we walk into a place that is a hotspot for creativity murderers. In the absence of this technology (and the paranoia it would generate) we must rely on our instinct, or at least ensure we engage in good healthy discussion on the topic so we can identify the killers in any area of the organisation.31