Chapter 4: Why save creativity?
Emergency response
A new rescue squad is being trained to deal with critical emergency situations. Perhaps the most unlikely of saviours, the knights in shining armour we are about to describe are not chosen for their physical strength or expert medical knowledge. They are painstakingly trained but will never set foot in the training room. Dispatched to the most dangerous of scenarios, these rescue squads have very high rates of success, yet they are not receiving the bravery awards or recognition you would think they deserve.
The rescue squad is, in fact, a team of furry rodents, a miniature army of rat risk-takers ready to step out into the unknown and sniff out danger. Trained by psychologist Alan Poling, the rats are helping to deal with two major, very different problems in the developing world — land mines and tuberculosis. More than 25 000 people a year are killed or maimed by landmines, which are considered one of the leading sources of suffering in the developing world. In Mozambique, for example, where land mines are still a major problem after a 16-year civil war, the livelihoods of thousands of civilians are threatened. If the people return to the land that is seeded with mines, they risk losing a limb, but if they cannot grow food on the land they risk starvation. After eight months of meticulous lab training, African pouched rats, which have a very keen sense of smell, have been taught to detect mines in the field with 100 per cent accuracy. Rats are now also being trained to detect tuberculosis, which still kills around two million people a year according to World Health Organization statistics. The rats have been found to be 44 per cent more accurate than standard smear microscopy in predicting the presence of TB.
Ironically, then, while we tend to associate rats with disease, danger and death (think of the bubonic plague, a disease spread by rodents through the fleas they carry, which has claimed more than 200 million lives worldwide), they may themselves now become a saviour in our fight against disease, danger and death.1
There are undoubtedly many who would prefer not to know too much about these squeaking sewer dwellers, but despite their gruesome reputation rats are actually clever animals that will often find creative ways to deal with challenges. To demonstrate the rat’s high level of creative intelligence, a couple of bloggers put together a list of rat attributes, suggesting a few good reasons to take the rat seriously when it comes to creative thinking and problem solving:
• the ability to learn to navigate a maze by trial and error
• the facility to venture into the unknown and to learn from their mistakes
• the ability to retain information and apply it in specific situations (for example, utilising information about what food is good and tasty, and what is poisonous and induces illness)
• the ability to develop organisational structures at an early age and to learn to stay in their place within that system (usually) in order to benefit the group as a whole.
The rat is said to have won its position in the Chinese zodiac through its creativity, rather than through great physical or intellectual skill. In one story the Chinese tell, Rat found a way to compete and win the Jade Emperor’s race through guile. He succeeded in outwitting his friend Cat to enter the race, and during the race he rode on the back of Ox, considered the most tolerant, courageous and hardworking of all animals. Just when the finishing line was approaching, Rat leapt over Ox’s head to take first position. By working smarter, not harder, Rat was able to stay ahead of the pack. The image of this race between animals of different sizes and strengths is humorous. But the story may offer a lesson to individuals or organisations facing economic or political challenges. Creative thinking allowed Rat to focus on and achieve his goal. This is the approach that will help us navigate the challenges of the future.
Innovation is no longer a luxury but rather a necessity. The visionaries understand they have no choice but to be creative and innovate. Perhaps we should start to believe in our ability to make our own luck or, more accurately, to create our own opportunities through intentionally creative decision making. It’s a lesson that can be well learned from the rat!
Innovation is a necessity, not a luxury
The necessity of human and organisational ingenuity is undisputed. Yet it’s not just about sustaining economic growth and supporting the capitalist system for its own sake. There are a myriad important life-changing decisions we can make and actions we can take. All around us there are problems of local, national and international importance — from saving the environment to bringing peace to Afghanistan to ending the scourge of poverty — that are begging for creative solutions. We will be able to draw the solutions that are needed only from individuals and communities committed to the creative thinking process.
Difficult economic times or tough market conditions usually dictate that areas perceived as non-essential ‘extras’ are the first to go. The individual will forgo the desire to develop in creative ways and simply do the job that brings in the cash. Organisations will slash their discretionary spending to focus on the areas that are considered to be core to their business. In times like these, innovation is considered to be the icing on the cake — a luxury you can afford to support only in times of plenty, when you are seeking ways to get a step ahead of the rest. But the pace of life has changed so much that innovation is actually now a core survival skill — a necessity, not a luxury.
In order simply to stay up with the rest, to avoid being culled by the latest cost-cutting measure, people at all levels need to be able to think and act creatively, and organisations need to live and breathe innovation. In an evolutionary twist, new adaptations must now emerge, not over thousands of years or at least generations, as they once did, but many times in a lifetime. We must be thinking ahead and moving ahead in cleverer and nimbler ways in order to save ourselves from obsolescence.
Take, for example, the trend towards downsizing when times are tough. Sometimes known as ‘rightsizing’ (after organisations have become overconfident and employed beyond their real needs), the general idea is to take dramatic measures to reduce an ‘overweight’ or even ‘obese’ organisation to a healthy and sustainable size. Rather than looking at ways to modify diet and exercise, and to become fitter and more capable through the process (to sustain the metaphor) most organisations will panic and resort to dramatic surgery to slice off the perceived ‘excess fat’. However, further down the track the real problems will still be there and are likely to re-emerge like a cancerous growth, with potentially more dangerous consequences. This is quite apart from the fact that the ‘amputated body parts’ — the people treated as unwelcome surplus — and the remaining body itself will experience deep pain and trauma.
Any team or organisation that needs to ‘take off some weight’ or ‘cut the fat’ must ensure it doesn’t remove vital limbs that may hold major arteries supporting healthy organisational functioning. It is essential to determine where creative changes can be made and costs can be trimmed without having to resort to major surgical amputation.
Creative thinking and innovation are no longer buzz words for the more adventurous, but are instead recognised as skills and approaches that are fundamental to any proactive organisation strategy. Innovation can be the essential survival tool that enables positive progress. If you fail to innovate, or simply make a token gesture towards it rather than ensuring it is integral to daily functioning, the consequences will soon become clear. All individuals and organisations will need to make sure that innovation is used to build the future and that this is communicated clearly.
We have discovered that in times like these maintaining the status quo — simply working the treadmill with no real goals — is no longer enough. Survival means staying ahead of the pack, no matter what the external pressures. No excuses. Proactive team innovation must be seen as a core competency. What was acceptable last year may not even get you to the start line this year. Before you know it, the lead your organisation may once have enjoyed is as useful as a typing pool in an age of computers. Western Union, for example, started off in the 1800s transferring money on horseback from city to city, but they have managed to constantly adapt to rapidly changing conditions. For more than 100 years they have built on their strengths through drastically adapting the products and services they offer, while maintaining their core values. It is creative thinking that has enabled them to thrive through all the challenges.
‘Trimming the fat’ is a proactive process that will continue to be necessary to keep the organisation lean and ready for high performance at all times. But sudden reactive cuts, triggered by the fear of a recession or a one-off crisis, only frighten employees, adding to the negative media fear frenzy, and leading to even lower motivation levels and paralysis. How can employees come to work each day ready to give their best when they are uncertain what will become of their jobs or whether their employment conditions will change?
Innovate, don’t amputate
Creativity must be fostered as an essential work skill in our contemporary competitive environment. According to brand designer Bruce Haddon, consumers quickly tire of yesterday’s innovations, and because rapid change environments constantly demand new ideas, successful organisations must come up with better ideas before their competitors.
A six-star, $1000+ per night hotel company we have worked with shared with us how for years they had enjoyed great success. Without much extra sales and marketing effort, guests simply continued coming through their door. But although they benefited from high occupancy rates and fees, no-one stopped to ask what had made them so successful. It took a crisis and a sudden drastic reduction in business for them to start asking the important questions and to recognise how important it was to continue to innovate.
Another company we worked with recently was also stuck with a major problem. This leading machine lubricant producer had a great new product, but its customers weren’t using it properly, with detrimental results. It was really a user rather than a product problem, but customers would inevitably blame the product. The best client machines were becoming damaged and breaking down because the users failed to replace the lubricant often enough. As the lubricant aged the machines wore down, and the lubricant company’s reputation was in danger of becoming permanently tarnished. Through our ‘creative collaboration’ team workshop process we encouraged the project team to look for creative solutions. Within a few hours the team came up with a new design for the product that effectively eliminated the user problem. As we took them through the creative thinking process we discovered that the principle of toothbrushes changing colour when they became old could be applied to these machines. The solution was to have the lubricant change colour, or even smell, when it needed to be replaced. The team had produced an outstanding practical solution to a problem that had been very costly both financially and in terms of reputation.
In yet another simple example, an airline saved hundreds of thousands of dollars when their flight attendant team discovered how much caviar was being wasted in first class. They simply designed a new process that reduced this unnecessary waste but still kept the passengers happy.
Alan Nobel, of Google Australia, believes that Google’s success can be attributed to innovation. ‘Innovation should just be there, it’s like the air you breathe — you innovate to survive, there’s nothing to systematize, it’s just what you do.’ It takes a great vision, a clear and focused company culture, and empowering leadership to reach Google’s level of success, but you have to start somewhere. You can’t simply bet on ‘hope’ and ‘luck’ to stay ahead.2
The people most likely to have creative ideas are those at the coalface with direct customer contact, as they are the first to recognise what is needed. But those few companies that understand the need for creative development usually start the implementation process from the top levels. At this level, if there is no specific practical focus, creative development can end up as a ‘groupthink’ exercise in which established ideas are simply reinforced. This process rarely reflects what is really going on in the organisation or reaches the whole organisation.
Trying to be ‘better’, ‘faster’ and ‘cheaper’ without making clear links to the creative process can also be counterproductive or even destructive.3 NASA found this out the hard way during the ill-fated shuttle disaster of February 2003. The left wing of the shuttle was damaged by debris that had broken off the shuttle on take-off, tearing a hole in the body of the spacecraft. The shuttle exploded when it re-entered the atmosphere. Even though the problem had already been identified by the NASA space team, debris having damaged the shuttle only two launches previously, NASA failed to resolve the issue.4 In this case, the pressure to keep the space program on track without taking the time to really analyse the problem from all angles led to disaster.
In the introduction we described the destruction of our favourite beach community on the island of Bali. Over a period of time we saw it slowly die, accelerated in the end by a terrorist bombing. The stakeholders in Jimbaran village did not deliberately set out to destroy it, yet it was nonetheless devastated over time. But that is not the end of the story, for the community survives and the people live on. One response was that the local Hindu Balinese priests conducted a major cleansing ceremony. Searching for explanations, they looked at the deeper issues, recognising that the Balinese people as a whole had been seeking short-term gains at the expense of long-term principles.
We have set out to make strong cases for the prosecution of potential creativity murderers, but we know that no-one deliberately sets out to destroy creativity, and our survey suggests the crime scenes are evenly spread across most organisation areas, with no clear single suspect. So moving forward may mean laying down the hatchets, and looking for ways to rescue and reform rather than take revenge. And it may mean looking deep within ourselves to see what principles we may have lost sight of in our race to the future.
We will finish this first section with a story from another part of Indonesia, another beautiful but very remote island beach not yet taken over by tourists. Here the hotel general manager had created a lovely internal environment for his guests, but there were problems with random attacks and thefts from locals in the nearby villages. The staff had to warn guests that they ventured up the beach at their own risk, which must have disconcerted many. People were talking, and negative reports on the travel website TripAdvisor were also discouraging tourists from coming, which meant the marketing department was losing its spin. People who did dare to venture out to the beach too often came back minus their cameras, pale despite the tans they had worked hard to build up that morning, the fear of having been robbed in plain daylight clearly etched on their faces.
But the GM was creative. He knew that the thieves who preyed on tourists had their own personal needs: they needed to have enough to live on and to feed their families. (It must be hard to watch a tourist who casually carries around a camera worth three years’ salary while your children go without food.) Understandably the local people were upset that a foreign owner could plonk a hotel in their village and take all the profit elsewhere. They had lost their power and their pride, and now the gap between the haves and have-nots was excruciatingly clear. So some formerly unoffending, peaceful villagers turned to crime. Of course not many of the tourists knew or understood this context — most saw only criminals who ambushed and robbed helpless tourists as soon as they stepped out of the resort.
The manager knew he had to address the real problem, and he decided he could not do this by simply increasing security as other GMs might have done. Instead he met with the villagers to find out what their specific needs were. When he understood their situation better, he came up with what may in hindsight sound like a simple solution (but that’s often creativity for you!): to put the same men who had been robbing the tourists in charge of security for the beach, paying them to protect the guests instead of isolating and disempowering them as had been done previously. This gave them a decent income and at the same time gave them back their sense of pride. By making these people feel valued and giving them a purpose, the problem was solved. The once-hostile villagers became a part of the solution, and almost overnight the signs were pulled down and the hotel, its guests and the villagers coexisted in harmony. ‘Whenever you can, bury the hatchet with an enemy,’ advise Robert Green and Joost Elfers in The 48 Laws of Power,5 ‘and make a point of putting him in your service.’ Abraham Lincoln also famously said, ‘The best way to destroy an enemy … is to make them your friend’.
When you get to the heart of the matter and identify the deeper needs and drives, and when you look for solutions from which everyone can benefit, you can effectively deal with negative influences without resorting to harsh measures and creating enmity. The creativity killers can be dealt with in the same way. With the murderers isolated or reformed, and with the weapons identified and laid aside, people are free to welcome creativity back into their lives and organisations.