Thoughts on Creative Leadership

We are all born with the capacity to think creatively, but somewhere along the line it becomes suppressed by parents, teachers, employers, friends or even ourselves because it is not something that is freely supported by our families, schools, employees, religions or cultures, so we start hiding it and end up in systems that are designed to teach us only what to think and never how to think.

We start school filled with wonder, excitement and slowly get conditioned into following what they deem as the only or the only correct path in our environments, in our lives and coming up with only one answer. We conform to this way of thinking so we can fit in and think the same as everybody else and end up exactly the same as everybody else. 

Ronald Reagan in his speech A time for choosing said that “… there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down”. I mostly agree with that. I say mostly because I don’t want you to abandon everything you’ve learned or experienced so far, thinking it’s wrong. There are many paths of creative thinking and you don’t have to abandon everything to suddenly pursue another one.

My friend, International Creativity Consultant and author of the book Broken Crayons: Break Your Crayons and Draw Outside the Lines, Robert Alan Black, PhD explains that creativity is not all about thinking outside the box; it’s about thinking there’s more to the box that you already have.

Maybe your box is bigger, or smaller, maybe you can connect another box to it, add a different colour or maybe even discard the box completely and think you’re more of a Hula-Hoop person or a loose rope, a string, a streamer. You have the potential to be more.

The creative leader will work with people, not through them. The creative leader allows for divergent thinking to all 4 dimensions of space and will find the different thinking paths of value.

They’ll encourage asking questions and work with the thinkers to converge upwards.

Steven Savage in his book The Power Of Creative Paths: Explore Creativity, Escape Limits outlines different creative paths and as a Creative Leader knowing which paths you and your team are on can make sure that even if you diverge left or right, you’ll still be able to lead them, converge them to moving up and get the results.

The website INC.com recently commented on the future of required job skills by the year 2020.

The website goes on to acknowledge the jump of Creativity from the number 10 position to position number 3. However, it seems to me that they’ve missed a small detail here. Creative thinking isn’t simply one thing, it’s more than just a checkmark in a box and it encompasses a wide range of skills. Skills such as those identified in this list as:

1. Complex Problem Solving,

2. Critical/Evaluative Thinking,

4. People Management,

5. Coordinating with Others,

7. Judgment and Decision Making,

9. Negotiation

10. Cognitive Flexibility.

These are all facets of Creativity and Creative Thinking. So, by that simple understanding you can see that Creativity isn’t the third most valued or required skill, it’s number one. The Creative leader understands this and uses it as an advantage.

While traditional, old-school educational systems don’t allow for much in the way of creative thinking the fact is that if creativity and creative thinking isn’t stimulated in any culture or corporate structure it will atrophy just like any muscle.

The problem is that creative thinking and stimulating the ability of how to think is a process that involves the thinker, the trainer and the leader; while teaching you what to think can be boiled down to a few charts and graphs.

As a leader your focus is on getting to the end result. The leader’s focus is on the vision, the future goal, while the manager, the supervisor or simply the boss has to focus on the mission and accomplishing tasks.

In their book of Why Great Leaders Are Catalysts Du Toit & Van Dyk outlined that a manager concentrates on the details while a leader concentrates on change. The Creative Leader understands both and chooses to do away with an either/or mentality.

I can hear the age-old cry already: If everybody starts thinking creatively then it will cause too much change and it’ll be chaos.

Change does not automatically mean that things will fall apart. Creativity is about change. It’s the ability to adapt, to think more, be more fluent with generating ideas, the ability to make new connections and to see the ordinary and mundane in a new light and that’s why creative leadership in every organization is monumentally important.

A corporate structure that doesn’t allow for creativity and individuality will become stagnant.

The creative leader allows and appreciates individuality and knows how to reach their audience, understands how they think and is able to utilize a host of creative thinking tools and techniques to come up with more solutions than there are problems.

The creative leader also knows that people are still people and people are imperfect, illogical and perhaps, at times, overly emotional creatures of habit, constantly looking for pattern. We handle situations mostly based from previous experience. We tend to fall into a pattern and stop engaging in some basic evaluative thinking. We stop asking questions, we stop improving ourselves by exploring different avenues of thought and we limit ourselves by being critical about anything that falls outside of our realm of experience.

There’s an unfortunate limitation in most languages when it comes to the word failure. It doesn’t allow for any interpretation other than the negative and we fail more than we succeed. There’s no word that encapsulates the idea that “Yes, we failed but it was a good try, we learned a lot and we’ll try again.” Progress is ultimately built on doing things, continuously trying, learning and growing even if it doesn’t work out every time. Human history is filled with mistakes and it’s difficult to keep going and generate new ideas when there is negativity and judgment.

Critical thinking has become a staple in classrooms and organizations where we constantly judge, critique and knock down new ideas and the people who had them. Rather than critical the Creative Leader needs to strive for an evaluative approach. Evaluate what’s working, what’s not working, and keep asking questions. You cannot be creative and judge at the same time.

Consider the story of elephants being conditioned not to break free from captivity by tying them up with a piece of rope when they are very young. The young elephant will struggle in vain trying to break free and ultimately give up and give in. The elephant grows older and stronger but is so conditioned to thinking that it can’t break free that it’ll never try. The elephant will live the rest of its life tied to that rope, thinking it can’t break free.

This is an example of never thinking or trying anything more because we’ve been conditioned by academic, cultural or corporate environments that never encourages Lateral Thinking, thinking past our past experiences.

The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore takes on a different approach to conditioning elephants through positive reinforcement and never through punishment.

Both cases are examples of Lateral and Vertical thinking. The first case is an example of vertical thinking described by Edward de Bono in his book Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step as the equivalent of digging a hole, coming up with nothing then digging the same hole deeper and still ending up with nothing. You keep doing the same thing even when it doesn’t work because that’s what you know, that’s what your past experience has conditioned you to do.

The second case however is an example of Lateral Thinking. De Bono explains it as digging a hole, coming up with nothing then digging a new hole using different equipment, using different techniques and that leads to success.

Irish playwright Samuel Beckett is quoted as saying "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." Creative thinking tools and techniques allows us to fail, to learn, to try again and to fail better.

Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken ends with the speaker choosing the road less traveled and I encourage you to do the same and you’ll see that for you too, it’ll make all the difference.