Asking Questions to Define Creative Problems

SS Ideal X, the first container ship designed by Malcom McLean

Questions help frame the creative problem
For centuries, ship designers were endlessly looking for ways to design ships so as to reduce shipping costs.  Designers focused on building larger, more efficient ships that could ship more cargo with less labor and fuel costs.  The shipping industry changed gradually over hundreds of years but the basic idea was the same – larger ships with aquadynamic hulls and fuel efficient engines.  However, it wasn’t until 1955 when Malcom McLean asked the right questions that the shipping industry was revolutionized.  The answer was the modern container ship.

Rather than asking the age-old question of “how to design a more efficient ship”, McLean asked the more important question, “how to decrease shipping loading time?”  Ship builders had been focusing on reducing the costs in transit, and ignored the largest of all costs – the lengthy loading and unloading time during which the cargo ship was largely idle.

Rather than taking several days to load large ship using expensive longshoreman labor, ships could be loaded in a matter of hours using automated cranes and other mechanical devices. McLean designed a system using large containers that were never opened in transit between shipper and consignee and that were transferable on an intermodal basis, among trucks, ships and railroad cars.

McLean worked with engineer Keith Tantlinger to develop the modern intermodal container that was designed to be efficiently be loaded onto ships and held securely on long sea voyages.  On April 26, 1956, when American trucking entrepreneur McLean put 58 containers aboard a refitted tanker ship, the SS Ideal X (picture above), and sailed them from Newark to Houston.

The modern container ship is often as large as 1540 feet in length and 200 feet wide – limited only by the depth of the Straits of Malacca, one of the busiest shipping lanes.  Containerization has increased the efficiency of moving traditional break-bulk cargoes significantly, reducing shipping time by 84% and costs by 35%.

Modern Container Ships in San Francisco

 

Creative Leadership: Strategic Thinking for Creative Leaders

While there are many skills that an effective creative leader must have, one of the most important skills is strategic thinking.  A creative leader is one that can generate and implement both an effective strategy (culminating the first three creativity steps) and effective solution (culminating in the last four creativity steps).  Creative leadership involves effective skills with visionary thinking, strategic thinking, and ideational thinking (creative leaders are good at generating many ideas).  This essay is explores what constitutes an effective strategy, namely the value of a particular strategy.

Strategy Matrix

Strategies can be grouped into four categories based on the potential value of a strategy (“Strategic Value”) and its respective difficulty of implementation (“Implementation Difficulty”).  To start this discussion on strategies, we will start by comparing and contrasting the four categories.

While both Critical and Cumulative strategies have high-strategic value, Critical strategies usually have the highest payoff of all strategies, but are more difficult to implement and, as a result, typically foreclose one or more alternative strategies.  In contrast, Cumulative strategies have good payoffs, but are easier to implement, and generally speaking, do not foreclose other opportunities.  Cumulative strategies often work in combination with other strategies, and thus, have an additive impact when aggregated.  Cumulative strategies have less risk and can pursue so long as they make sense on a cost-benefit basis and profitable Critical strategies have been exhausted.

However, the matrix above isn’t really drawn to scale as Critical strategies can sometimes have many times (if not 1000X) the potential impact (and risk) as Cumulative strategies.   Even within each quadrant, there can be great variations in terms of difficulty of implementation and strategic value so nuanced analysis and rank-ordering is usually a good idea, both across and within quadrants.

Critical, Quagmire, and Disaster strategies are all marked by high Implementation Difficulty.  However, a Critical strategy, if implemented effectively, has high Strategic Value.  What makes a Quagmire so bad is that it has high Implementation Difficulty but low strategic value, even if implemented successfully.  The third alternative – Disaster – is not an initial strategy, but rather the actual result when a Critical strategy fails or is implemented poorly.

Both Cumulative and Distraction strategies are easy to implement and tend to be “additive” in nature with each successfully executed strategy bringing the organizational closer to desired results.  This is because easy-to-implement solutions typically do not foreclose the pursuit of other strategies (pursued sequentially or simultaneously).  Though Distraction strategies may have some value, they are labeled Distractions as they divert attention from Cumulative and Critical strategies (if a Distraction strategy had significant strategic value if would be Cumulative).

Having discussed the four quadrants of strategy, this posting will now explore some particular strategies associated with high-strategic value.

High-Strategic Value Strategies

People

Recruiting and hiring the best people is usually a Critical strategy (because it forecloses the opportunity to hire someone else), though some hires have greater potential to impact an organization than others.  For instance, hiring a new CEO will likely be a Board of Directors most Critical strategy of the year; hiring additional members of the leadership team might still be a Critical strategy.  Hiring a new payroll manager, however, at best is more of a Cumulative strategy as the potential payoff of such strategy is not nearly as high.

One common mistake of organizations is that often over-emphasis resume or technical skills over interpersonal skills, character, and general likeability.  An organization will never be great if employees don’t like the other employees that work there.

In addition to hiring the best people, organizations should be committed to developing their people (through mentoring, training, education, delegation of good assignment, development plans, etc.), doubly so in respect to their current and future leaders and triply so in regards to a few hand-selected Critical leaders.

Sometimes overlooked, though equally important to hiring the best, is actually firing the worst performers in an organization.  Too often leaders put off having honest and frank conversations with a few “bad egg” individuals.  While people should be given some chance to correct behavior, they need not be given many chances.  You cannot overestimate the damage one individual can do to an organization.  Even if they aren’t causing major problems, they are taking a space that could be filled by a problem-free contributor or even a star performer.

By identifying and progressively moving the weakest performers out the organization, the organization strengthens its key assets – its people.  Incidentally, this is why governments are totally inefficient, instead of firing people that should be fired, they give them jobs and pensions.

While the following statements border on flippancy, Mitt Romney’s quote is actually part of the reason he is an effective executive leader:  “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me … You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say, I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.”

Similarly, successful leader Donald Trump’s key catch phrase is appropriately, “you’re fired!”  While good leaders wield their power to fire with tact, judgment, patience, and mercy, they still must do it – that is why they are the leader.  However, the best course is to hire very carefully (as a Critical strategy) and slowly so as to prevent the need for firing.

Resources

Critical or Cumulative strategies usually involve obtaining, preserving, and deploying resources effectively.  Obtaining additional resources is usually an important strategy, which is why college president and politicians must be excellent fund-raisers.  In addition, resources must be obtained regardless of whether they come from within (budget and head count allocations) or without (grants, revenue, contributions) the organization.  The failure to obtain resources can lead to disaster or stagnation within an organization or department.

Likewise, obtaining extra resources, if deployed effectively, can generate “momentum” as discussed below.  In addition, there are situations where acquiring a specific resource at a specific time is of the utmost strategic importance to execution of particular strategy.  For instance, the selection of Vice-President Candidate (a resource) is often the single most important strategy decision in a presidential election because of their ability to sway (for or against) certain voting blocs and thereby win (or lose) certain states.

As Benjamin Franklin would say, “a penny saved is a penny earned.”  Thus, conserving resources is a high pay-off strategy.  One way to conserve resources is by carefully cutting any unnecessary or unhelpful costs.  Another way to indirectly cut costs is by a constant commitment to process improvement.  Process improvement allows organizations to increase their output while decreasing their inputs, thus conserving resources.  As a caveat, in some organizations, being too efficient with your budget actually leads to departmental budget cuts, so you have to be careful if you are department head.

Besides physical resources (people, buildings, computers), there are also intangible resources – time, energy, commitments, morale, etc.   An effective strategy seeks to increase and conserve these types of intangible resources just the same as tangible resources.

Likewise, sometimes the worst “leaks” in an organization is psychic drain due to certain aggravating factors (annoying policies, employees, or the pursuit of Quagmire or Distraction strategies) that need to be alleviated.

Similarly, an effective strategy is always to deploy resources more effectively.  Similar to process improvement, by deploying resources well you can increase output while decreasing inputs.  Take a look at my strategic delegation posting for advice on how to do this more effectively.

If you employ all these strategies regarding obtaining, conserving, and deploying resources effectively, you will (hopefully) find that your organization sudden has a surplus of resources. What then?  Use them on Critical and Cumulative strategies of course!

In fact, it is by careful use of your resources you can pursue multiple strategies simultaneously (not all of them can be Critical however).  In particular, you should deploy them on strategies that will generate momentum throughout the organization, including securing key wins, boosting morale, eliminating bottlenecks or drains, improve relationships with key stakeholders, developing leaders and staff, or generating competitive advantage, etc.

Relationships

Critical or Cumulative strategies often involve improving relationships with key stakeholders, both internal and external.  In addition, even strategies that involve ideas, technology, or other things have important people considerations.  Thus, a key strategy is to identify and to improve relationships with key stakeholders.  These could include key internal leaders, employees, as well as external customers, supporters, and even detractors.   While sometimes you have a specific position that you are advocating, developing relationships ahead-of-time is important practice that will help ensure that you have “the votes”, exactly when you need them.

To accomplish this, an effective strategy is to take the time to meet with and communicate with key stakeholders.  In particular, is wise to spend a lot of time listening (rather than talking) in order to learn about the preferences and interests of the stakeholders.  The more you know about the key stakeholders, the better you can adapt your potential strategy – whatever it be – to the context.  In addition, supporting the (non-controversial) projects and interests of key stakeholders helps build the “goodwill” bank account and often ensures that they will support your (non-controversial) measures in the future as well.

Events & Incidents & Opportunities

Critical or Cumulative strategies often involve handling events, incidents, and opportunities – planned and unplanned – is an important strategy and leadership task.  To draw an unfortunate analogy, the most effective leaders act *somewhat* like politicians during a campaign season – they monitor current events, respond to incidents, seize opportunities, and use social events to move their organizations and their campaigns forward with ruthless efficiency.

For instance, think about Joe Paterno’s failure to manage incidents (allegations of abuse on his staff) decimated much that he accomplished.  In contrast, the textbook example of crisis management is Johnson and Johnson’s management of the cyanide Tylenol incident in the 1980s.  This is where J&J was willing to pull the contaminated Tylenol from the shelf costing some short-term financial pain, though the long-term benefit to its brand were enormous.

Equally important to crisis management, however, is a leader’s ability to spot and capitalize (and create) opportunities.  If executed well, a leader can turn an opportunity in a small or large victory, which generates a leader’s most important (and fickle) resource – organizational momentum.  Anyone who has played on a team that was “on fire” knows the power of momentum.  Likewise, anyone who has spent time on a losing team or organization knows that negative momentum can be a black hole whose gravity is difficult to escape.

Technology

In the past, organizations could have strategies that did not depend on technology.  Now days, it is hard to imagine any strategy that did not depend on technology in at least in some fashion.  In some cases like tech companies or web companies, the technology is the strategy.  For most industries, technology merely supports or enables the strategy.  In any case, effective strategies will always involve some use of technology.

Choosing the Right Strategy

Of all the Critical strategies, the one with the highest payoff is choosing the right strategy.  While organizational devote some time to strategic planning, they may not necessarily devote the right time, people, and resources needed to determine a break-through strategy.

Very often, choosing traditional strategies (increasing product quality, reducing costs, driving revenue) are either Quagmire or Distraction strategies.  In contrast, the strategies chosen by creative leaders like Steve Jobs (integrate music hardware, software, and music distribution), have enormous payoff if they succeed.

Whatever strategy you choose, it should be one that seeks to develop sustainable competitive advantages throughout your organization and industry.  While it depends on your exact organization and industry, competitive advantage can include key technological advances or initiatives, world-class customer service, or expertise.  In addition, developing core competencies such as marketing and product management, process improvement, innovation, or sales can be distinct competitive advantages that propel your organization ahead of the competition.

Strategy & Creative Leadership

Where a creative leader often excels (when compared to a traditional, non-creative leader) is developing an effective, sometimes unique, often innovative strategy in achieving a desired objective.  In addition, a creative leader will often have a vision that is either clearer or more expansive than traditional leaders.

A perfect example of this compares the late Steve Jobs of Apple with the leader of Sony during the same time.  Sony was dominant player in the personal CD player and MP3 player market such that it could have easily have leveraged its strong position into new, more compelling consumer products.  Instead, Sony pursued a traditional strategy of incremental improvements and product line extensions, maximizing current revenues but missing the opportunity to disrupt and dominant the consumer music market.

In contrast, Steve Jobs had a vision much more expansive than mere revenue generation (though he did manage to generate tractor-trailer loads of cash) – revolutionizing consumer music hardware, software, and distribution, all at the same time.  His strategy was revolutionary (not incremental) and involved the integration of music hardware, software, and distribution into one seamless, consumer-friendly system.  The iPod, iTunes & Apple store represent the brilliant solution that executed the brilliant strategy that Steve Jobs developed.

Strategy versus Solution

Generally speaking, “strategy” is the culmination of the first three steps – diagnostic, visionary, and strategic thinking and results in  the asking of the right question.  From the example above, Sony’s leader implicitly asked, “how might we extend our product line and competencies to maximum revenue and market share?”  In contrast, Steve Jobs might have asked, “how might we revolutionize the music industry by integrating consumer music hardware, software, and distribution paired with elegant design?” A revolutionary strategic question gets revolutionary solutions.  Consistently pursue the wrong question and your organization is toast even before it starts.

The “solution” is the culmination of next four steps of the creativity cycle – ideational, evaluative, contextual, and tactical thinking – and it is the answer that is implemented in response to the strategic question.

Generally speaking, the impact of a solution is largely determined by the importance of the strategic question.  For instance, what if Edison had asked, “how might I improve gas lamps” instead of “how might create the first commercially feasible electric light source?”  Edison strategy was revolutionary, and so was the result.  Thus, what really separates creative leaders from most other leaders is that creative leaders ask questions that tend to be revolutionary (re-ordering and disrupting the status quo) rather than incremental (optimizing the status quo).

Traditional Leaders versus Creative Leaders

Like traditional leaders (most CEOs), creative leaders must develop and execution good solutions to implement their strategies effectively.  However, creative leaders tend to pursue revolutionary strategies (that reinvent the system) rather than the incremental strategies (that improve the existing system). In contrast, there are near countless CEOs that follow traditional business wisdom (incremental changes), implementing effective solutions, but never generate an innovative or disruptive strategy in their lives.  It is a sad truth that organizations that are led by traditional leaders are often (though not always) doomed to “middle of the pack” status.

Future creative leaders have developed the rare ability to generate an innovative strategy, but may need to work on their leadership and execution skills before they can develop into a creative leader.  Future creative leaders can develop into creative leaders if they are mentored and gain the necessary experiences and leadership skills that enable the effective implementation of a solution.  Unfortunately, however, many future creative leaders fail to blossom into creative leaders because they often lack one or more essential skills – like self-discipline, social and political skills, or judgment that blends both vision and practicality.

Finally, there are some leaders who neither develop good strategies nor execute solutions well.  These individuals must either improve quickly or find a new job, preferably not as a leader.

Developing into a Creative Leader

Creative leaders will not always outperform traditional leaders from the start, though over time creative leaders tend to prevail.   This is because innovative strategies are harder to implement, and thus, require a mature leader who has honed his leadership skills over many years.   For example, early on, Microsoft lead by a more traditional Bill Gates (who effectively executed solutions and strategies that were hardly innovative) ruthlessly crushed the more innovative Apple and Steve Jobs.  However, after Steve Jobs developed over the years (i.e, grew into a true creative leader), Apple crushed Microsoft (and virtually every other company) over the past 15 years or so.

There are two paths towards becoming a creative leader.  The first path involves first mastering leadership, but then learning to develop increasing daring and innovative strategies.  For instance, a strong traditional leader (like a Mitt Romney) could work with his team to ask the right questions, and work towards becoming a creative leader.

However, the sad truth is that most traditional leaders tend to remain “stuck” in their mental paradigms.  Few traditional leaders develop out of more traditional, white-bread backgrounds.  This is because traditional leaders have a strong propensity for working within existing structures (hence their effectiveness as a leader).  If measured on the Kirton Adaptation-Innovative (KAI) scale, traditional leaders would have a strong preference for adaption (working within existing structures).  In contrast, creative leaders tend to work outside the status quo (innovation).

Just because most traditional leaders don’t make the leap to become a creative leader, it does not mean that can’t.  They just need some training in creative problem solving (search CPSI on google) that will help launch them into a new life a creative leader.  In addition, a traditional leader might pair with a more innovative (as measured on KAI) individual to find success as a creative leader.

Most creative leaders develop out the second path – starting as a future creative leader and eventually becoming creative leaders.  A common characteristic of great creative leaders is that they do not conform to conventions and thus take much longer to mature and develop than traditional leaders.  Eccentricity has it down-sides and takes creative leaders a long time to jettison (or sufficiently reduce) their socially unproductive behaviors while still keeping their visions and strategies that are laced with creative gold.  In addition, future creative leaders often need to develop self-discipline organizational skills before they become develop truly effective creative leadership.

Besides learning to “hold back” their non-conformity a few notches, most future creative leaders need to spend years polishing their traditional leadership skills, especially diagnostic, evaluative, contextual, and tactical thinking.  These are the skills (often possessed in abundance by traditional leaders) that are necessary to get solutions implemented.  Future creative leaders tend to be possess inherent or latent strengths in regards to visionary, strategic, and ideational thinking (often lacked by traditional leaders) – the skills necessary to formulate brilliant strategies.

Overtime, future creative leaders can overcome their personal and leadership weaknesses and develop into great creative leaders.  As a warning, however, failure to overcome these weaknesses will lead to perpetual ineffectiveness.  In the recent political campaign, case in point is Newt Gingrich.  While Newt was arguably a brilliant policy maker and a man with some potential to innovate and disrupt society (hopefully in a positive way), his personal baggage – a lack of self-discipline, grandiosity, arrogance, inability to manage, and personal character flaws – led his campaign to crash and burn when faced with a more disciplined traditional leader (Mitt Romney).  However, if a future creative leader will persist in developing, gaining experience, and polishing his strengths and overcoming weaknesses, watch out!

Book Review: Creative Thinkering by Michael Michalko

Introduction

 For a book review, I reviewed Creative Thinkering by Michael Michalko, who also authored Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, and Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques.  Creative Thinkering is divided into two parts:  Creative Thinking and Creative Thinker.  The first part covers the brain’s tendency to self-organize diverse perceptions into recognizable patterns, creating new ideas by blending concepts; looking at problems from different perspectives; and prompting ideas using different stimuli.  The second part covers aspects of creativity that are personal to individuals, including the power of intention; the linkage between speech, belief, and actions; and the importance of taking chances.

Summary of Content

The book starts with a proposition common to most creativity books, that as children we were all creative and that this creativity diminishes over time.  The primary source of this decrease in creativity over time is formal education, overly focused on answers deemed “correct” by history, analytical ability, or arbitrary authority figures at the expense of generating and exploring alternatives:

We were not taught how to think; we were taught to reproduce what past thinkers thought.  When confronted with a problem, we were taught to analytically selected the most promising approach based on history, excluding all other approaches, and then to work logically in a carefully defined direction towards a solution.  (p. 3-4).

The problem with education is that it wires into our brains “thinking patterns [that] limit[] our imagination and inventiveness.”  (p. 4).  Michalko explains the brain’s tendency to organize information and perceptions into these thinking patterns:

When information enters the mind, it self-organizes into patterns and ruts much like the hot water on butter.  New information automatically flows into the preformed grooves.  After a while, the channels become so deep it takes only a bit of information to activate an entire channel.  This is the pattern recognition and pattern completion process of the brain.  Even if much of the information is out of the channel, the pattern will be activated.  The mind automatically corrects and completes the information to select and activate a pattern.  (p. 12).

To become more creative, one must find ways to break out of existing mental patterns and structures by adopting certain practices and attributes that facilitate creative thinking.  Thus, “[o]ne of the hallmarks of a creative thinker is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency, and things out of place.”  (p. 5).  Throughout the book, Michalko describes different practices, techniques, and attributes that if adopted, will help people break out of thinking ruts and create novel ideas.

The main idea of the book involves what Michalko describes as “conceptual blending.”  According to Michalko, “[c]reative thinkers form more novel combinations because they routinely conceptually blend objects, concepts, and ideas form two different contexts or categories that logical thinkers conventionally consider separate.”  (p. 19).  Michalko further states that “[i]t is the conceptual blending of dissimilar concepts that leads to original ideas and insights.”  (p. 19).  Michalko explains how this process works:

[W]hen two dissimilar subjects are conceptually blended together in the imagination, new complex patterns are formed that create new ideas.  The two subjects cross-catalyze each other like two chemicals that both must be present in order for a new concept, product, or idea to form.  This strongly resembles the creative process of genetic recombination in nature.  Chromosomes exchange genes to create emergent new beings.  … The new ideas are not only greater than the sum of their parts, but they are different from the sums of their parts. (p. 20).

This conceptual blending idea is one of the dominate themes of the book with much of the book showcasing specific and different ways to employ this practices.  For instance, Michalko describes a process for generating ideas commonly referred to as “forced connections”, stating that you “will find inspiration for marvelous ideas if you look for random subjects to conceptually blend with your challenge.”  (p. 55).  Michalko describes a number of effective ways to generate forced connections – collecting interesting objects, pictures, or articles for use as an “idea drawer”, going into nature or for a walk and talking notes of anything that sticks out or is particularly interesting, or using your imagination to generate your own forced connections.  Another interesting insight was to work on multiple ideas in parallel or simultaneously, allowing ideas regarding one problem to cross-pollinate and impact the other problems.

Michalko has a number of interesting observations about perception.  For instance, he states that “scientists and psychologists have proven that perception is demonstrably an active rather than a passive process; it constructs rather than records reality.”  (p. 82).  Some key insights include that “the perception of the observer depends on the observer’s own assumptions” and “[c]onsciously or unconsciously, we are anchored to our first impressions unless we actively change the way we look at the subject.”  (p. 82, 87).  Michalko then gives several ways to look at things differently – from the perspective of another or from a specific role or viewpoint; look at things from as many perspectives as possible; use metaphors to shift perspectives; pair opposite or paradoxical ideas to gain new insights.

In the second part of the book, Michalko shifts his focus from creative thinking to how creativity applies at the individual level.  Michalko discusses the power of intention, stating that “[y]our brain becomes an extra-ordinary pattern recognition tool when you focus your intention.”  (p. 157).  When we focus our intention on something specific, “[i]ntention has a way of bringing to our awareness only those things that our brains deem important.”  (p. 148).  Thus, by focusing your intention on something, the brain filters out the non-important information and then brings the essential information – often the creative spark or ahah moment – the attention of your conscious mind.

The remaining chapters focus on becoming creative by the words we choose and the way we act.  To be more creative, we should focus our thoughts on what we want rather than what we don’t want.  Similarly, we should speak with the positive language of inclusion – describing things as they are or could be – rather than the negative language of exclusion that describes thing in reference to what they are not or cannot be.  (p. 162).  Michalko ascribes great power to the mind and imagination, stating that “you can synthesize experience, literally creat[ing] it in your imagination.”  (p.186).

Reactions

Creative Thinkering is an interesting blend of creative thinking techniques, puzzles and illustrations, thought experiments, and practical tips to improve creativity.  Similar to Edward De Bono, Michalko applies a practical, anecdotal approach, rather than an academic, research-based approach.   Even so, the result is a book that is entertaining, informative, and engaging and provides several actionable creativity tips.  However, readers looking for a more systematic or comprehensive theory or approach to creativity will be disappointed.

Similar to Edward De Bono, Michalko’s strength is bringing creative thinking, especially creative thinking techniques and concepts to a popular, non-academic audience in digestible, entertaining fashion.  Also similar to Edward De Bono, the weaknesses of his writing is that they tend to lack a unifying framework or theory.  This makes placing his work within the taxonomy of other creative thinking theoretical frameworks difficult as well a veritable dearth of verifying and validity research.

Concluding Summary

The greatest contribution of this book to the field of creativity is in its description of several simple but powerful principles – conceptual blending; perception; intention; linkage between speech, thought, and actions; and the power of the imagination.  Although most of these concepts are covered elsewhere in the creativity field, few books are as entertaining, practical, and immensely readable as Creative Thinkering.

Challenges with Leading Leaders

Very often when one is appointed to a leadership position of progressive responsibility, it doesn’t take long to realize that there is a big difference between leading leaders and leading followers.  As a front-line leader, you interact primarily with the followers you are supposed to lead.  The work you is largely the “technical” or day-to-day work of your organization or department.

As a leader of leaders, however, your primary interaction is with leaders, not followers, who behave very differently than followers.  In addition, as a leader of leaders, your work is largely strategic – coaching, planning, taking strategic actions – not the day-to-day work you were accustomed to do.  In fact, if you are still doing the same exact work as a leader of leaders as you did when you were a front-line leader, then something is wrong (i.e., not delegating properly or you have not developed your leaders and staff).

Similarly, leadership as a front-line leader in certain contexts such as an academic department chair, managing partner of a law firm, or leader in a volunteer organization is akin to leading leaders, not followers.  That is because followers who are highly educated, highly talented, or wealthy have more power and therefore, greater autonomy and independence than ordinary followers.  Volunteers have the greatest power of all as they can always, well, leave the organization whenever they chose, or worse, stay and block your initiatives.

Remarkably, there are few books that make distinctions between leading leaders and followers.  One such book is Leading Leaders: How to Manage Smart, Talented, Rich, and Powerful People by Jeswald Salacuse, which I highly recommend (many of the ideas in this essay are directly from or influenced by this great book).

Along the same lines, the typical leadership genre of military leaders, sports figures, or even CEOs as leadership role models is better suited for leading followers (than leading leaders) because these contexts usually fit within the typical command and control organization paradigm.  In contrast, to learn how to lead leaders, it is best to look for contexts such as shared governance in academic leadership, multi-polar like multinational diplomacy, or with leading peers at roughly the same level like legislative politics or volunteer organizations.

This essay is primarily concerned with understanding the primary differences or challenges experienced in leading leaders or independent followers, leaving it to future essays to describe some strategies and solutions.  As will be described in future essays, the key skill is learning contextual leadership.  Creative leaders must posses strong contextual leadership skills to provide effective creative leadership.

Contextual Leadership

Leading leaders has a clear tie to creative leadership.  There are seven distinct thinking skills (diagnostic, visionary, strategic, ideational, evaluative, contextual, and tactical thinking) involved in the creative process and creative leadership process. Leading leaders requires significant skill as a “contextual” thinker, with supporting strengths in strategic and tactical thinking.   Contextual thinking involves distinct skill sets like political skills; sensitivity to people and environment (i.e., social intelligence); conflict resource, negotiation and mediation skills; and interpersonal skills (i.e., emotional intelligence).

An otherwise strong leader with weak contextual skills will find that their grand visions and plans will often shipwreck on the hard rocks of context each and every time.  This is often why some particularly “visionary” leaders fail – too much vision and too little contextual understanding and sub-par implementation.

Likewise, leaders with strong contextual skills (think of Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney, George H. Bush), may be accused of “flip-flopping” or lacking conviction, but they also get things done by understanding their respective contexts and adapting accordingly.  In addition, they are able to build coalitions out of very diverse followers (like Bush in the first Gulf war) and thereby obtain their objectives whereas their rigid, ideologue counterparts tend to go down in flames.

Leaders who fail to adapt to their context (like George W. Bush and President Obama), are either unable to pass their agenda, or when they do, it makes people mad as their agenda is very unpopular and out-of-touch with the needs and wants of many of their followers (like Obama’s healthcare plan or the unpopular second Iraq war).  In addition, these leaders are perceived as being unilateral, arbitrary, arrogant, divisive, and ultimately, ineffective and unsuccessful as leaders.

A strong understanding of context is particularly important when leading leaders or otherwise powerful or talented individuals.  This is because leaders and talented individuals, unlike average followers, both have individual agendas and the power and ability to assert them vigorously, causing potential contextual landmines you must detect and disarm, or avoid altogether.  Failing to understand the interests of the people that you lead is a key reason for failure as a leader of leaders.

Specific Challenges of Leading Leaders

Newly minted leaders often confuse two key concepts – power and authority.  Authority can be defined as a legitimate right to influence people based on one’s position inside an organization.  Authority is often derived from something larger than itself.  A CEO gets authority from the board of directors, who gets authority from the shareholders that in turn receive authority by virtue of their shareholder status combined with their state law charter (articles of incorporation).

In contrast, power is the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others and may have little to do with authority.  There are at least nine sources of power – position (authority), positive reinforcement (rewards), punishment, charisma (likeability), vision (the “cause”), relationship (trust and history), coaching (personal investment), persuasion, and expertise.

While more authority generally equates with more power, this is not always the case.  Some of the most influential (powerful) leaders ever – Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, Princess Diana – have had little to no formal authority over their followers, yet they had great power (or influence).

In addition, authority (even dictators have some limits to their authority – unless they conquer the free world) is by nature subject to certain formal and informal limits.  Thus, while as CEO, you may hire and fire at will, a series of bad hiring decisions would lead your board of directors to question your leadership ability, leading to reduced power (loss of respect from others) and eventually less authority – they may fire you, or otherwise limit your authority.  Likewise, some leaders might have limited ability to hire and fire in that they can only make recommendations that are approved by others.

Authority-based power also usually includes a certain degree of power to reward or punish.  However, whether authority based power will include a lot or little power to reward/punish will depend on the organization.  For instance, tenured professors and state employees generally have certain protections in place that makes punishing or firing them difficult or impossible, meaning their leaders will have little ability to influence them in at least this respect.

Authority-Based Power is Woefully Inadequate

Leaders often mistakenly assume that people will follow them because of their authority.  And people will – if they feel it is in their interest to do so.  However, when followers or leaders have substantial power, authority-based power is less effective, and thus, they don’t have to follow you.  In addition, high-talent followers or leaders are less impacted by punishments because they have more options and are thus, are less threatened by punishments though they still might be enticed by some rewards.

Some illustrations will help.  As department chair of a higher education department, you are having a problem with an uncooperative faculty member – who defies your authority at every point – refusing to attend meetings, ignores your emails, and openly speaks badly about you to the other faculty members.  Yet you can’t do anything about it – the faculty member (besides being tenured), is the leader in his specific sub-field, and he brings in tons of grant money.  The dean would never approve a termination, let alone a reprimand.

As an assistant pastor in your church, you work with the other leaders in your organization.  They generally support you (at least in theory), until that is … they don’t.  Even though you may have more insight as to what the organization needs to move forward, they may not see it that way.  In fact, as they are volunteers in your organization (as are you), you have no real authority over them whatsoever.  Thus, in effect, your authority by virtue of your position is essential nil.  The only power you have comes from the other sources of power, namely your relationships with them and your ability to persuade and organize the efforts of different volunteers.

The key difference between leading leaders and followers is that leaders possess more power than followers, and thus, are more difficult to lead.  For instance, individual leaders often have their own followers, resources, relationships, expertise, internal and external networks, and so forth.  In fact, sometimes the leaders you will lead will, in fact, have more power than you do.  In addition, leaders also have more options – a large social network, education, money  – and thus can change jobs or find better opportunities elsewhere, which makes them less deferential to your authority.  You can’t afford to lose them, and they know it.

As a result, they are less likely to follow you just because of your authority.  In addition, as they likely also possess expertise and/or charisma themselves, they are less likely to be swayed by compliments, inspiring speeches, and so forth. Further, as they may have many followers of their own, they will not follow you if your recommended course of action will hurt their followers or lessen their personal standing among their followers.

Future essays on this topic will describe the various strategies to employ when leading leaders (or highly talented followers), including the different sources of power, and how to use them in a positive, ethical fashion.

About the Author

As a leader of leaders at church, and a front-line leader at work, I have noticed several things about myself as a creative leader.  I am very strong in regards to my visionary and ideational skills.  I should be good at, but often lack patience with, diagnostic, strategic, and evaluative thinking, as my strong bias towards action causes me to under use my analytical skills.  My weaknesses are in regards to contextual and tactical thinking as a creative leader.  Some improvement in this area comes with time, but I need to devote more study to this area.  As a visionary, I tend to live in my head (it is an interesting place!), not paying enough attention to the world and people around me. Perhaps I should marry a socially savy woman, to help compensate for, and help me improve, this particular weakness.  H2 find a socially savy wife (hopefully that is good at, and actually likes, throwing dinner parties)?

Strategic Delegation – Important skill for creative leaders

After mastering the basics of “how to delegate”, an effective leader will quickly shift his or her focus to the next two questions – what projects do I delegate, and to whom?  If these questions are not asked and answered, the leader will continue to flounder doing too much routine work, micromanaging and delegating ineffectively.  This essay will help answer these two questions, with the help of this nifty chart I created featured below.

Routine Work – Newbies

In any setting, there are really only four categories of work to be done.  The majority of work is the “routine”, day-to-day work of the organization or department.  This type of work is generally not extremely difficult, nor is extremely mission critical, yet it has to get done.

Don’t assume, however, that routine work has to get done – frequently strategic actions involve the elimination of routine work through process improvement, technology, or other means.

Examples of routine work vary greatly according to the organization, but in a law department such as where I work, it might include customer contracts of relatively low value, or reviewing marketing materials or other documents.

Routine work is ideal for inexperienced, younger workers to handle.  If they make a mistake, it will generally not “burn down the building”, so to speak. And there is tons of it – plenty to go around.

And more importantly, it is precisely the type of work that you, as the leader, should not be doing!  If most of your day involves doing routine work, something is wrong.  If you keep doing routine work, you rob your staff of development opportunities and prevent yourself from tackling the important, strategic work you should be engaged in (like developing your staff) and other mission critical objectives.  Getting rid of routine work helps free up your mind, which, once it is de-cluttered, will often identify work that is, in fact, strategic in nature.

In addition, if you are delegating well, you will find that, very often, your staff can do certain routine work much better than you can.  This is one of the more pleasant surprises about delegating well – when your delegate turns in a stellar work product, far better than you could or would have done.

Difficult / Complex  – Niche Players

Some work is hard.  Not that it is so earth-shatteringly important, but it can be difficult, tricky, or complex, but it nonetheless, needs to get to done.  While I am a big fan of eliminating work through a zealous commitment to process improvement (I am very diligent if work has to be done, but unmotivated if I believe that the work could be streamlined or eliminated), there is a lot of work you just can’t get rid of, and thus, someone has to do it.

Work is difficult for many reasons, including that there is a high-dollar amount at risk (high-value contracts), it requires a specific skill set (as in an experienced contract attorney), or involves a number of moving parts.

Difficult work should be sent to “niche players.”  These are persons that have a specific skill set that is well-adapted to handle the particular work, including the right technical skills, knowledge, and experience.  Unfortunately these niche players often have certain limitations such as poor social skills, low motivation, or inadequate skill sets that keep them from developing into “stars”.

While niche players usually don’t reach star status because of their limitations (and therefore handle difficult and important work), they can indeed be trained to handle difficult or specialized work.  For example, a factory worker that could never design a car as an engineer may be capable of being trained to weld a very difficult joint on the assembly line in a highly competent fashion.

A key job of a leader is to train his or her new workers to handle increasingly difficult work.  This training can be “trial by fire” on the job, or could include additional educational training or mentoring.  It can also be achieved by specialization, giving one person on your team that certain type of work until they become experts at it.

Semi-Strategic – Rising Stars

Semi-strategic work is work that is important but not very difficult.  Just as work varies in difficulty, it is also varies in terms of its importance.  Important work could include tasks that help generate new products or services, bring in key clients, recruit key employees, streamline processes, or secure important resources.  Importance also depends on circumstances and timing; work that is unimportant at one point can be become very important at another time.

Work that is important helps organizations move forward is key areas and has a large downstream impact on the organization, such as increasing or conserving organizational resources, improving the composition of your team, or developing certain skills.

In contrast, work that is of little importance tends to have an impact that is either small or isolated.  In other words, doing unimportant work does not really change your organization’s position in any significant way.

Semi-strategic work is great for rising stars.  Rising stars are highly talented, responsible individuals that have great potential, but are currently inexperienced or lacking key competencies that they will eventually develop.  Handling important (but not overly difficult) work helps rising starts grow into stars.  In addition, their responsible, “can do” attitude ensures that the important work gets done in a timely fashion, and thus, moves the organization forward.

Strategic – Stars

The last category of work is both very difficult and very important.  Doing this work and doing it well has the potential to move the organization forward in very significant ways.  However, because the work is very difficult, if it is done poorly, it also has the potential to either hurt the organization significantly or lose much of its intended value.  As the leader, you should strive to work in the strategic quadrant as much as possible, including by developing your rising stars into stars, though some level of monitoring of the difficult work is often wise.

Examples of strategic work are hiring the right person for a key position, developing your future leaders and staff, or completing key organizational initiatives.  Other types of strategic work can include process improvement initiatives (which can eliminate costs and labor and thus increasing organizational resources) or innovative projects that can change a business’ balance sheet nearly overnight.

Strategic work is very often non-urgent work that is hard to complete because of limited resources and time constraints.  Thus, a constant challenge of leaders is to free up their resources from routine work so they can work on semi-strategic or strategic projects. Spending more time on strategic work tends to generate build yields that pay increasing (or even exponential) dividends over time.

Commonly Made Mistakes With Delegation

A common mistake of leaders is that they spend inordinate time on routine or difficult work that they should be delegating to newbies or niche players.  As a result, these leaders have little time to work on strategic or semi-strategic work.  In addition, their propensity towards micro-management means their staff is not growing, leading to unsatisfied workers and missed opportunities.

Another common mistake is that leaders do not take the strategic action of developing their staff.  This takes time, effort, patience, coaching, as well as funds for additional education and training.  Without efforts to develop staff, newbies do not grow into niche players and rising stars never reach star status. As a result, leaders have fewer qualified resources to assist them with strategic, semi-strategic, or difficult work.

A third common mistake is mis-judging the nature of the work.  Sometimes we under or over-estimate the difficult or importance of a project.  When this happens, we usually find that we have delegated the work to the wrong person, and then have to make course corrections – adding additional resources, providing support, or reassigning the work to the right person.

A fourth common mistake is misjudging their staff.  Sometimes leaders think someone might be up to a big challenge, while in reality they are not ready or willing.  Other times they might not have known about a certain trait or weakness of the person, which is revealed by unfortunate circumstances.  When this happens, leaders need to make sure they are still the right person to handle the assigned work, or they may need to conduct some quick damage control.

A final commonly made mistake when delegating is failing to retain responsibility for the delegated work and failing to hold the delegated person responsible.  Delegating work does not relieve you as the leader the responsibility for getting that work done.  While you don’t want to micromanage, you should retain oversight, especially for difficult, semi-strategic, or strategic work.  Likewise, you should hold responsible those to whom you have delegated the work for complete it successfully.

One way to ensure that you don’t make these mistakes is by progressively delegating more difficult and important work to your staff members.  Doing this gives them the chance to grow as well as you the opportunity to understand their strengths and weaknesses, which information you will use when making future decisions regarding delegating additional projects.  This helps you avoid delegating strategic work or giving someone a strategic role in an organization before they have proven themselves.  It is generally unwise to put the health of your organization at risk, though sometimes you should bet on a rising star that is progressing.

Author’s Note:

As a leader that is new to delegating, I am constantly making “little” learning mistakes as I delegated.  For instance, I thought one litigation matter was semi-strategic (and thus brought in a rising star to help), but it turned out it was strategic due to the sensitive nature of the litigation, and thus I should have kept the matter closer to home.

Other times, I have delegated the right task, but I have done so in the wrong way.  It is best to “prepare” people to receive assignments, making them in person or over the phone.  This is particularly true in the volunteer setting where I have limited authority as a leader.

One key to improve your delegation skills is to increase your “contextual” intelligence.  This helps you read people, work, and situations so you can determine to delegate what work, to whom, and how to delegate it.

Learning to delegate has changed my life in a huge way.  Rather than struggling endlessly with keeping my home clean and keeping up my large garden, I have found reasonably-priced “niche players” that do the work 5X faster and better than I could do.

This has left me with more time to do I what I do best, writing about delegation.  In addition, the congregation where I volunteer as an assistant leader has made huge steps forward over the last few months as we have learned the art of “strategic delegation” (with attendance increasing from a 52-week low of 22 to 52-week high of 49 in just two and half months during the summer).

Leadership – More on Delegation

In the month since I wrote the post on delegation (written in April, posted in July), I have made huge progress in learning to delegate.  As a result, I actually have some interesting thoughts on the subject.  In particular, there is a huge difference between merely assigning (or dumping) work on others and actual delegating effectively.

At work, we are adopting a semi-virtual law department model where we hire independent contractors to help us out our growing company.  As a result, I have been working with multiple lawyers in trying to get the work of our department done.  Here are some lessons learned:

Not all work should be delegated

While it depends on the amount of resources you have access to, not all work should be delegated. For instance, if you have certain projects that you want done in a particular way, it might make sense for you to keep them.  However, you should not make this a common practice; else you are a bad delegator (micromanager).   One way I get around this is that I will sometimes have one person start a project, yet give it to another will finish it.   For example, we have one independent contractor who has been with us for years.  She knows our organization very well (including our unique culture) and has a great attention to detail – as a result she can put final touches on projects and bring them to completion far more effectively than trying to get a similar result with a contractor who knows our company less well.

Delegating is about teaching, not efficiency

There is a real cost to delegation (cost to delegate = time spent explaining project + time spent monitoring project + difference in quality between what you want and what you get).  Viewed in isolation, there is a real temptation to do a project yourself in order to minimize these costs associated with delegation. 

However, though this is not frequently discussed, there is also a cost to not delegating (opportunity cost of the missed growth of the delegator and delegate + every issue always has to involve the boss + boss has less time to work on more important things).  Anyone who is worked with or for a micromanager boss knows this – the boss gets involved in everything – which is an ineffective management practice and constitute very bad leadership.

The key to delegation is about teaching.  Instead of mere explaining the specific details of an assignment, spend a few extra moments to explain the context and “why” behind the project. In addition, explain the “why” behind why it is better to do it this way versus that way (and also forces you to make sure there is actually a real “why”, not just arbitrary preferences).  This information will help your delegate perform better and will help them grow over time.  In addition, at the end of an assignment, always make sure that you close the loop with your delegate by sharing any tweaks that you made (and why) after receiving an assignment from the delegate that he or she may not have been privy to.

By investing your time in teaching and training, wonderful things happen.  Over time, your delegate grows and can take on high-quality work with less assistance.  In addition, the costs of delegation continue to shrink as less time is spent explaining and monitoring projects, and the difference between what you get and what you want decreases. 

Delegation helps your team grow

Delegation helps your team grow.  By freeing up busy but experienced personnel, they have more time to work on higher level projects that will help them continue to grow and improve their technical skills.  By giving projects to less experienced members of your team, they gain experience and their skills grow as well.

When delegating, thoughtfully consider what projects you will give and to who.  Each assignment is an opportunity for growth, so it should go to the person who needs that experience.  For example, by giving contracts to a litigation lawyer, they gain experience outside of their normal area.  In addition, they may bring their experience to bear in the new area and make useful suggestions about how to modify the contract to avoid certain problems. 

In contrast, you might give the same type of projects to the same person.  While this can be a little tedious, it allows them to gain expertise in a specific area becoming the subject matter expert within your team.  My personal preference is allow for specialization, but at the same time, always cross-train so that there are “secondary” experts on your team in each subject area.  

In addition, besides delegation, it is important to engage in constant knowledge sharing so that the members of the team learn from each and are constantly improving their knowledge and skills.  One way to do this is hold periodic meetings to tackle certain projects, where all members of the team contribute their expertise to the project at hand.

Delegation leverages your growth

This principle was a total discovery to me.  By having two or three people to delegate to, I can handle two or three times the number of projects and issues.  By taking on more projects, my legal skills have grown dramatically as the supervising attorney. 

Two illustrations will explain this.  By himself, an ER doctor could hypothetically monitor and treat 10 or so patients at a time.  But give him 5 experienced nurses, and he could treat 50 patients (hopefully without any dying).  As a result, he gains professional experience 5X faster than had he worked by himself.  There is a diminishing returns to this, however, as the depth of learning tends to decrease (as opposed to the breadth of experience) when you have more and more direct reports. 

Another illustration is of a CEO. Rather than being over just the functional area over which he came (like a CFO for example), a CEO now has direct reports from other areas that he has little or no formal training or experience.  As a result, he gains broad exposure to areas he never actually worked in. 

As a result of delegation, a person can gain technical expertise within their domain at a faster rate and exposure to other areas in which they supervise employees but never actually worked in.

Delegation frees you up for higher-level work

My boss recently thanked me for my “proactive thinking and planning” as I’ve been managing our law department, which made me “think about thinking.”  In order to continue to grow in your career, you should spend more and more time on higher-level thinking.  As discussed in earlier postings, creative thinking actually involved 7 types of thinking, including diagnostic thinking (what are the facts of the situation), visionary thinking (what you want), strategic thinking (how to get it).  The goal is engage in diagnostic, visionary, and strategic thinking more often. 

The only way to get this “thinking time” is to delegate effectively so that you don’t have to spend all of your time “doing” the work (ideational, evaluative, contextual, and tactical thinking).  In order to become more valuable, you have to spend more time “thinking.”  One way I accomplish this regularly is by traveling a lot (except during the summer). My trips out of town always provoke new thinking as a result of exposure to different stimuli (new or different surroundings) (see my lateral thinking posting).  I always come back from trips with new ideas, especially about how to be more effective at work.

I have considered trying to “get away” from the office more often, by taking a note pad outside and walking on a nearby golf course, or working from home for a few hours a week.  Of all the places I am least creative; unfortunately it is my desk at work.

If it is not important, let it go

The flip-side of the “teaching” coin is the “let it go” side.  In order to delegate effectively, you have to choose your battles carefully.  If something really doesn’t matter that much or there is a better way but the chosen way is working alright, than let it go!  There is an optimal amount of teaching in any delegation situation while any additional “teaching” pushes you over the edge from good manager to micromanager.  So let it go!

Creative Leadership – Delegating Effectively

Even though this blog is entitled “creativity-leadership”, this blog for the past 18 months has focused almost entirely on creativity for one simple reason – I have much to say on the subject, which makes writing on the topic relatively easy.  The opposite is true in regards to leadership.  While I like the topic, neither practicing leadership nor writing on it comes naturally.  Even so, I decided that would write on leadership topics to help myself become a better leader as the act of writing is a great learning tool.

Thus, the following entries on leadership are not those of “born leader”, but rather that of a humble leader who is learning by trial and error.  Down the road a bit, I hope to write on the budding topic of creative leadership, specifically how (a) ordinary leaders can unlock the creativity of their followers and (b) leaders can use creativity to take their leadership to the next level.  This is a new field within leadership and creativity, and I hope to be at its forefront.

Leadership Bloopers:

In my life, I have two main leadership roles.  First, I am an assistant leader at a congregation of young single adults.  Second, at work, I have been managing the law department on a day-to-day basis (without the official title but all the responsibility).  Recently, I made the unfortunate discovery that, in both of these roles, I am a poor delegator.  You too might be a bad at delegation, if you exhibit any of the following warning signs:

* You have perfectionist and/or micro-manager tendencies

* Delegated projects still occupy lots of your time and mental energy, or are constantly coming back on your desk

* The delegated person is not showing initiative and acts disempowered or feeble

* Your staff is not increasing in terms of skills, knowledge, and experience

* You only work effectively with one or two individuals who understand how you like to work

* Work keeps piling up on your desk and/or you keep doing more and more to keep your organization running smoothly

* You delegate too much, and your delegates begin to ignore you and the work you assign

In contrast, the sign of an effective delegator is free time.  I used to notice that the former CEO of my company, an awesome leader and a good friend of mine, often looked bored at work.  He wasn’t really bored as he constantly was meeting with his leaders who swarmed into and out of his office.  But overall, he had lots of time to think and focus on the big picture.  His “lieutenants” were in charge of the different businesses, and they were fully engaged in their work. He would comment on the “details” of any particular subject, but he did it in such a way that the responsibility for the work alwaysremained on the delegate.

When delegating an assignment, he started by giving a clear assignment but then asked you to restate the assignment in your own words.  Listening to your restatement, he would clarify (if necessary) and confirm the assignment.  Interestingly, he never “gave help” or interfered with the assignment or micromanaged, but would remind of you of a deadline or of the assignment and that he would follow up.  He always had high expectations of his delegates, and they always wanted to live up to his assessments of them.  You were always part of his team, and wanted to remain there (he was the CEO, after all).

Lessons Learned:

* Delegation frees up leaders to work on strategic priorities such as key projects, leadership development, and so forth

* Delegation, when done properly, builds up the skills, talents, and capacity of the delegate

* Communicate assignment clearly (important outcomes)

* Check for understanding, have delegate restate the assignment, clarifying where necessary

* Don’t proscribe methods or process (except where absolutely necessary)

* Communicate follow-up and reporting.

* Be careful about offering unsolicited (or solicited) help to the delegate – once delegated, you shouldn’t be taking back a project in whole or part

* Respect the stewardship and authority of your delegate in all that you do

* Don’t interfere, legitimize delegate’s authority with others

Importance of “Being” as a Leader

Truth – Over time, an organization will strongly reflect its leader, so you’d better have a leader worth emulating.

At my work, I had the interesting opportunity to watch our organization transition between the outgoing CEO and the new one, which provided an interesting chance for observation.  The old CEO was highly charismatic and extremely well-liked among employees (at times, with seeming father-like adoration – they even made him a bobble-head doll).  He knew pretty much each of the 1000 employees (he handed out paychecks each pay cycle to keep his common touch).  He was decisive, provided great individual autonomy to try things and experiment, a great developer of leaders, yet his style harkened back to an earlier era (he liked clean-cut, shaven employees) and was very cost-conscious, which allowed us to ride out the 2008 recession remarkably well.

In contrast, the new CEO is less extroverted, analytical, very focused and disciplined, but with more of a modern, almost pop culture-like personality.  He is well-liked throughout the organization, but replacing a great leader has been a hard act to follow.  It has been fascinating to watch certain changes being implemented.

For starters, the new CEO outlined an ambitious goal, doubling our organization’s value within a few years, not an easy task for an already successful company seeking to become a billion dollar company.  Reflecting his personality trait of “focus”, he reduced the number of annual goals for the organization and replaced them with a few goals that would last several years, surrounded around a carefully communicated mission.

As to our CEO’s modern, forward-thinking bent, the company’s HR department has updated their recruiting practices, including by hiring MBAs (a new practice for our company) reflecting the premium placed on analytical skills by the new leader.

Accountability has increased within our company, as the new CEO has implemented a business unit structure that gives profit and loss responsibility to the individual business leaders, an approach that is more decentralized yet still maintains the focused efforts of the business leaders. Our new leader has striven to maintain our unique culture of a strong, customer serviced focused organization, which largely was strongly instilled by the former leader.

One of the few downsides, if any, is that there is less “freedom” to try new things internally.  Though risk taking through new ventures is still encouraged, there is an emphasis on calculated or measured risks where as before, there were slightly fewer restraints on business development.   In addition, while our employee culture is still excellent, the strength of culture has dissipated slightly as we have become mainstream.

Overall, as you can see, the organization has been transformed from a highly charismatic, culture-driven organization (reflecting the old leader) to an ambitious organization driving towards its mission reflecting the new leader.

Lateral Thinking

I will be in Buffalo for a week this month at school.  I can’t wait to see my creativity classmates.  It is nice to find “people like me.”  Here is a paper I wrote for class:  Lateral Thinking Paper.  Enjoy!

Edward De Bono’s Lateral Thinking Model

Edward De Bono, a leading creativity practitioner, developed two different models regarding creative thinking called “lateral thinking” and “parallel thinking”.  De Bono developed his models over a number of years with his book, Mechanism of the Mind, being published in 1969.  This book contained a key insight upon which the lateral thinking model is based: 

De Bono’s research concluded that the brain is indeed a self-organizing system that routinely interprets inputs into patterns.  It is not then inherently designed for creativity. However, if certain lateral thinking tools are applied, the brain can be encouraged or trained to become more creative.  (Bailey, 2007, p. 46).

In 1970, De Bono published Lateral Thinking:  Creativity Step by Step, detailing his lateral thinking model.  Over the last 40 years, De Bono has continued to refine his theories and techniques, publishing numerous books and articles on related topics, and developing training materials, programs, and personnel to take his varied creativity and thinking courses to thousands of organizations and hundreds of thousands of individuals. 

In 1985, De Bono published a second break-through book entitled Six Thinking Hats that extolled parallel thinking, “a technique for teaching the brain to look at a problem from a variety of angles” (Carter, 2007, p. 20).  These six thinking skills (or “hats”) are aimed at exploring ideas and generating better outcomes, and provides an alternative to traditional critical thinking that mainly analyzes ideas with argument and counter-argument.

Different Types of Thinking

One of De Bono’s many contributions to the creativity field is his identification and development of three types of thinking – vertical thinking, lateral thinking, and parallel thinking.  The best way to understand vertical and lateral thinking is compare and contrast them side-by-side: 

Rightness is what matters in vertical thinking.  Richness is what matters in lateral thinking. Vertical thinking selects a pathway by excluding other pathways.  Lateral thinking does not select but seeks to open up other pathways.  …  With vertical thinking one is trying to select the best approach but with lateral thinking one is generating different approaches for the sake of generating them.  (De Bono, 1970, p. 39).

Other comparisons between vertical and lateral thinking include:

Vertical thinking moves only if there is a direction in which to move, lateral thinking moves in order to generate a direction. … Vertical thinking is analytical, lateral thinking is provocative.  … Vertical thinking is sequential, lateral thinking can make jumps. … With vertical thinking one has to be correct at every step, with lateral thinking one does not have to be. … With vertical thinking one concentrates and excludes what is irrelevant, with lateral thinking one welcomes chance intrusions.  … With vertical thinking categories, classifications and labels are fixed, with lateral thinking they are not. … Vertical thinking follows the most likely paths, lateral thinking explores the least likely.… (De Bono, 1970, pp. 39-43).

Vertical thinking and lateral thinking, when practiced together, end up being one complete creativity “thinking skills” model.   A completely separate way to view creativity in totality is through the parallel thinking model.  In this model, De Bono describes six types of thinking (or “hats”) that taken together, comprise creative thinking (just like the thinking skills model of creative problem solving (CPS)).  The six types of thinking include blue hat thinking (process and control), white hat thinking (facts, information), yellow hat thinking (benefits of an idea), black hat thinking (weak aspects of an idea), red hat thinking (emotional or feeling), and green hat thinking (new ideas and creativity) (Carter, 2007, p. 20).

Description of the Model

De Bono’s model of creativity can be described as disrupting linear pathways and creating asymmetric ones.  All around us is vast amount of information, data, ideas, and images that we process through our five senses.  Our brains are highly developed pattern-recognition machines, and thus process this information into a handful of recognizable patterns (De Bono, 1992, p. 151).  Over time, these patterns form into dominant neural pathways that we tend to resort to automatically.  If left unchecked, the brain’s pattern forming tendency discourages creativity because thinking is instead channeled down dominant pathways.

The way to develop creative thought, according to De Bono, is to disrupt these linear pathways, and thereby discover asymmetric ones (ones that are not readily apparent in foresight, but are logical in hindsight).  Rather than moving along the pattern in traditional logical, “vertical” thinking, the key is to use lateral thinking to move across the pattern and thus, to break out of the dominant pathway rut.  Once outside of the dominant pathway, a person is free to experience different thoughts and hopeful reach some new, useful ones. 

De Bono’s approach to creativity is identify, develop, and use a number of techniques that help overcome the brain’s pre-existing mental patterns and thus facilitate lateral thinking.  In Serious Creativity, De Bono states that he will “be covering the three broad approaches to lateral thinking:  (1) Challenge; (2) Alternatives; and (3) Provocation” (De Bono, 1992, p. xii).  But then he does little, if any, to explain the differences between the approaches or to develop a taxonomy of lateral thinking techniques, leaving the reader to figure out the connections (if any) between the approaches.  Even though De Bono spends little time developing a satisfactory unifying theoretical framework (other than you need lateral thinking to “think outside of the “box” of confining mental patterns) in regards to his techniques, the techniques themselves can be powerful and effective. 

The technique that most distinctly captures the essence of De Bono’s model of creativity is his “provocation” technique.  A provocation (abbreviated as “PO”) is a temporary idea that is used to encourage new perceptions and patterns and is “used for its movement value” (De Bono, 1986, p. 58).  Thus. the goal is to “move on from the provocation to end up with useful ideas” and the provocation itself is only a “temporary phase” (p. 58).  The provocation serves to take us out of the comfort of an existing pattern (De Bono, 1995, p. 18). 

For instance, if my focus (objective) is to improve a new car model, and my PO is “dolphin”, I would think of ideas brought to mind by the word dolphin (sleek, fast, intelligent, dorsal fin, communicates with others), and then apply those ideas to the focus:  intelligent cars, cars with aerodynamic fins, cars that communicate with other cars or traffic lights and so forth. 

Many of De Bono’s numerous techniques for applying lateral thinking are briefly described in the chart below:

Focus	“[F]ocus is a deliberate effort to pick out a new focal point.” (De Bono, 1992, p. 92).
Creative Pause	“The creative pause is the willingness to pause during some thinking or discussion to pay creative attention” to what is going on. (p. 92)
Challenge	“The creative challenge simply refuses to accept that the current way is necessarily the best way.”  (p. 105).
Alternatives	“Is there another way?”  “What are the alternatives?” (p. 119).
The Concept Fan	“We go from an idea … to a concept which becomes the fixed point for other ideas.  But we also go from the concept to a ‘broader concept,’ which then becomes the fixed point for alternative concepts.” (p. 129).
Concepts	“In general, it is difficult to work at the concept level.  So it makes sense to work at the idea level and then keep ‘pulling back’ to find the concept.  What is the concept here? What concept is being carried out by the idea?” (p. 139).
Movement	“The general ‘sense’ of movement means the willingness to move forward in a positive exploring way rather than stopping to judge whether something is right or wrong.” (p. 153).
Random Input	“[O]btain a word which has no connection whatsoever with the situation and hold the two together. … From this juxtaposition we seek to develop new ideas.” (p. 177).
Sensitizing Techniques	“The purpose of sensitizing techniques is to feed ideas into the mind in order to allow our thinking to take new and creative lines.  … A ‘stratal’ is a number of unconnected statements put together solely to form a stratal.  The purpose of a stratal is to sensitive the mind so that new ideas can come forward.” (p. 184).

While most of De Bono’s work is focused on generating ideas as part of the divergent stage of the creative cycle, some of his work deals with the convergent stage of creativity. 

Harvesting	“In any creative thinking session, there are at least three purposes:  1.  To find the magic idea; 2. To produce new ideas that can be shaped into usable ideas; 3. To stock the mind with a repertoire of concepts and ideas that may not be useful at the moment but that will enrich any future thinking on the same or related matters (and even on other matters).  With poor harvesting, the second and third of these purposes is ignored.” (p. 211).
Treatment of Ideas	De Bono reviews multiple ways of evaluating ideas including:  quick rejection of ideas, shaping ideas, tailoring ideas, strengthening ideas, reinforcing ideas, take-up of ideas, comparison, faults and defects, consequences, testability, and evaluation.  (pp. 216-223).
Formal Output	De Bono suggests the disciplined use of time, focus, and technique enhances creativity sessions.  In addition, the output of the session should be formalized into writing that includes the focus, concept, and idea for all the output in the sessions.  (pp. 224-228).

Analysis of the Model

A strength of De Bono’s model is that it provides a logical, common sense approach to creativity.  In addition, there is minimal amounts of jargon to learn other than a few words which De Bono invents (vertical, lateral, and parallel thinking; provocations, etc.)  In essence, his model states that the brain organizes information into patterns, which needs to be disrupted in order to encourage novel ideas.  Vertical thinking tends to perpetuate the existing patterns.   In contrast, lateral thinking provides numerous opportunities for disrupting existing thinking patterns and moving towards new ones.  De Bono’s lateral thinking becomes an effective complementary pairing to “vertical” thinking. 

A second strength of De Bono’s work is its accessibility to lay persons.  Once De Bono teaches the difference between vertical and lateral (and parallel thinking), a lay person can quickly master some or all of his techniques and implement lateral thinking as a way to disrupt vertical thinking.  Once his techniques are applied, some new ideas quickly follow and thus, De Bono’s work continues to gain support and widespread commercial appeal and significant though anecdotal support. 

A third strength of De Bono’s work is its explanation of the need for creativity.  While the trite phrase “think outside of the box” is in some circles synonymous with creativity, De Bono’s theory does explain that there is actually a box (the confines of the mental patterns organized by the brain) and then proceeds to give effective tools for “thinking outside”, or rather across, those patterns.  De Bono’s model (mental patterns) also explains why people new to a domain (not limited by mental patterns of perception) often create more break-through ideas than experience practitioners within the domain (limited by experience). 

A limitation of De Bono’s model is its inherent squishiness.  In contrast to other creativity models, De Bono’s model places little emphasis on the different aspects or phases in solving a problem (in contrast to the Four Sight model) or meta-cognition (where am I in this process?).  Thus, his model, while effective at generating new ideas, is difficult to apply in a coherent, systematic fashion.  In addition, while his techniques could be used during any phase of CPS, they are most effective as ideational techniques. 

Another limitation of De Bono’s work is its disconnected nature.  While De Bono creates overarching framework regarding why creativity is needed, he spends little time developing theoretical connection s between the different techniques and the model.  Thus, one is given a number of tools to “think laterally” but De Bono spends little time trying to explain or categorize lateral thinking to explain the different types of lateral thinking.  De Bono likely considers this to be unimportant because, within lateral thinking, “[c]lassifications and categories are not fixed pigeonholes to aid identification but signposts to help movement.”  (De Bono, 1970, p. 43).

The significant limitation of De Bono’s work is the dearth of research in support of his work in spite of the fact that his work has reached a wide commercial audience.  While there is some literature that either applies or supports lateral thinking, not a single study was found conducting experiments whether lateral (or parallel) thinking was effective as a creativity enhancement tool (in contrast to CPS which does has this support in the  research).  A possible explanation for the lack of research supporting De Bono’s models may be his personal tendency to portray himself as a distinct creativity brand and creator of the lateral and parallel thinking models, which makes it difficult to discern where the man ends and his models begin.  In addition, De Bono’s commercial showmanship may have discouraged researchers from studying whether his training methods can produce lasting, measureable increases in creativity. 

Supporting the Model

A significant strength of De Bono’s work is the sheer volume of books on the subject and the availability of training on his programs and techniques.  De Bono has authored at least 75 books, several training programs, and trained hundreds of certified trainers worldwide, though the exact nature of the training programs are difficult to determine as there are conflicting claims among magazine articles and internet websites (De Bono’s and others).  Some of De Bono’s training programs including Six Thinking Hats, Lateral Thinking, CoRT Tools, DATT – Power of Perception, Simplicity, and Six Value Medals (www.edwarddebono.com, 2012).

            While there was not much (if any) research explicitly assessing the validity or reliability of De Bono’s models, there a handful of articles that recognized the value of his ideas and used them in other areas.  For instance, Tanner applied De Bono techniques in the consumer marketing and product development contexts including two provocation techniques (random word and escape) to find new applications for existing products (spandex) and to shorten the time-to-market for a new product (1993, p. 22). 

Other favorable references to lateral thinking include where Kuesten states that lateral thinking can be its own leadership style and that a “lateral leadership style … includes soliciting suggestions, delegating, treat staff as colleagues, looking for ideas from everywhere, using lateral thinking, and sharing exposure with the team” (2008, p. 35).  Finally, Braunstein puts lateral thinking in a historical context and posits that the information overload in past forty years has increased the value of lateral thinking (ability to form connections among remote associates) and its prevalence as the natural result of exposure to huge amounts of information (1999, pp. 15-17).  

            In summary, Edward De Bono’s lateral thinking model has good explanatory value regarding why creativity is required and then provides valuable tools for generating ideas on demand.  However, the lateral thinking model unfortunately lacks research in support of its validity and reliability.  In addition, the lateral thinking model is relatively formless and does not provide a clear framework for solving challenges (in contrast to CPS or other models).

References

 

Bailey, J. (2007). Profile lateral thinking: Edward De Bono. Engineering Management Journal, 17(5), 46-47.

Braunstein, P. (1999). The case for lateral thinking:  Discerning new thought patterns on the contemporary info-sphere. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 5(10), 10-17.

Carter, D. (2007, June). Thinking ahead. Training Journal, 6, 19-21. 

De Bono, E. (1970). Lateral thinking: Creativity step by step.  New York, NY: Harper & Row. 

De Bono, E. (1986). Ideas about thinking: Excerpts from Edward De Bono’s “letter to thinkers”. The Journal of Product Innovation Management, 3(1), 57-62.

De Bono, E. (1992). Serious creativity: Using the power of lateral thinking to create new ideas.  New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 

De Bono, E. (1995). Serious creativity. The Journal for Quality and Participation, 18(5), 12-18.

Kuesten, C. (2008). [Review of the book The leader’s guide to lateral thinking skills: Unlocking the creativity and innovation in you and your team, by P. Sloane]. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 25, 303-310.

Tanner, D. (1993). Applying creative thinking techniques to everyday problems. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 9(4), 23-28.

Bibliography

De Bono, E. (1967). New think: The use of lateral thinking in the generation of new ideas. New York, NY: Basic Books.

De Bono, E. (1985). Six thinking hats. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co.

De Bono, E. (2008). Creativity workout: 62 exercise to unlock your most creative ideas. Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press.

Creative leadership: Master the art of visionary thinking

This essay addresses creative potential, the second of the four “Ps” of visionary thinking – purpose, potential, possibility, and picture.  Visionary thinking is an essential skill that creative leaders must master.  Creative leadership is a process whereby an idea is brought from initial conception to its fulfillment in reality.  Visionary thinking is one of the first steps (or thinking skills) in the creative process where one formulates an understanding of the desired outcome, leaving aside its actual achievement for future steps in the creative process.  An important subcategory of visionary thinking includes potential thinking, where one examines the potential of the new idea or vision.  A closely related cousin to potential thinking is possibility thinking, which will be examined in a separate essay.

One of the challenges faced by creative leaders– especially those who are highly skilled at divergent thinking – is that they can “think up” more desired outcomes (and ideas) than they could ever develop into final form in a hundred lifetimes.  Thus, a critical step in the creative process must be to assess the potential of each desired outcome and select the best one from among several promising alternatives.  Ideally, this assessment should occur, at least tentatively (expected potential), as part of the visionary step in order to preserve resources from being squandered on low-potential ideas.  A more complete assessment of the desired outcome (actual potential) may occur later in the creative process.

Very often, legendary inventors have evaluated the potential of their desired outcome on an implicit basis.  For instance, to the Wright brothers, the potential benefits of a flying air machine were obvious and worth the time devoted to the task.  Likewise, for Edison, a long-lasting light bulb had the potential to revolutionize life and indeed, it did indeed usher in the modern era.

It is important to use potential thinking in a deliberate, explicit manner.  The consequences of failing to engage potential thinking early on usually include wasted time and resources that could be used on higher-value objectives.  Additionally, omitting potential thinking also causes a plethora of distractions and unfinished projects, though started with great zeal, are abandoned as it becomes apparent that the potential of the project may not be so high after all.  Worse yet, some ideas are taken all the way to final form, only to flop in epic manner when taken to market.

However, even the great Edison had to learn this lesson the hard way.  On June 1^st, 1869, Edison obtained his first patent for the electric voting counting machine.

“A fellow telegrapher named Dewitt Roberts bought an interest in the invention for $100 and took it to Washington, D.C. to exhibit to a committee of Congress. The chairman of the committee, unimpressed with the speed with which the instrument could record votes, told him that ‘if there is any invention on earth that we don’t want down here, that is it.’ The slow pace of roll call voting in Congress and other legislatures enabled members to filibuster legislation or convince others to change their votes.  Edison’s vote recorder was never used.”  (Thomas Edison papers, Rutgers University.)

From this experience, Edison learned two valuable lessons: (1) only work on ideas that have high potential; and (2) carefully assess the potential of an idea before expending the time, effort, and resources to bring it into fruition.

Measurement of Potential

The potential of a desired outcome can vary greatly and impact different levels – personal, domain, local, national, or global.  Here are some desired outcomes that I am either working on, have achieved, or might work on in the future.

Level	Desired Outcome (Primary Purpose)	Considerations (Secondary Purpose)
Personal	Write a creative short story for class	Get “A” on assignment; write a literary work that teaches about creativity; improve writing skills and personal creativity.
Domain	Publish article in creativity journal	Build credentials within creativity field; add to knowledge on creativity; help others.
Local	Presented on visionary thinking at Florida Creativity Weekend, March 2-4, 2012	Build credentials within creativity field; practice public speaking; teach audience things that will help them.
National	Published article in national magazine, ACC Docket, Dec. 2011.  Increasing the Organizational Impact of Your Law Department	Build credentials within legal field; free advertising for my employer.
Global	Write book on the promotion of creativity & creative leadership in business and education	Earn second income to support future creative endeavors; add to existing knowledge; advance business and educational concerns; help others

It is best to evaluate a desired outcome in terms of both personal and broader considerations.  For instance, personal considerations might include monetary concerns, potential to unlock doors in career, gaining additional resources to support future creative endeavors, etc.  Broader considerations might include advancing scientific, political, societal, moral, or artistic concerns.  For instance, movements such as Microplace and Kiva use microfinance loans to accomplish the societal, moral, and political objectives of reliving suffering and promoting economic development and equality throughout the world.

It is also important to note that at this stage, we are interested in measuring the potential of the desired outcome, not necessarily the potential of the solution that would achieve the desired outcome.  At the visionary stage, it is important to make sure we have the “right” problem.  Only later in the creative process will be concerned with whether we have the “right” solution.  Focusing on the right problem is important because it is sometimes tempting to come up with an elegant solution to the wrong problem (“how might I make this horse buggy more efficient”), which can be majorly counterproductive.

Assessing the Potential of a Desired Outcome

False Acceptance and False Rejection

At the visionary stage, we are primarily concerned with the “expected potential” of a desired outcome because its actual potential won’t and can’t be known until much later in the creative process.  When assessing the expected potential of a desired outcome, there are two errors or traps that should be avoided, if at all possible:  false acceptance and false rejection.

Both errors occur where there is a significant deviation between the expected and actual potential of a desired outcome.  In the case of false acceptance, the actual potential is lower than its expected potential.  With false rejection, the actual potential is higher than expected.  The first error type leads to wasted resources invested in a failed product or idea, which sometimes can be significant waste.  Though often, there are some lessons learned that can be invaluable (so long as you didn’t get fired) and lay the ground for future creative success.

The second error type of false rejection leads to missing what can sometimes amount to a significant opportunity.  Unfortunately, opportunities often have short-shelf lives as competitors move quickly to capitalize on opportunities that may have been inadvertently or foolishly overlooked.  In some instances, however, competitors also overlook the same opportunity which lies dormant until someone is prepared to discover it.  False rejection can be caused by a number of factors including the presence of other viable opportunities, incorrect or incomplete assumptions, inadequate investigation, incomplete or inaccurate data, personal prejudices or blind spots, excessive deference to established conventions or norms, or focusing on a perceived flaw rather than the idea’s potential.

False acceptance can occur by giving too much weight to early data or not thinking things through.  Both Thomas Edison and Coca-Cola made false acceptance errors—Edison with his electric voting machine and Coke with its product flop of New Coke.  Examples of false acceptance abound when dealing with new product launches.  Some examples of some famous product flops include Sony Betamax, Coca-Cola’s New Coke, Pepsi’s Crystal Pepsi, the DeLorean (as in “Back to the Future”), and the Ford Edsel.

However, false rejection is probably even more commonplace than false acceptance.  This is because it is extremely easy to reject the potential of a desired outcome without undertaking a sufficient investigation, including by developing new thinking about how limitations might be overcome.  The following is compilation of famous quotes demonstrating the prevalence of false rejection.

Examples of False Rejection

• “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” ~ Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
• “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” ~ Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.
• “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” ~ Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
• “The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.” ~A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
• “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” ~ Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
• “A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.” ~ Response to Debbi Fields’ idea of starting Mrs. Fields’ Cookies.
• “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” ~ Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

Overcoming False Acceptance through Accurate Prediction,

Fortunately, there are at least three antidotes – accurate prediction, affirmative judgment, and strong conviction – that help avoid the errors of false acceptance and false rejection.  Accurate prediction seeks to eliminate predictive errors between the expected potential and actual potential of a desired outcome in order to avoid false acceptance.

Accurate prediction is a skill that is notoriously difficult to develop and is more of an art than a science.  If you had it, you could use it to make millions in the stock market.  With accurate prediction, you could know which markets to enter and exit, what products to launch and pull, and what companies to acquire or investments to divest.  Accurate prediction is achieved by gathering the “right” data, analyzing conflicting information, anticipating trends, and developing and testing theories, but then ultimately, making an educated guess coupled with a strong hunch.

Accurate prediction obviously requires a careful, through data gathering process.  This includes gathering information from proponents, naysayers, the indifferent, and even unrelated fields, gleaning as much information and insight as possible.  In essence, to become good at this, you have to become hyper-focused on information, where you are continuously scanning the environment for new bits of information to process and revise your working theories and hypotheses.  More importantly, however, accurate prediction requires openness to information and substantial sensitivity to data, even in the smallest micro-informational packets.  Biases should be carefully minimized (they can never be eliminated) as the only concern should be for an accurate prediction (even one that goes against personal preferences).

Careful analysis of data reveals that certain data (or sets of data) is more important than other information.  From this data you can start to develop theories and anticipate possible trends or outcomes.  Over time, the various trickles of information will flow together into small streams, which will usually point in more than one direction (possibly indicating the need for multiple theories or sub-theories).  Unfortunately, this process is never entirely clear, so a high tolerance for ambiguity is needed.  At best, at the end of this process you will have developed a multiple, plausible theories, each substantiated by different pieces of data, which point to different outcomes.  But as additional data comes in, certain theories are vindicated while others are abandoned.  At the end of the day, you should have some working models which might (if you are lucky) give you a sense of direction as to which way things are heading, and thus, which projects you should invest time, money, and resources into development.

Accurate prediction of expected and actual potential of a desired outcome can be achieved by seeking information, remaining open, and become sensitive to even the smallest bits of information.  This information is used to challenge assumptions and make sure a desired outcome really has a high potential before proceeding with it.  This skill is vitally important because, without it, it is possible to falsely assume that a particular outcome will be successful based on limited data, when such idea will ultimately prove untenable.  For example, the success of the Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs was largely attributed to his legendary ability to anticipate consumer demand while still in the design process of a new product launch.

Overcoming false rejection through Affirmative Judgment

Affirmative judgment promotes the careful examination of a desired outcome before its actual potential can be understood, realized, and achieved.  By developing affirmative judgment, you can avoid the temptation to give up on a high-potential idea just because you have received some (or a lot) of rejection at an early stage in the project.

Affirmative judgment is the exact opposite of critical judgment.  Ever notice that when, in a large group of people, someone expresses an idea, members of the group will invariable shoot off their mouths like verbal shut guns and hurl volleys of negative remarks towards the fledgling idea, which shatters into shards before it even reaches its zenith.  In contrast, affirmative judgment give each idea every possible chance to fly.

Affirmative judgment can be summarized with the acronym POINt (pluses, opportunity, issues, new thinking).  First the positive attributes of the idea is examined.  Next, the idea’s opportunity (or potential) is examined.  Only after exhausting all positive views of the idea are potential “issues” explored.  But unlike with critical thinking, with affirmative judgment the participants attempt to overcome any issues with new thinking about how the idea could be modifying or that obstacles could be removed in some fashion.

Practicing affirmative judgment helps avoid false rejection (due to critical judgment) by giving ideas a chance to develop as well as additional time to better understand their potential.  Ideas are like tadpoles, partially formed at birth and take time and a supportive environment to come to fruition.  Affirmative judgment gives you a chance to work through and overcome certain issues with any idea as no idea is conceived in perfect, final form.

Overcoming false rejection through Strong Conviction

In addition to exercising affirmative judgment, strong conviction as a visionary is absolutely critical.  Strong conviction requires a belief in the vision’s potential and the possibility of bringing it into reality.   Without a strong belief in the potential of a vision, a visionary may be thwarted by obstacles before the true potential of a desired outcome becomes apparent.

There are plenty of people who had high-potential ideas and dreams within their grasp, but an incomplete understanding and conviction of their potential caused those ideas to slip through their fingers.  A great example of this is the McDonalds brothers, who set up a profitable hamburger stand in southern California and employed factory line efficiency to fast food.  But it was Ray Kroc, who ultimately bought out the McDonalds brothers and took their ideas to the whole nation and founded McDonald’s worldwide fast food empire.  Indeed, it was Kroc’s strong conviction in the potential of the vision that motivated him to act successfully and with tenacity.

Besides conviction as to an idea’s potential, a visionary needs conviction in regards to an idea’s possibility.  Being a successful visionary requires a high degree of self-confidence, resourcefulness, and persistence.  Belief in oneself as a visionary is very likely to translate into the actual ability to carry out the vision.  Resourcefulness is paramount to overcome the numerous challenges that arise when bringing a vision into reality.  Finally, a high degree of dogged persistence is essential to see the vision through from beginning to end.  Visions can be notoriously difficult to achieve so the visionary must be willing to endure a long and difficult ordeal, including many setbacks, obstacles, and naysayers along the way.

Common Characteristics of Visionaries

There are relatively few people that are universally regarded as visionaries.  These might include individuals such as Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, among others.  While universally acclaimed, they are often disregarded as super-talented genius, outliers that live outside of the range of normal human experience.  This essay seeks to discuss several of the main characteristics that these and other visionaries often possess.

Openness to Information

Visionaries possess an unusually large degree of openness to new information (this openness may or may not extent to people).  Some people, once they make up their mind, cannot be persuaded, nor do they continue to search for or take in new information.  Not so with visionaries, they are constantly searching for additional information, knowing that each new piece of information might yield an insight that helps solve a difficult problem or create the breakthrough needed for the next innovation.

Closely related to openness to information, visionaries typically exercise a low degree of deference to convention, historical precedent, or authorities within their domains.  While they seek to know as much as possible within their domains, they don’t defer to the judgments of the existing authorities within their domains.  By ignoring or purposeful violating norms with their respective disciplines, visionaries are able to experiment and try things that others overlook or aren’t willing to challenge.  As a result of their willingness to experiment and try things, they often are in the best position to make “breakthrough” discoveries or happy accidents.

Mental Sight

Because, at least in part, of their openness and lack of deference to authorities, visionaries possess the ability to see things with their mind (mind’s eye) often before others – sometimes long before others.  This might include certain observations that unlock the secret to understanding the natural world, trends that are still in their infancy stage (or that haven’t even begun yet), or the possibilities of new inventions, discoveries, products, or even new social or historical movements.

Visionaries are often marked by an unusual degree of sensitivity.  While this sensitivity can manifest itself as “quirkiness” or even in certain cases as mental illness (Van Gogh, Howard Hughes, John Nash), a high degree of sensitivity results in extra information being accessible to visionaries that others are not aware of.  Thus, the mark of a true visionary is that they can often see what others cannot.

Accurate Extrapolation

In some senses, visionaries seem to “see” the future.  With the exception of ancient and modern prophets (see other blog) who do, most visionaries don’t actually see the future.  What visionaries can do, however, is to build an accurate conceptual model of the future based on their keen understanding of the present.  And then (successful) visionaries bring that model into reality, creating the future.

Thus, the visionaries’ key ability is not their prophetic sight, but rather the gift to extrapolate (accurately) from the present into the future.   When accurate extrapolation is combined with the executive ability to carry out the vision, the visionary literally creates the future.  While there is some difference between the ability to accurately predict what is going to happen versus the ability to actual influence what will happen, possessing the former skill is helpful (and the first step) to developing the later skill.

Vivid Imagination

It should go without saying that the mark of a visionary is that he or she has a vision.  This is very much the end result of a strong and active imagination, one that the visionary has cultivated and nurtured very carefully.  Visionaries spend their lives following their dreams and seeking to bring them into reality.  In contrast, the masses turn off their imaginations as they mature, feeling that imagination is akin to child’s play.

Visionaries often reside in two worlds – the external world, the other being a rich internal world of ideas, pictures, and thought.  The reason why visionaries are so driven to carry out their dreams is because their dreams are so real and vivid (in their mind’s eye) to the visionary.  Thus, clarity of imagination leads to a compelling desire to carry out the vision.

Strong Conviction

Once a visionary has a worthwhile vision, the visionary must have strong conviction if the vision stands a chance at being brought into reality.  Certain visions are extraordinarily difficult to carry out and thus require an extraordinary strong belief in the vision and the visionary’s ability to carry it out.

Several specific traits support the development of conviction in a vision.  One such trait is the willingness to take (calculated) risks.  In order to form conviction, a visionary must be willing to lay it all on the line for a worthy cause.  Similarly, a certain amount of discontent with the status quo is necessary for one to be willing to lay things on the line.  In addition, an unconventional nature is somewhat helpful in that it tends to make one immune to negative social pressures that are experienced as naysayers constantly doubt the vision and the visionary.

Finally, visionaries often possess (but don’t usually discuss) a sense of personal destiny.  If you asked them (and they were honest), they’d admit that they always believed that they were destined to accomplish great things, even though they might not have known the details of how it was going to happen.  In some sense, this is necessary because the visionary needs to have a strong belief that they have the ability to carry out.

Persistence

One specific challenge unique to visionaries is best expressed by the warning label on a driver’s mirror, “objects in mirror are [further] than they appear.”  Because of the vividness of their visions, visionaries often underestimate the difficulty in bringing the vision into reality or the “distance” between the present and envisioned outcome (as the vision seems so close and obtainable to them).  The other challenge faced by visionaries is that they tend to have dreams that are larger and more difficult than average persons, and thus an extraordinary degree of persistence is required.

As a result, a high degree of persistence is absolutely critical to be a successful visionary.  Unabashed persistence allows the visionary to push through all difficulties, including the opposition of others, bad fortune, insufficient resources, or dead-ends.  In the end, the difference between a successful and unsuccessful visionary (who does not accomplish their worthy vision) often comes down to drive and persistence.

Florida Creativity Weekend – March 2 – 4, 2012

Come join the Florida Creativity Weekend this March.

This will be my debut as a creativity speaker, presenting on the topic “Visionary Thinking: Purpose, Picture, Potential and Possibility”.

• Visionary thinking – setting the desired outcome
• Purpose – define the desired outcome
• Picture – visualize the desired (ideal) outcome
• Potential – make sure the desired outcome is worth it
• Possibility – make sure the desired outcome is possible

It should be a great weekend!  To see the presenters (I’m at the bottom), click here.

Download copies of my visionary thinking Visionary Thinking Presentation and Visionary Thinking Worksheet.

Book Summary – The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life

The Creative Habit:  Learn It and Use It For Life

By Twyla Tharp

Summary: 

The premise or thesis of this book is that creativity is most often accomplished at the intersection of hard work and habit.  While there are sometimes some seemingly mystical and mysterious aspects of creativity, more often than not great creative works are the results of hard work and a diligent application of a creative process.  Throughout the book, the author gives her readers specific tools for overcoming certain challenges associated with creativity such as getting started, getting an idea, organizing ideas, making a coherent, meaningful creation, getting out a rut, and dealing with failure.

Routine & Preparation:

The author starts by sharing her experience as a choreographer – starting with an empty room – as a metaphor of the difficulty in facing the “blank canvas”, the empty creative space.  She states that “[s]ome people find this moment—the moment before creativity begins—so painful that they simply cannot deal with it” (5).

The key, according to the author, is to establish daily routines that facilitate the creative work to be accomplished.  A writer might have a daily routine of getting up early and staying at the computer until 2000 words or more have been written.  The author discusses the age-old controversy surrounding creativity— whether it is the result of a mysterious, uncontrollable process (i.e., “god” inspired), or of hard, laborious work.  The author is of the later opinion.

In order to overcome the difficulty of getting started, the author recommends developing “rituals—automatic but decisive patterns of behavior—at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up or going the wrong way.” (15)  The author’s ritual for getting started in her chorographic work is getting coffee and then catching a cab at 5:30am in the morning to take her to her NYC dance studio.  The benefits of a preparation ritual is that it pushes you get started, even when you don’t feel like it, thus helping your overcome the “blank canvas” or your particular feelings at the moment.

Creative DNA: 

The author makes an interesting assertion – that artists and creators each have particular “strands of creative code hard-wired into our imaginations.” (37)  This is why some artists always paint nature scenes, others paint portraits, while yet others paint abstractly.  Some paint close up scenes while others paint from a distant vantage point.

Once one understands their “creative DNA”, they can use this self-awareness to their advantage.  Straying too far from what is comfortable, usually results in frustration, slows progress, and causes confusion.  Understanding the common elements of your work helps you create more effectively by helping you know when and where you should “push the envelop” and when you should “stick to your knitting.”

Creative Box:  

The author recommends having an organizational system to collect and organize creative ideas and projects – the “raw index of your preparation.” (88)  Her system is a cardboard box filing system in which she puts every thing – items, clippings, videos – used in the preparation and performance of her various choreographic performances.  Thomas Edison and Leonardo da Vinci kept elaborate notebooks containing their writings and ideas.  Having an organizational system gives you easy access to a lot of good material – the building blocks of new creative ideas.  A system also lets you look back on the process by which you arrived at your now-complete creations.

Scratching:

The author describes how she finds ideas literally everywhere including in every day conversation, the work of other artists, and even nature.  She notes that reading is an especially powerful way to search for ideas because when you are reading you are literally filling your mind with ideas.  She also noted that it is helpful to “scratch furiously” (with urgency and persistence) for an idea as well as to search among the best sources, the “masterpieces” in every field.

Accidents:

Planning and preparation are very important to creativity, but it is also important to leave room for the “happy accidents” often get associated with creative endeavors.  The more prepared one is, the more they are ready to get “lucky” as their preparation helps them recognize the particular advances that are brought forth by luck or circumstances.  She also mentioned things which can thwart creativity and modify creative plans including other people, perfectionism, bad structure, sense of obligation to other people or art, and using the wrong materials.

Spine:

The author next introduces the concept of “spine”.  (146) According to the author, the creative “spine” is the artist’s concept of the work that helps guide the process of making the creation.  In her words, the spine helps “keep [her] on message, but it is not the message itself.” (149)  Sometimes, however, the “spine does double duty, both as the covert idea guiding the artist and the overt theme for the audience.” (149)  The spine’s most useful feature is that it operates as a creative homing pigeon in that if the creator gets off-course, the spine is what brings the creator back on-course. The usefulness of this device is that is becomes easier to produce a coherent creative work and helps a creator stay on track and finish projects much sooner than if they wandered aimlessly without a guiding idea or theme.

Skill:

Skill is the foundation upon which all creativity rests.  The author notes that skill is what brings creativity into being:

Skill gives you the wherewithal to execute whatever occurs to you.  Without it, you are just a font of unfilled ideas.  Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. (163)

Skills are developed through “perfect practice”, where the creator does work that can be both painstaking and technically challenging. (165)  The author notes that the most gifted creators got that way, not because of latent natural talent, but because they were the most focused and dedicated to practicing and improving their craft.  In addition, when developing skills, it is best to work on areas where you are deficient and could use improvement, instead of exclusively on areas where you are already proficient.

Ruts, Grooves & Failure:

Sometimes things go really smoothly for a creator and stay that way for a good long time in what the author describes as a “mega-groove.”  But more often than not, creators have to deal with ruts of various causes and durations.  Ruts occur for a variety of reasons including bad luck, bad timing, bad luck, creative burnout, and other unknown reasons.  A common feature of ruts is “sticking to tried and tested methods that don’t take into account how you or the world has changed.” (186)  The cure for a rut can be as simple of taking a break for a while, going back to your creative core, or trying something new.  Very often ruts end as suddenly as they start and result in a new cycle of creative breakthrough.

A final part of becoming excellent creator is dealing with failure.  Failure can occur for a variety of reasons including a lack of skill, bad concept, bad judgment, repetition, denial, or lack of courage to pursue the idea. (215-217)  Failure is an inherent part of taking risks, and creativity is about taking risks.  The key to failure is to humbly seek to learn lesson embodied in the failure—what is the cause of the problem and to make adjustments accordingly.  Hopefully, an artist can honestly assess his or her work and make the adjustments before the work is unveiled in public to prevent embarrassment and other things that discourage future creativity.  Persistence is also very important as the lessons learned in one “failed” project very often become the catalyst that causes the next project to become a blockbuster success.

Book Summary – Growing Up Creative: Nurturing a Lifetime of Creativity

Since I am hard at work on my creativity degree, I will be posting adapted homework assignments from time to time.  Hopefully they are interesting.

Growing Up Creative:  Nurturing a Lifetime of Creativity

By Teresa M. Amabile, Phd.

In this book, the author sought to convey a basic understanding of what constitutes creative behavior and how to encourage it in children.  The author focused extensively on how to help encourage a child’s intrinsic motivation to act creatively on the theory that a motivated child will develop the domain skills (art, music, or other skills) and other attributes like persistence and dedication necessary to achieve creative success.  In addition, the author enumerated a number of things that discourage creative behavior like competition, evaluation, limited choices, or acting controlling.

Vision and Passion:

The author states that “more than any single thing you do or say to your children, the vision you have for each of them will be crucial in the development of their motivation, creativity, and ultimate achievement”. (5)  This vision, of course, needs to be shaped by the “temperament, personality, needs, and interests of that particular child.” (6)  Regardless of the vision, it is important to imagine them as “independent and passionately interested in whatever work they chose.” (6)  In addition, it is important to help your child gain a love of education, whether formal or informal, as a love of education with serve them wherever they end up.

Recognizing Children’s Creativity:

The author defined creativity as something that is “novel” and “appropriate.”  Novelty means that the act is not an imitation of prior observed behavior, but instead represents something that is new within the context of the “child’s repertoire of behavior.”  (25)  Appropriateness means that the behavior has some measure of usefulness whether measured objectively or subjectively.

In some contexts like math or science, “appropriate” behavior can be objectively measured.  In other contexts like art, play, or similar endeavors, “appropriate” behavior involves some level of behavior that is pleasing, communicative, or meaningful in some way.  Fluency, or the number of ideas a child can generate, has been used to measure creativity but it seems to lack a degree of soundness as a measurement criteria as if the sheer number of ideas would ensure either novelty or appropriateness.

Giftedness, possessing an unusually high degree of talent in one area or high intelligence, is not the same as creativity as the novelty element is usually lacking.  Nor is eccentricity, where a child demonstrates unusual behavior – “being different for its own sake, as a goal in itself, is not sufficient for creativity” – because even though the behavior may be novel, it lacks the appropriate element. (22)

The Ingredients of Creativity:

The author posits that creative success depends on three sets of learnable skills:  domain skills, creative thinking and working skills, and intrinsic motivation. (35)  The author asserts that creativity cannot be evaluated separately from the particular context or domain.  Thus, a child may be a creative prodigy as a piano player, but as a lackluster student. Domain skills refer to the child’s skills in a particular area of creative endeavor (art, music, etc.)

Creative thinking skills include suspending judgment, thinking broadly and systematically, perceiving different patterns, trying new things, and breaking out of molds.  Creative working skills include developing a sense of craftsmanship, persisting through difficulties, concentrating for long periods of time, putting aside difficult problems temporarily, and abandoning unproductive ideas.  Certain personality traits are conducive to creative thinking including self-discipline, perseverance in the face of frustration, independence, tolerance of ambiguity, nonconformity to established societal rules and norms, ability to delay self-gratification, self-motivation, and a willingness to take risks. (49)

Motivation for Creativity:

The author asserts that children are more motivated to act creatively when motivated by intrinsic motivation instead of external factors or rewards.  Intrinsic motivation is influenced by the degree of interest, competence, and self-determination (deciding for oneself) a child has in connection with a creative activity.

Children that are intrinsically motivated love the particular activity; are dedicated to working hard at the beloved pursuit; experience “flow” and “play” while working; and concentrate on the activity itself. (58)  Children that are motivated by extrinsic factors “when they are doing something in order to reach some goal that is not part of the activity itself—for example, earning some money, winning a prize, getting positive recognition, avoiding punishment, meeting a deadline, fulfilling someone’s else’s orders, or getting a satisfactory evaluation.” (54)

Keeping Creativity Alive:

The author noted that creativity can be destroyed in a variety of ways including by an excessive concern with evaluation, external rewards which tend to lessen intrinsic motivation, competition, or restricting choice.  At school, creativity can be reduced by a negative teacher attitude, rote learning, and pressure to conformity.

The author listed a variety of ways to encourage creativity:  “[g]ive your children a great deal of freedom, respect them as individuals, be moderately close emotionally, and place emphasis on moral values, rather than specific rules.” (93)  Parents that give their children freedom help them develop creativity by giving them room to take risks, try new things, experiment, make mistakes, and ultimately, improve upon their creative efforts.  Respect for children gives them confidence and helps them develop their abilities and preserve through difficulties.  Parents that appreciate creativity and that aren’t excessively concerned with social status and social demands help children be more flexible and willing to try new things.

Book Summary: The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life

Since I am hard at work on my creativity degree, I will be posting adapted homework assignments from time to time.  Hopefully they are interesting.

The Path of Least Resistance:  Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life By Robert Fritz

Summary: 

This book is largely about three critical insights that form the basis for the remainder of the book.  First, “you go through life taking the path of least resistance.” Even though people change their behavior, over time they tend to resort back to established patterns of behavior.  Second, “the underlying structure of your life determines the path of least resistance.” The reason why most people fail in their personal efforts to change is that they attempt to change the “flow of the river” (behavior) but do not substantially change the underlying river bed (established patterns and influences impacting behavior).  As a result, most efforts to change are short-lived.  Third, “you can change the fundamental structures of your life.” These three premises combine to form the guiding principle of the book, “you can learn to recognize the structures at play in your life and change them so that you can create what you really want to create.”

“Creative” Problem Solving v. Creating: 

Contrary to the thinking of some other writers on creativity, the author draws a clear distinction between problem solving and creating: “Problem solving is taking action to have something go away—the problem.  Creating is taking action to have something come into being—the creation.”

The difficulty with problem solving is that “what drives the action is the intensity of the problem”.  Thus, when you have a serious problem (like gaining weight), you take steps to reduce the problem (dieting and exercise), which causes the problem to reduce in intensity (you lose some weight).  But then with time, you stop your efforts to lose weight (since the problem is gone or at least is less pressing) until eventually you are right back where you started.

The critical question of creativity is:  “what do I want to create?”  According the author, the “inventiveness of the creative process does not come from generating alternatives but from generating a path from the original concept of what you want to create to the final creation of it in reality.”  Thus, instead of generating random, unrelated ideas (as in brainstorming), the best path is focus all of one’s energies on the problem at hand and make minor variations that all make sense “within the context of the results the creator has in mind.”  Thus, when “you are aware of the final result you want to create, you are able to focus the process, rather than make the process a random one.”

Creating:

The author believes that “creating is a skill that can be learned and developed.  Like any skill, you learn it by practice and hands-on experience.  You can learn to create by creating.”  The first and more important step in creating is to mentally imagine or conceive the desired result.  Creators also have to learn about what already exists, and then take action towards the desired end.  The author also describes about how the act of creating generates momentum:  “Each new creation gives you added experience and knowledge of your own creative process.”

The Orientation of the Creative:

The author comes up with two general personality orientations – “reactive-responsive” and the creative orientation – and then explores them in great depth throughout the book.  The difference between the orientations is that with the first one, people do not create what they genuinely desire but instead merely react to circumstances or choose from a narrowly defined set of acceptable alternatives.

People with the creative orientation know what they truly desire and are motivated primarily by the “desire for the creation to exist”, wherever that desire or creation may be.  These people “create what they create, not in reaction to their emotions but independent of them.”

The Creative Cycle: 

Germination

Germination marks the start of a new project, the time when the new idea or concept is mentally conceived.  It is often an exciting time, full of possibilities, boundless energy, while the magnitude of the work to be done has not yet set in.  According to the author, germination is all about making primary, secondary, and fundamental choices.  A primary choice is something that you want for its own sake.  A secondary choice is one that choose because of the results in brings (it helps bring to pass a primary choice).  A fundamental choice is a commitment to a certain way of living and is the “foundation upon which primary and secondary choices rest”.

Making fundamental choices is the key from moving from a reactive-response orientation to a creative orientation.  The author asserts that “[p]eople in the reactive-responsive orientation have never made an authentic fundamental choice about their own lives.”  Once people make the fundamental choice to be the creators of their own lives, it enables them to pursue their primary and secondary choices, instead of merely reacting to circumstances.

Assimilation

Assimilation is the phase is often where creators give up as it often lacks the boundless energy experienced during the germination stage.  Creators are often very skilled at visualizing the desired result so vividly and clearly in their minds that in some ways marginalizes the importance of bringing into fruition.  One challenge of the assimilation phase is that very often creators underestimate the distance between the vision of the desired result and the difficulty in bringing the desired result into being.  The author also describes this phase as a dualistic process or phase where the creator works to (1) complete the creation itself and (2) the process of becoming a more skillful creator.

Completion

Completion entails exactly what it sounds.  In this phase, the creative vision is carried out in its final form.  One interesting thing about completion is that expands one’s creative energy.  Completing a project frees up and indeed, creates new energy, to start the next creative cycle.  Conversely, when we fail to complete a project, the unfinished project saps our creative energy and discourages future endeavors.

Visionary Thinking: Identifying your Creative Purpose

“Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.” ~Napoleon Hill

This essay addresses creative purpose, the first of the five “P”s of visionary thinking – purpose, potential, possibility, picture, and path – leaving the remaining concepts to be addressed in future essays.  Creativity is a process whereby an idea is brought from its initial conception to fulfillment in reality.  Visionary thinking is one of the first steps (or thinking skills) in the creative process where one formulates an understanding of the desired result (leaving aside its actual achievement for future steps in the creative process).  Understanding the desired result is absolutely critical to its obtainment and constitutes your primary creative purpose.

Great ideas rarely come from nowhere.  If ideas can without being prompted, they would probably go unnoticed or unused.  Thus, in order to prompt a great idea, one must have a primary creative purpose that is truly compelling.  A creative purpose that is unclear or undefined can be transformed into a compelling one with a three-strep process that includes identification, clarification, and intensification.

Identification:

A creative purpose is the desired result to be obtained.  The actual creative problem, as will discussed later, is the “gap” or distance between the primary creative purpose and the present state of reality.  A creative purpose can include creating an entirely new work or solving an existing challenge.  For example, Michelangelo’s creative purpose was to paint an epic, awe-inspiring mural of the earth’s creation on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.  Other creative purposes might include solving a difficult challenge, or improving a particular process.

In contrast to a primary creative purpose, your secondary creative purpose is the variety of reasons for wanting to obtain the desired result.  These secondary reasons can include personal values, or aesthetic, mental, social, emotional, career, societal, or financial considerations.  It is important to understand the secondary reasons because they can and should influence your primary creative purpose.  For instance, if your secondary reasons are essentially financially, you should choose a primary creative purpose that will best accomplish that objective.  Likewise, if your secondary purpose is mainly personal enjoyment, your primary purpose should reflect that as well.  If your primary and secondary purposes are in conflict, you will likely not make much progress towards your primary creative purpose until the conflict is resolved.

Clarification

When clarifying a creative purpose, it is important not to become overly committed to the initial formulation of the purpose.  After all, Albert Einstein emphasized the importance of defining a problem carefully, stating “[i]f I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.”  Properly defining the creative purpose is one of the most important steps in the creative process because working on the wrong creative purpose is a colossal waste of time and the true problem is often not readily apparent.

The first step in clarifying a creative purpose is to review all relevant information related the situation prompting the creative purpose.  This might involve gathering data, facts, and other information about your present situation.  A good example of a highly clarified creative purpose was with Thomas Edison and his invention of the light bulb.  A review of the data would include the fact that other inventors had already demonstrated that the light could be generated from electricity and the many experiments by others with batteries, filaments, and vacuum tubes.  Additional data includes information about how the then existing commercial light system of gas and oil lamps was grossly inadequate and therefore ripe for disruption by a better invention.

The second step in clarifying a creative purpose is to review the secondary considerations supporting the primary purpose.  For instance, in the case of Edison, this would include the fact that he had recently been bested by Alexander Graham Bell, who produced and patented the first authentic transmission of human voice, the telephone.  Additionally, Edison formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City in 1878 with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan and the members of the Vanderbilt family.  Thus, Edison had strong secondary considerations to develop a working prototype as soon as possible to placate his financiers and with the race to patent the light bulb.

The third step is to develop alternative formulations of a creative purpose.  For instance, Edison’s initial creative purpose may have been to invent the light bulb.  But after reviewing information about the attempts by other inventors, Edison would have reformulated his creative purpose to invent a light bulb that would last sufficiently long enough to become commercially feasible.  After reviewing his secondary considerations, Edison would have refined his creative purpose to invent a commercially feasible light bulb and patent it before anyone else.

Due to a compelling creative purpose and tons of persistence, Edison succeeded in inventing a long-lasting light bulb in October 1879 with the first test of a carbon filament lasting 40 hours.  Early the following year, Edison continued to improve his now patented invention, using a bamboo filament that lasted a whopping 1200 hours.  Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park, bragging that “[w]e will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”

Intensification:

Once we have identified and clarified our creative purpose, we must make sure that it is sufficiently intense.  Legendary inventors like Edison had no problem developing a creative purpose that was sufficiently compelling to motivate them to action.  But for mere mortals like us, living in a world with many distractions, developing a creative purpose that is sufficiently compelling can be challenging.

Napoleon Hill taught that the key to achieving goals (or a creative purpose) is to develop “definiteness of purpose” and that “[a]ny dominating idea, plan, or purpose held in your conscious mind through repeated effort and emotionalized by a burning desire for its realization is taken over by the subconscious and acted upon through whatever natural and logical means may be available.”  Through this process, a creative purpose can be transformed into a compelling necessity, one that drives its creator to its achievement.

After all, Plato in The Republic aptly stated that “[n]ecessity … is the mother of invention.”  Plato did not say that a luke-warm wish, an ungrounded hope, a half-hearted desire would prompt invention.  Nothing short of necessity prompts innovation.

Necessity breeds innovation for several reasons.  First, necessity improves focus dramatically.  Individuals and organizations often have many competing objectives and goals.  Resources and efforts tend to get assigned across a number of different projects and objectives, and as a result, are spread thin.  The great thing about necessity is that is a great clarifier between the important and unimportant.  Necessity forces organizations and individuals to reallocate resources in order to achieve necessary objectives.

Second, when something is truly necessary, then people and organizations are willing to devote sufficient resources to solving the challenge and keep them committed for as long as it takes to succeed.  For instance, the creative purpose of the Manhattan project was to create the first atomic bomb to end World War II.  The project started small in 1939 but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost $2 billion (roughly $25 billion in 2011 dollars).  It is doubtful that the project leaders had to fight to keep their budgets during the final phases of the project.

Third, only when things are truly necessary are people willing to persist until they find a creative solution because quitting is not an option.  A good example of persistence is with Thomas Edison, who, when working to invent the light bulb, stated: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  He further noted that “[o]ur greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

Fourth, necessity forces people to try new ways to solve problems by helping us break out of mental ruts and incentivizing us to try new things.  If one day you woke up and electricity was 20 times more expensive than normal, it is likely that you would find a way (or a hundred ways) to conserve electricity in your home.  Some of them might be true inventions while many would involve adopting best practices that were previously known but not adopted.

Fifth, when something is necessary, your brain works harder to find a solution.  The reticular activating system (RAS), the part of the brain that brings relevant information to your attention, is activated when something is truly necessary.  The RAS acts as a filter between the conscious and subconscious mind.  All day long you are saturated with information that is processed by your subconscious mind, but yet only a small portion of it comes to the attention of your conscious mind.  When you have a compelling problem, your RAS is activated and begins to search for information that might possibly be part of the solution.  When it finds the golden nugget, the RAS often brings the information to your conscious mind (often suddenly), sparking a great “Eureka!!!” moment.

An Introduction to Visionary Thinking

This is the first in a series of essays on visionary thinking.  This essay introduces the five Ps of visionary thinking – purpose, picture, potential, possibility, and path – that will be covered in greater detail in an initial series of essays.  A second series of essays will review current research and writings on visionary thinking and cover visionary thinking tools, historical examples, and case studies.  A third series of essays will cover visionary thinking leadership.

The following hypothetical situation illustrates the five Ps of visionary thinking.  Imagine five individuals at a NYC dinner party where the conversation eventually turns to business (they work on Wall Street after all).

Purpose:  The venture capitalist among the group laments that because of the downgrade of U.S treasuries by S&P, I moved all my vast fortune to cash.  I am now earning negative interest on my billions thanks to my special Bank of New York Mellon account.  Does anyone have some good ideas I could invest in?

Picture:  Wouldn’t it be cool to buy some tropical islands and then sell them to people with money to burn?  In fact, we could start a company that builds custom tropical islands, complete with luxury resorts, hotels, and houses.  I am not sure how much we could get for an island though.

Potential:  O my gosh!  I bet we could sell custom made tropical islands for between $250 million to $1 billion each.  We could probably build and sell four or so each year.  With an average selling price of $400 million and a 50% profit margin, we would net $800 million a year.  Before taxes of course, unless we hire my friend at GE, in which case we won’t have to pay any.  If we build them in the Gulf of Mexico, we might even qualify for some of the new Brownfield tax credits issued jointly by BP and the EPA.  I doubt that this idea is feasible though, if it were possible I am sure someone like Halliburton would already be doing this.

Possibility:  I know it can be done.  I saw an episode of “Mega Engineering” on the Discovery channel where they built floating islands in international waters for the libertarians at the Seasteading Institute.  I haven’t a clue about how a couple of unemployed investment bankers would go about it though.  Maybe we should just do another social network IPO instead.  It would be a lot easier.  Starting an actual business sounds hard.

Path:   We can do this.   It shouldn’t be too hard.  We can lease a couple of dredge ships, find a spot where the ocean is shallow, and then move some sand around.  We can contract out the building of luxury condos, hotels and resorts to Donald Trump.  Toll Brothers could probably put up some new houses fairly quickly.

Implementation:  (unscrupulous VC)  These are great ideas.  I am taking them.  Too bad mere ideas in verbal form aren’t copyrightable and you’re all too broke to get patents.  Ha ha ha ha ha (evil laugh).

In the above example, each of the Ps of visionary thinking – purpose, picture, potential, possibility, and path – was provided by different individuals.  For instance, the venture capitalist provided the creative purpose, the identification of potential investment opportunities.  The second man came up with the picture, the mental image of a possible option that would satisfy the creative purpose.  The third person didn’t come up with the idea, but he helped assess its potential.  The fourth man helped establish that the idea was possible (albeit through anecdotal evidence).  The fifth person helped identify a possible path that would ostensibly pave the way to the fulfillment of the creative vision.  The venture capitalist also underscored the importance of implementation, which occurs during the remaining steps of the creative problem solving method.  A creative vision, no matter how good, is next to meaningless without proper and effective implementation.

The creative process is indeed an iterative one.  This means that the vision (including the 5 Ps) is continually refined throughout the remainder of the creative process.  For instance, the vision must be sufficiently clear to motivate someone to continue the creative process.  A vision must initially appear to have potential and be possible; else the visionary will not invest the necessary time and energy into the vision to bring it to fruition.

The actual picture, potential, possibility, and path of a vision do not need to be conclusively established during the visionary stage.  The mental picture (“initial picture”) at the start may be significantly difficult than the vision that makes it into tangible form.  Further, an idea must merely have sufficient apparent potential (“initial potential”) to motivate the visionary to proceed, although it exact potential may not be known until much later in the creative process.  A vision must have a reasonable prospect as being possible to achieve (“initial possibility”), though it may turn out later that the vision is not (yet) possible to achieve.  At the visionary stage, we are merely concerned in finding at least one potential path (“initial path”) as a different path might actually be used later.  If no initial path is visible, one will question whether his or her initial assessment that the vision is indeed possible.

The reason the five Ps are important to visionary thinking even if still in initial form is that they are what separates a true visionary from his or her contemporaries.  A visionary sees an initial mental picture of a vision while others see the mere status quo.  A visionary sees the initial potential of an idea, long before its actual, final, or exact potential is understood.  A visionary sees the initial possibility of an idea, long before its actual possibility has been demonstrated or discovered.  A visionary sees an initial path to achieving the idea, though it may in fact be a dead end and require much more effort to discover an actual path to the fulfillment of a vision.

What separates visionaries from others is their willingness to believe in a vision while it is still in its initial or infancy stage.  Most others, instead, prefer to wait to jump on the bandwagon until after the vision has been made tangible.  This is awfully convenient of them as it avoids the struggle and battle to make an idea tangible, which can be a long and difficult process, full of doubt, confusion, dead-ends, and much invested time and effort.  Visionaries that fail to realize their visions do so because they neither understand nor apply the remaining creative problem solving (CPS) steps.  Non-visionaries never taste the fruit of being a successful visionary, the self-satisfaction in benefiting society with your successful vision.  Perhaps we have no greater fear than being a failed visionary, one who has a grand vision but does not succeed in executing it, which is why society is so quick to ridicule visionaries.

In summary, a visionary sees a vision that is both valuable and possible to obtain, even though all the details have not been worked out.  Thus, while the vision can be very tenuous and tentative at first, the remainder of the creative process will help fill in the detail and make the vision real.  By the end of the creative process, you will hopefully see the picture in final form and understand its actual value.  Further, you will have demonstrated that the vision was actually possible to complete, having found and used at least one workable path to its fulfillment.  But you have to start somewhere, and that is why vision is so important.

Developing Creative Leaders through Creative Problem-Solving & Facilitation Training

Effectiveness as a leader is dependent on a combination of personal attributes, skills, experience, and leadership style.  Training in the creative-problem solving (“CPS”) method and facilitation process (referred to as “creative training”) can help leaders improve their leadership and creative thinking skills, but also gives leaders specific tools (“creativity tools”) to help them produce better decisions and outcomes.  In addition, creativity training helps leaders develop a leadership style that supports creativity and the accomplishment of organizational goals.  Indeed, “creativity itself has been elevated to a leadership style” (IBM, 2010, p. 26) (CEO Study).  Creativity impacts nearly every aspect of leadership:

 Creative leaders share a set of common characteristics that help them innovatively lead   their organizations.  They challenge every element of the business model to realize untapped opportunities and improve operational efficiency.  Leaders grow their businesses through the exploration, selection and execution of diverse, even unconventional, ideas about the potential of new markets.  They leverage new    communication styles to motivate talent and reinvent relationships, both internally and across the supply chain, to create collaborative productivity.  They focus on the bigger  picture — the global marketplace — and how to lithely optimize the collective skills of   their organizations. (IBM, 2010, p. 25) (GHRO Study)

Creative leadership has been defined as “deliberately engaging one’s imagination to define and guide a group toward a novel goal—a direction that is new for the group” (Puccio, Murdock & Mance, 2011, p. 40).  Thus, the difference between leadership that is “plain vanilla” and creative leadership is that creative leadership is needed where the objective (or the path towards achieving the objective) involves some degree of novelty.

Given the importance of creativity in organizational leadership, it is somewhat puzzling why creativity is not a more common attribute in leaders.  Part of this deficiency may result from the inherent difficult in “measuring” creativity.  Even within the creativity field there is active debate about if and how creativity can be measured (this debate has not stopped the development of numerous so-called “creativity” tests) (Sternberg & Lubart, 1999).  Furthermore, creativity is seemingly intertwined with the myths of the lone investor (like Edison or Tesla), eccentric scientist (Albert Einstein), renaissance master (Leonardi Da Vinci), or modern corporate leader (Steve Jobs at Apple), who, while classified as “creative geniuses”, are discarded as outliers beyond the range of ordinary experience.

Because of these difficulties, executive training programs (i.e. MBA) have taken a results-oriented approach to creativity by offering courses in innovation, product development, and strategic planning but have neglected to teach creativity as a distinct but learnable skill.  Some business schools have attempted to develop creativity in their students by immersing them in various artistic disciplines over ten-week periods (Allio & Pinard, 2005).  This “immersion” approach, while having some benefits, at best represents a partial solution as even these researchers noted that “[i]mproving corporate creativity is a systematic challenge” (p. 51).  The result of substantial corporate investment in innovation, innovation training, and “ad hoc” creativity training has had widely varying outcomes, but has produced few leaders that are truly creative.

Creativity training helps leaders increase their ability to set desired outcomes and wield organizational resources to achieve their objectives.  Creativity training does not necessarily need to be long or complicated to be effective.  According to Clapham (1997), simple creativity training focused on basic ideational skills (such as separating divergent from convergent thinking) were virtually indistinguishable from more elaborate creativity training in terms of results.  A recent survey conducted by IBM on global chief human resource officers highlighted the importance of creativity training as part of leadership development initiatives:

To instill the dexterity and flexibility necessary to seize elusive opportunity, companies    must move beyond traditional leadership development methods and find ways to inject within their leadership candidates not only the empirical skills necessary for effective management, but also the cognitive skills to drive creative solutions.  The learning initiatives that enable this objective must be at least as creative as the leaders they seek to foster. (IBM, 2010, p. 19) (GHRO Study) (underline added)

The creative thinking skills model is an ideal model for use in creative training because it assists in the development of the distinct cognitive skills that collectively comprise creative thinking (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2011, p. 54).  Current research in creativity suggests that there are seven distinct creative thinking skills (diagnostic, visionary, strategic, ideational, evaluative, contextual, and tactical thinking) (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2005, p. 62) involved in the creative process.  While these seven thinking skills are improved by creativity training, these thinking skills are not unique or specific to creativity but are used in other fields including leadership (though they usually are not treated so explicitly).  One way to selectively engage and improve each of the seven distinct thinking skills is by using creativity tools in a systematic manner in order to resolve a particular aspect or element of a creative challenge.  Over time, the habitual use of these tools develops and strengthens the leader’s creative thinking skills from “consciously unskilled” to “consciously skilled” and eventually “unconsciously skilled” (Puccio, Murdock & Mance, 2011, p. 292).  Having addressed the connection between leadership and creativity, the remainder of this paper will address how creativity training can aid in the development and use of the creative thinking skills starting with diagnostic thinking (this paper explores all but tactical thinking due to its substantial overlap with current leadership literature).

Diagnostic thinking involves “[m]aking a careful examination of a situation, describing the nature of a problem and making decisions about appropriate process steps to be taken” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2005, p. 62).  Diagnostic thinking is not unique to the creativity field, but instead is practiced by most fields and professions, including leadership.  Effective leadership requires diagnostic thinking—i.e., the ability to take an honest look at the “facts” as they are exist rather than as one might wish them to be.  Holding facilitation sessions as a leader can be a powerful way to “collect” facts that tend to be scattered throughout an organization.  As people throughout an organization have different perspectives and experiences, gathering a widely dispersed pool of participants (“resource group”) increases the chance that the “whole truth” is uncovered rather than a non-representative subset of facts.

Using facilitations to engage in diagnostic thinking is a way to promote a participatory leadership style, which in turn helps promote organizational creativity.  By including people in a facilitation resource group, a leader can help the persons involved in the “problem” become part of the solution, improving both the understanding and resolution of the problem.

The involvement of the participants in the critical exploration of their own process in an intense, open, and confrontational way was an essential discovery.  Results on the groups were highly effective.  Significant changes were seen taking place on the spot. (Keltner, 1998, p.13).

After engaging in diagnostic thinking (and hopefully having gained an understanding of reality), leaders need to engage their capacity for visionary thinking to set the objectives and ideal destination for their organization.  Visionary thinking has been defined as “conceiv[ing] of the result you want to create” (Fritz, 1989, p. 51).  Visionary thinking has become more important over time as leaders cannot rely on extensive data-gathering campaigns before making decisions.  In a world full of increasing complexity and rapid change, “CEOs recognize that they can no longer afford the luxury of protracted study and review before making choices” (IBM, 2010, p. 27) (CEO Study).  Instead, “they are learning to respond swiftly with new ideas to address the deep changes affecting their organizations” (p. 27).

Creativity training promotes visionary thinking by developing greater capacity for imaginative thinking through the use of the affective (emotional) skill of “dreaming”—“to imagine as possible your desires and hopes” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2011, p. 140).  In addition to dreaming, “storyboarding” can be an effective creativity tool that can be used to create a compelling vision.  Storyboarding involves creating a series of visual depictions of the key steps, issues, or events that need to be addressed in order to eventually reach a desired outcome.  The habitual use of dreaming helps make possibility-thinking a deeply-engrained mindset.  A leader with a strong possibility-oriented mindset and leadership style can transform an organizational culture from one that focuses on the status quo and problems (and why things “can’t be done”) to one that believes in and actually achieves great outcomes.

Leaders with strong visionary thinking skills (i.e., imagination) are able to imagine new concepts, products, or services that others may not have considered (or thought of in a lesser sense).  Strong visionary thinking skills also help leaders recognize the potential of ideas, the possibility of those ideas, and a potential path to their fruition.  For example, the concept of portable consumer devices that play electronically-stored music without a CD or tape has been around for years.  Yet it took the visionary leadership of Steve Jobs of Apple to imagine and create a whole new generation of portable music players (iPod, iPhone, & iPad) with accompanying docking systems and an online store.  Apple, through its sleek consumer products, revolutionized the entire music industry and made obsolete clunky MP3s players and existing music distribution channels.

The essential skill that separates visionary individuals from visionary leaders is that leaders have developed the ability to communicate their vision to followers in a compelling and dynamic matter.  Story telling is an effective tool that helps leaders “to create a vision of the future, a coherent sense of the past and a journey for the listener.  In effect, [stories] take the listener from the past, to the present, and on to the future” (Hansen & Parry, 2007, p. 284).  Telling stories is a useful tool to promote visionary thinking and leadership as:

[Stories] provide an appreciation of the possibilities that the future might offer to followers. Put another way, they articulate scenarios that are possible for the future…. [T]hey make sense of and communicate a future that the organization can determine and pursue for itself.  That future is bounded by many barriers, but within that bounded rationality, visionary leaders confirm confidently that the organization can hew out its own future (p.   286).

Over time, the use of dreaming, storyboarding, storytelling, and other creativity tools designed to promote visionary thinking helps leaders develop both a compelling vision and the ability to communicate the vision to followers in a manner that resonates.  However, once leaders have firmly set the vision and communicated it to their organization, they need to engage in strategic thinking to close the gaps between the vision and current state.

Strategic thinking involves “identifying the critical issues that must be addressed and pathways needed to move towards the desired future” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2005, p. 62). Almost all leaders (one would hope) engage in some form of strategic thinking usually as part of an annual or periodic strategic planning process.  Creative leaders, however, are more likely to engage in strategic thinking as an ongoing and iterative process rather than a once-a-year, formal event:

Standout CEOs expressed little fear of re-examining their own creations or proven strategic approaches. In fact, 74 percent of them took an iterative approach to strategy, compared to 64 percent of other CEOs.  Standouts rely more on continuously re-conceiving their strategy versus an approach based on formal, annual planning (IBM, 2010, p. 26) (CEO Study).

Besides engaging in strategic thinking more often, creative leaders approach strategic thinking with greater “openness” and stronger commitment to a complete and comprehensive strategic process.  A leader without creative training might start a strategic planning session with only a few challenge question(s) (such as “how can we increase revenue by X% next year”) without much consideration of alternative challenge statements, and then start into the ideation phase by developing a list of possible strategies and courses of action.  In contrast, a leader trained in CPS would realize the strategic phase of CPS involves both divergent and convergent thinking and push his or her team to generate twenty or thirty (or more) challenge statements ranging from “how might we acquire more market share” to “how might we acquire our biggest competitor” to everything else in between.  Thus, only after careful convergence on the best challenge statement(s) would a creative leader launch into the ideation phase of CPS.  After all, working on the “right” problem is essential to a successful ideation phase as “[t]he more clearly the challenge is stated, more likely you to get the kind of ideas that can be used to solve the problem” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2011, p. 175).

Ideational thinking has been defined as “producing original mental images and thoughts that respond to important challenges” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2011, p. 171).  Ideational thinking is the process of generating numerous ideas that each might potentially resolve (or reduce) the gap between the vision and current state.  While there has been much written about the “eureka” moment in which a brilliant idea is born, more often than not the new idea comes only after hours of tedious labor of ideational “grunt work” and an often prolonged incubation period.  As a result, it is often said that “innovation is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration” (Birkinshaw, Bouquet & Barsoux, 2011, p. 44).

Creative leaders can encourage organizational participation in creativity and idea generation by using brainstorming, forced connections, or similar ideational techniques.  When conducting a brainstorming session, a facilitator with a participatory leadership style (characterized by involving others) as compared to a supervisory style (characterized by directing others) tends to promote increased ideation as a group (Anderson & Fiedler, 1964).  In addition, leaders need to ensure that brainstorming sessions are conducted effectively to get the maximum output from ideational efforts.  For instance, one study found that brainstorming produced more ideas when conducted individually (results aggregated together) than when conducted in groups, possibly because of social inhibition (Lamm & Trommsdorff, 1973).  A possible implication from this study is that when group brainstorming is conducted, efforts need to be taken to put the members of the resource group at ease to promote maximal ideational production.

In order to support and promote idea generation throughout an organization, creative leaders should adopt a leadership style that creates a climate that is conducive to creativity.  One important practice as a leader is to encourage ideas thus “increasing the likelihood that followers will bring ideas forward in the future” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2011, p. 171).  Other important behaviors displayed by creative leaders in order to develop a creative climate include openness to change, involving followers in problem solving efforts, responding positively to new ideas, encourage debate, entertaining diverse perspectives, encouraging freedom and autonomy, encouraging risk taking, and accepting mistakes (p. 271-72).

A common misconception about creative thinking is that it undisciplined thinking, resulting in novel ideas that, if pursued, can sometimes represent a colossal waste of time and organizational resources.  Convergent thinking is an essential skill because “the problem for most large organizations usually isn’t a shortage of ideas.  The real challenge is figuring out how to ferret out the good ones” (Reitzig, 2011, p. 47).  This is especially true in large organizations that generate thousands of ideas, but then have to incur real costs in deciding which ideas to implement and how to implement them.  Leaders should ensure that their organizations have an effective process for evaluating the ideas resulting from ideational efforts and developing the best ideas further.  While convergent thinking is used at every step of CPS, it is most prevalent in evaluative thinking, which usually follows immediately after the ideation phase of CPS.

Evaluative thinking has been defined as “[a]sessing the reasonableness and quality of ideas in order to develop workable solutions” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2005, p. 62) and includes both divergent and convergent thinking.  There are several principles that are essential to successful evaluative thinking.  In contrast to critical judgment, “affirmative judgment” examines what is “right” about an idea (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2011, p. 96-97).  In addition, as ideas are often conceived in a partially formed state, “transforming” an idea means “changing rough ideas into more elaborated and workable solutions” (p.193).  Because even good ideas have weaknesses, it is important to “strengthen” ideas by “focusing first on the positive aspects of an idea and then by seeking ways to overcome shortcomings associated with the idea” (p. 193).  The creativity tools of POINt (positive, opportunity, issues, new thinking) and PPC^o (pluses, potential, concerns, opportunities) are useful because they combine affirmative judgment, divergent and convergent thinking into a single creativity tool focused on evaluating, transforming, and strengthening ideas (p. 193).

Evaluative thinking is an absolutely critical leadership skill, especially when evaluating novel ideas for possible implementation.  “It is possible for [divergent thinking] to be accepted without exploration (i.e., divergent thinking without convergent thinking).  If such novelty proves to be ineffective, we can speak of ‘recklessness,’ which raises the danger of disastrous change” (Cropley, 2006, p. 399).  Ineffective evaluative thinking can potentially result in the rejection of an otherwise effective novel idea (a false negative) or the positive evaluation of an ineffective novel idea (false positive) (p. 400).  When conducted effectively, however, evaluative thinking can identify a potentially valuable idea, and carefully elaborate and support its growth into a fully developed solution that leads to significant positive change when implemented. Because of the potential for prematurely discarding good ideas or implementing bad ideas, evaluative thinking needs to be conducted carefully and in a systematic fashion.  However, even after an idea has been fully developed, it may need to be modified in order to gain acceptance in a particular environment or context.

Contextual thinking has been defined as “[u]nderstanding the interrelated conditions and circumstances that will support or hinder success” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2005, p. 62).  Contextual thinking is a valuable leadership skill because “[t]o successfully introduce novel solutions or to bring about creative change, leaders must learn to skillfully work within their social contexts” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2011, p. 208).  A “stakeholder analysis” is a useful creativity tool for deploying contextual thinking in a given situation.  This tool is used to rate stakeholders from supportive to opposing (and everything in between), and gives the user the opportunity for divergent thinking as to how to modify the solution or persuade vital stakeholders to move to a supportive or at least a non-opposing position (p. 213).  By employing contextual thinking (through a stakeholder analysis or similar creativity tools), a creative leader can build internal or external consensus concerning a novel solution and secure its successful adoption and implementation.

In summary, creative thinking and facilitation training can greatly improve leadership skills.  Creative leaders are skilled at developing organizational vision, defining the “right” problem, and generating large number of ideas.  In addition, creative leaders are able to recognize good ideas and turn them into solutions and gain acceptance of their proposed solutions from decision makers and constituencies.  Further, creative leaders are more likely to promote organizational cultures where creativity thrives, employees are actively fully engaged, and challenges are overcome using CPS.  Companies can realize significant gains in terms of leadership development and actual results by developing the creative thinking skills of leaders through CPS and facilitation training.

Personal Reactions to Research

After reading the research, I have concluded that the CPS thinking skills model and facilitation training offers a robust framework that can be overlaid on current literature and research on leadership.  Current leadership writing lacks a theoretical framework to address creativity that can be supplied by CPS, particularly the seven thinking skills that comprise the creative thinking skills model.  From research, it appears that the business world usually engages in processes that resemble CPS but apply creative thinking haphazardly and less thoroughly than with CPS.  I am interested in reviewing additional research regarding the connection between facilitation, leadership styles, and creative climate within an organization.  It seems that a leader that is willing to promote CPS and facilitations throughout an organization would usually tend to have a participatory leadership style (or be willing to develop one).  Further, CPS and facilitations (assuming they taken seriously) would also tend to promote a creative climate within an organization, which in turn would make leaders more effective.

From reviewing publications such as the IBM CEO study (2010), it is clear that business world recognizes the need for creative leadership.  It is equally clear, however, that business schools and commentaries lack training and experience in the creativity fields, and as a result, have resorted to “ad hoc” training methods in creativity.  While describing the positive impact of immersing students in artistic mediums, Allio and Pinard noted that “[i]mproving corporate creativity is a systematic challenge” (2005, p. 51).  CPS and facilitation training could fill the need for creativity training that is currently missing in business world and leadership literature.  How might we take CPSM and facilitation training into the business world and education?

References

Allio, R. & Pinard, M. (2005). Innovations in the classroom:  Improving the creativity of MBA   Students.  Strategy & Leadership, 33, 49-51.

Anderson, L. & Fiedler, F. (1964). The effect of participatory and supervisory leadership on creativity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 48(4), 227-236.

Birkinshaw, J., Bouquet, C. & Barsoux, J. (2011).  The 5 Myths of Innovation, MIT Sloan Review, 52(2), 42-51.

Clapham, M. (1997). Ideational Skills Training:  A Key Element in Creativity Training    Programs. Creativity Research Journal, 10(1), 33-44.

Cropley, A. (2006). In praise of convergent thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 18(3), 391-404.

Fritz, R. (1989).  The Path of Least Resistance:  Learning to become the creative force in your life.  New York: Fawcett-Columbine.

IBM (2010).  Capitalizing on Complexity:  Insights from the Global Chief Executive Study. Retrieved from http://www.ibm.com (CEO Study)

IBM (2010).  Working beyond Borders:  Insights from the Global Chief Human Resources Officer Study.  Retrieved from http://www.ibm.com (GHRO Study)

Hansen, H. & Parry, K. (2007). The organizational story as leadership. Leadership, 3(3), 281-300.

Keltner, J. (1989). Facilitation. Management Communication Quarterly, 3(1), 8-32.

Lamm, H. & Trommsdorff, G. (1973). Group versus individual performance on tasks requiring ideational proficiency (brainstorming): A review. European Journal of Social Psychology, 3(4), 361-388.

Puccio, G., Murdock, M., & Mance, M. (2005). Current developments in creative problem solving for organizations:  A focus on thinking skills and styles. Korean Journal of Thinking & Problem Solving, 15, 43-76.

Puccio, G., Murdock, M., & Mance, M. (2011). Creative Leadership:  Skills that drive change. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Reitzig, M. (2011).  Is your company choosing the best innovation ideas?  MIT Sloan Management Review, 52(4), 47-52.

Sternberg, R. & Lubart, I. (1999). The Concept of Creativity:  Prospects and Paradigms. In R. Strenberg (Ed.), Handbook of Creativity (pp. 3-31).  Cambridge University Press: New York.

The Importance of Creative Thinking Skills in Executive Leadership

My first essay in the field of “creative leadership” as part of my master’s in creativity studies from Buffalo State, SUNY.  I can now write papers in two equally annoying citation styles (APA & Legal).  As a nod to the legal profession, I cited myself as a reference (see if you can find where) in my own paper:

Creativity is quickly becoming the central guiding force in the world economy, displacing the importance of technology in recent years.  As globalization, political turmoil, and other events combine to cause turmoil and even systematic upheaval, leaders must become increasing adept at adapting.  It should be no surprise that corporate America is increasingly demanding leaders with strong creative skills.  A recent study conducted by IBM ranked creativity as the most important skill needed in Chief Executive Officers (2010).

Leaders with strong creativity skills (referred to herein as “creative leaders”) are well-equipped to guide their organizations through the change and growing pains that accompany corporate renewal.  Indeed, companies like Apple guided by powerful creative leadership teams, have become the shining stars of the US economy even during the most challenging economic times.  Companies with creative leadership grow by creating entirely new markets (Apple, for instance, with its blockbuster consumer products) or by dominating existing markets like some pharmaceutical or entertainment companies that repeatedly deliver blockbuster drugs and movies.

Given the importance of creativity in corporate leadership, it is somewhat puzzling why creativity is not a more common attribute in executive leaders.  Part of this deficiency may result from the inherent difficult in “measuring” creativity.  Even within the creativity field there is active debate about if and how creativity can be measured (this debate has not stopped the development of numerous so-called “creativity” tests) (Sternberg & Lubart, 1999).  Furthermore, creativity is seemingly intertwined with the myths of the lone investor (like Edison or Tesla), eccentric scientist (Albert Einstein), renaissance master (Leonardi Da Vinci), or modern corporate leader (Steve Jobs at Apple), who, while classified as “creative geniuses”, are discarded as outliers beyond the range of ordinary experience.

Because of these difficulties, executive training (i.e. MBA programs) have taken a results-oriented approach by offering courses in innovation process and new product development but have neglected to teach creativity as a distinct but learnable leadership or thinking skill.  Some business schools have attempted to spur the creativity of their students by exposing them to various artistic disciplines over ten-week “immersion” periods (Allio & Pinard, 2005).  This approach has had some benefits but at best represents a partial solution as even these authors have noted that “[i]mproving corporate creativity is a systematic challenge” (p. 51).  The result of substantial investment in innovation, innovation training, and “ad hoc” creativity training has had widely varying outcomes, but has produced few leaders who are truly creative.

Current research in creativity suggests that there are at least seven different distinct creative thinking skills (diagnostic, visionary, strategic, ideational, evaluative, contextual, and tactical thinking) (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2005).  Because most of these thinking skills (diagnostic, strategic, evaluative, contextual, and tactical thinking) are covered in traditional leadership writings (at least to some degree), this paper focuses on visionary, strategic, and ideational thinking.  The presence (or absence of) these thinking skills is often the difference between leadership that is truly creative or is unoriginal, traditional, or even formulaic.

Visionary thinking is defined as “conceiv[ing] of the result you want to create” (Fritz, 1989, p. 51).  The practice of creating a mental picture (i.e., “mental creation”) of a desired outcome is the first step to generating a unique idea or concept, which is eventually transformed into physical reality (Covey, 2004, p. 99).  Visionary thinking constitutes an essential skill for leaders as part of their opportunity and responsibility to “chart the course” for their respective organizations (Maxwell, 2007, p. 35).  Visionary thinking and leadership includes both conceiving of the vision and the communication of that vision:  “A prime leadership skill will be to envision some desired future state of being, and to inspire others to understand and share that vision.” (Morden, 675, 1997).  Visionary thinking is sometimes used to develop mission statements that help guide individuals, departments, or organizations towards a desired destination (Rampersad, 2001).

Strategic thinking involves “identifying the critical issues that must be addressed and pathways needed to move towards the desired future” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2005, p. 62).  Strategic thinking connects visionary thinking with ideational thinking by pinpointing the “gaps” between the desired outcome and current reality with these differences being formulated into challenges (strategic objectives) to be achieved or solved through ideational thinking.

Ideational thinking has been defined as “producing original mental images and thoughts that respond to important challenges” (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2011, p. 171).  Ideational thinking is the process of generates numerous alternatives ideas for resolving the gap between the vision and current reality.  Ideation is the “grunt work” which often precedes the birth of a “new idea” that becomes the foundation of an effective solution that is becomes critical to the eventual realization of a particular strategic objective.

The first step involved in creative thinking is “assessing the situation” through diagnostic thinking.  “Diagnostic thinking” involves “[m]aking a careful examination of a situation, describing the nature of a problem, and making decisions about appropriate process steps to be taken” (Puccio, Murdock & Mance, 2005, p. 62).  In the business world, diagnostic thinking has largely occurred via gathering data as market research or strategic planning.  In some situations, slavishly following data can sometimes lead to massive debacles such as the failed product launch of New Coke in 1985 (Lamoreaux, 2001).  In that case, comprehensive marketing testing confirmed that consumers preferred the test of New Coke over Pepsi or the old Coke formula.  Yet after product launch, New Coke was quickly withdrawn as consumers vigorously objected to the replacement of old coke with New Coke as “destroying an important piece of Americana” (Lamoreaux, 2001, p. 647).

Creative leaders are able to formulate a coherent vision and act boldly even in the absence of the data, or where it could be misleading, conflicting, or altogether incorrect.  In a world full of increasing complexity and change, “CEOs recognize that they can no longer afford the luxury of protracted study and review before making choices” (IBM, 2010, p. 27).  Instead, “they are learning to respond swiftly with new ideas to address the deep changes affecting their organizations” (IBM, 2010, p. 27).

When creative leaders have strong visionary thinking skills, they can produce new ideas, products, or services that can revolutionize the world.  Steve Jobs of Apple, Inc. is an example of a “visionary” creative leader whose company’s products heavily reflect his personal design insights and philosophies.  When a journalist “asked what consumer and market research Apple had done to guide the development of the new product. ‘None,’ Mr. Jobs replied. ‘It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want’” (Lohr, 2011).  By combining business acumen with his legendary design skills (a form of visionary thinking) of consumer products, Steve Jobs has repeatedly created blockbuster consumer products (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.) to become one of the world’s most valuable companies with $27 billion in sales in the first quarter of 2011 (Goldman, 2011).

Sometimes visionary leadership is exercised, not be generating a specific vision, but instead by adopting and supporting the creative vision of another and courageously bringing it into reality in spite of opposition.  Peter Chernin, Chairman of CEO of Fox Entertainment Group, displayed such visionary leadership when he and Jim Cameron committed to producing the movie Titanic based on his instincts and Cameron’s “extraordinary vision.” (Chernin, 2001, p. 248)  At first, this decision appeared to be disastrous as the epic movie started off $15 million over budget before ballooning to nearly double its $115 million budget (at a time when an average movie budget was $50 million).  But after opening, these “losses” quickly turned into enormous profits as Titanic posted record-breaking numbers in international markets.

Executives with strong visionary thinking skills literally “create” the future and thereby “arrive” at the destination significantly before their competitors.  These visionary thinking skills pay off for years to come as their organizations can often leverage their first- or early-mover advantage into market leadership for years to come (like Amazon, EBay, Apple, Google, etc.).  In addition, strong visionary thinking skills prevent leaders from overlooking opportunities within existing markets (For instance, in contrast to Apple, Sony failed to dominate the MP3 player market despite long-standing dominance with personal music device markets).

While most leaders engage in strategic thinking as part of traditional strategic planning processes, creative leaders are more likely to generate unique strategies and obtain truly remarkable outcomes.  This is because visionary, strategic, and ideational thinking combine to generate a larger quantity and higher quality of alternatives than could be obtained without creative thinking skills.  Creative leaders also view strategic planning as an ongoing and iterative process rather than a once-a-year, formal event:

Standout CEOs expressed little fear of re-examining their own creations or proven strategic approaches. In fact, 74 percent of them took an iterative approach to strategy, compared to 64 percent of other CEOs.  Standouts rely more on continuously re- conceiving their strategy versus an approach based on formal, annual planning. (IBM, 2010, p. 26).

Instead of generating unique alternatives like Apple, which expanded adjacently from computer hardware to consumer music hardware and distribution, executives with lower creativity skills will tend to follow traditional business wisdom and deploy algorithmic strategies regardless of the complexities of the situation.  For example, they might acquire competitors, change their distribution strategy, focus on customer service, and so forth.

Strong ideational thinking skills are very helpful to all executives, but especially in certain industries such as the pharmaceutical or entertainment industries that rely heavily on the protections of intellectual property rights.  In these industries, executives are under never-ending pressure to produce blockbuster hits faster than old patents expire or entertainment becomes an irrelevant consumer relic.  When executives have strong ideational thinking skills, they can turn their organizations into powerhouses of ideational thinking that can produce a constant stream of new wonder drugs or chart-topping hits.

Ideational thinking is also very helpful in manufacturing and high-tech industries that require constant process improvement or an entirely “new way of doing things” in order to remain competitive.  Strong ideational thinking skills not only entails of thinking of new ideas, but also finding ways to develop a culture that supports the development of new ideas.  For example, a nationally recognized food service company supported the implementation of process improvements and realized millions in savings annually by installing a knowledge management data base.  This data base contained thousands of minor process enhancements developed at each of its various plants throughout the country and could be reviewed by plant operators to transfer best practices throughout the company in a cost-effective manner (Prince, 2011).

In conclusion, creative leaders can use visionary, strategic, and ideational thinking to develop a clear vision of a compelling future and identify the best pathways and alternatives to reach the destination.  Creative leaders push their organizations to re-examine existing business models and paradigms, frame challenges carefully and in a positive manner, and develop solutions that are novel yet appropriate to the context.  With strong creative leaders, companies can discover opportunities in even mature or saturated industries, disrupt new industries, or even create new markets.

Personal Reactions to Research

After reading the research, I have concluded that the creative problem solving method (CPSM) and thinking skills model offers a robust framework that can be overlaid on current writing and research on leadership and management.  Current leadership writing lacks a theoretical framework to address creativity that can be supplied by CPSM, particularly the seven thinking skills that comprise the creative thinking skills model.  From research, it appears that the business world usually engages in processes that resemble CPSM but is more haphazard and less thorough than with CPSM.  CPSM training would help companies separate their divergent and convergent thinking processes, resulting in better ideas that are thoughtfully evaluated and implemented.

Some examples illustrate this point.  I found leadership articles that extolled the virtue of “visionary” leadership but did not really explain what it means to be visionary or  “how” to be visionary (other than extolling specific visionary leaders or the use of mission statements) (Rampersad, 2001, p. 213).  With the thinking skills model, visionary thinking is treated as distinct, learnable competency with tools such as wishful thinking (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2011, p. 145), storyboarding and storytelling to assist in visionary thinking.  As a side note, I am interested in doing further research and writing on visionary thinking as it frequently gets glossed over because it equated with either brilliant minds (outside of the range of common experience) or as daydreaming (which it is).

Leadership writings also gloss over the role of ideation in generating unique alternatives that are necessary if a strategic plan is actually to comprise new or disruptive thinking.  Older companies in established industries can learn to act like disruptive companies (usually newer or smaller) by developing ideation as a key competency.  I would be interested in doing further reading that looks at the differences in ideational practices and processes (or lack thereof) that are employed between companies in different industries.

From reviewing publications such as the IBM study on CEO (2010), it is clear that business world recognizes the need for creative leadership.  It is equally clear, however, that business schools and commentaries lack training and experience in the creativity fields, and as a result, have resorted to “ad hoc” training methods in creativity.  One article I found discussed how a particular business school used a ten-week immersion program in artistic mediums as way to stimulate creativity, though the authors noted that “[i]mproving corporate creativity is a systematic challenge” (Allio & Pinard, 2005, p. 51).  CPSM could fill the need for creativity training that is currently experienced in the business world and in leadership literature as a gaping void.  How might we take CPSM and creativity training into the business world and education?

References

Allio, R. & Pinard, M. (2005). Innovations in the classroom:  Improving the creativity of MBA Students.  Strategy & Leadership, 33, 49-51.

Chernin, P. (2002). Creative leadership: The strength of ideas: The power of the imagination.  Vital Speeches of the Day, 68(8), 245.

Covey, S. (2004). The Seven Habits of Highly-Effective People.  New York: Free Press.

Fritz, R. (1989). The Path of Least Resistance:  Learning to become the creative force in your life.  New York: Fawcett-Columbine.

Goldman, D. (2011, January 18). Apple sets new record with sales of $27 billion.  CNNMoney.  Retrieved from http://www.cnnmoney.com

IBM (2010). Capitalizing on Complexity:  Insights from the Global Chief Executive Study.  Retrieved from http://www.ibm.com

Lamoreaux, N. (2001). Reframing the past: Thoughts about business leadership and decision making under uncertainty. Enterprise & Society, 2(4), 632-659.

Lohr, S. (2011, January 18). Can Apple Find More Hits Without Its Tastemaker?  The New    York Times.  Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

Maxwell, J. (2001). The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You.  Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson.

Morden, T. (1997). Leadership as Vision.  Management Decision, 35, 668-676.

Prince, F. (2011). Interview by T.N. Turner [Written].  Creativity Cruise Seminar.

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