creativity and innovation

Joanna: 'There's this idea that you can only create great ideas in a free-form, unstructured environment. I don't believe that.'

In Creativity is Not Enough, Professor Ted Levitt (who later became editor of the Harvard Business Review and popularised the term 'globalisation') said interesting things about creativity and innovation:

It is alleged that everything in American business would be just dandy if
industry were simply more creative and if it would hire more creative people and
give them the chance to show their fructifying stuff.

It seems to me that the world would be a better place if more Harvard Professors used terms like 'fructifying stuff' and my fantasy is that, of the two terms, he'd rather be famous for that than globalisation.

Levitt goes on to explain his view that:

...there is really very little shortage of creativity and of creative people
in American business. The major problem is that so-called creative people often
(though certainly not always) pass off on others the responsibility for getting
down to brass tacks. They have plenty of ideas but little businesslike
follow-through. They do not make the right kind of effort to help their ideas
get a hearing and a try.

His point, clearly enough, is that ideation in businesses is relatively abundant. It is its implementation that is more scarce. Which brings us back to one of the conventional distinctions made by people who attempt to define innovation and creativity: namely that creativity is about having the idea, while innovation is about making it happen.

In this sense, Red Stripe had the perfect brief. It had not only to have the big idea or ideas, it had to 'pick one or more of these ideas to develop, and then bring the idea(s) to market'.

Another point made by Levitt in the same article, is that 'in most business organisations, the most continually creative men... are also generally known as corporate malcontents.' For whatever reason (Mike Seery says the team members were chosen 'for their flexibility, enthusiasm and to get a range of experience within the team'), the Red Stripe team members were far from corporate malcontents. Of course, they were not all unreserved admirers of their employer but, by and large, they liked and respected The Economist, were proud to work for it and determined to do well by it during the six months of the project. Perhaps, if the team really had been capable, as Slashdot suggested, of frittering away the six months on drink and debauchery, then they might also have been even more receptive to even more revolutionary thinking:

In the first week, the staffers bought beer, wine, whisky, condoms, flat
screen televisions and gaming consoles.

In the second week, the staffers hired a young graphic artist through the internet for $35 per hour to set up a rudimentary web page asking for innovative ideas.

The next 5 months is a blur.

The final two weeks were a flurry of activities. So many good ideas to review! So little time!

By contrast, it was their respect for The Economist Group and concern not to do anything that might damage its reputation (or concern for their jobs, or conservatism, or pragmatism... call it what you like) that led them to back off from their brief at times. When they could have gone public with the Lughenjo idea and effectively forced the hand of The Economist Group (who would not have wanted to be seen ditching an admirably philanthropic scheme), they deliberately chose to stay silent and seek approval from the GMC first.

Staying with Ted Levitt, he further noted:

There is some evidence that the relatively rigid organisation can build into
its own structure certain flexibilities which would provide an organisational
home for the creative but irresponsible individual. What may be required,
especially in the large organisation, is not so much a suggestion box scheme as
a specialised group whose function is to receive ideas, work them out, and
follow them through in the necessary manner.

One of the bravest decisions that Project Red Stripe took in its early days was to abandon the great ideas that most of its members had brought with them and, in some cases, which they had worked up into virtual business plans in order to get accepted onto the team. (Joanna didn't have an idea at the outset and, as a result, felt somewhat split off from those who were 'awash with them'.) After presenting their ideas to each other on a cold day in Regent's Park, the team set about finding ways to harvest ideas from Economist readers and other interested parties. In using this crowdsourcing approach, they defied James Surowiecki, the granddaddy of crowd stuff, who claims - in the words of Dave Pollard - that 'despite compelling evidence that executives and experts are poor at making decisions, and that the collective wisdom of large numbers of people is very much better at it, few businesses rigorously canvass their employees and customers for anything more than inconsequential assessments after the decisions have already been made.'

For the first few weeks they simply worked on developing a workable scheme for collecting, collating, sorting, classifying and evaluating these ideas.

As a result they put themselves at a stroke in exactly the position of the 'responsible' evaluation group rather than that of the 'irresponsible' creative individual.

One reason this was such a bold decision was that it effectively undermined one of the most significant 'glues' that the team started out with - the notion that they could come up with an idea that would change the face of business, or the world, or - at the very least - The Economist.

In doing so, they freed themselves temporarily from the clutch of the becoming-whale-of-an-idea.

Dilemmas:

If good ideas are relatively abundant but the ability to commercialise them is relatively scarce, it may be useful to focus on the latter. But, if you do that, you might end up missing out on the really good idea, which no-one has had yet.

The crowd will come up with good ideas but it may also be tainted by lowest-common-denominator thinking.

A less responsible (or more malcontent) bunch than the Project Red Stripe team might have pursued the idea of a philanthropy website and launched it in a blaze of publicity without approval from the GMC. The Economist Group would have got 'businesslike follow-through' but would also have got an innovation it didn't want.

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Credits:

Innovation depot: Chris Denbow

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drifting, angst and pan-ic

Joanna: 'I feel a little bit paralysed at the moment.'

One of the many tensions (and I mean tension in a Newton's 3rd Law kind of way) apparent in Project Red Stripe related to direction-finding, goals, intentions and wandering around.

With its very broad remit, Project Red Stripe gave its members enormous scope for 'wandering about' and looking for, or waiting for, inspiration. Now, of course, this is in the very nature of an innovation team and one of the primary characteristics that distinguishes it from a more goal-oriented project team. Yet, this innovation team had a very clear sense of having a goal: 'creating an innovative and web-based product, service or business model'. It just didn't yet know what the goal looked like. Its task was to locate the goal and then get there.

This set up tensions from the outset. There was a feeling amongst the team at different times that they were wasting time. Against this was the clear sense that the team ought to take its time in identifying the right idea - because there was surely no point in spending six months writing business and marketing plans, developing websites and other infrastructure, working with partners and commercialising the idea, if they hadn't chosen the right one in the first place.

Drifting

This often reminded me of 'drifting'. Drifting has been developed as a performance art, as autobiogeography, as a philosophical study and as a literary style (as well as a way of exploring the urban landscape). Its masters and mistresses (if you can master and mistress something as elusive as drifting) are the Wrights and Sites team.

It seems to me that drifting has particular relevance to the innovation project team where it pays attention to the idea of determination. Baz Kershaw, formerly Professor of Drama at Bristol University, although he's not a drifter as far as I know, has talked about the way in which our experience at a zoo is 'over-determined': signs, paths, maps and guides structure the route we walk; information notices structure the way we look at and experience the creatures; cages, enclosures and access points structure the way we observe and what we observe - and all this in addition to the particular memories and experiences we may bring, the cultural associations and responses that we may carry with us, and so on. Cities have a similar effect: there are explicit and implicit rules about where we can go and where we can't; where we can stop, stand and sit and where we must walk; what we can look at and what we can't; even how fast we should walk or on what side of the pavement.

All of this 'over-determination' in the city or in the zoo makes it hard to 'just drift'.

Some of these same rules come into play in an innovation project. The team members have their own expectations and associations, have their own experience of groups, reactions to rules and authority, working preferences and so on. They will also tend, such being our habit in this country and at this time, to look for some rules and guidelines, to establish where the power and the authority lies, to set down - if there aren't any already in place - codes of conduct, attendance times and working policies.

Inevitably, this sought-after regimentation can be at odds with the 'right to roam', which is the passport of the innovative and inventive mind. Just as drifting largely dispenses with maps and destinations and attempts to journey without intention (what Walter Benjamin - quoted here - has called 'the rhythmics of... slumber'), so we can suppose that innovation might attempt to dispense with as many limiting conventions as possible, in order to facilitate the emergence of ideas. Though creating a regime within which regimentation is discouraged is itself paradoxical.

Panic

One of the by-products of drifting or, more specifically, of the absence of rules, form and shape that accompany it, is a sense of panic. There is a hegemony of rules and shapes and laws precisely because we feel chillingly uncomfortable without them. Phil Smith has described this kind of panic as an 'encounter with everything (else), an intense, but relatively common initiatory Pan-ic - an experience of causeless, but sited dread' - the hyphenation of pan-ic reminds us of the word's Greek origins and associations with the god Pan and the word pan meaning everything.

In this form, panic is closely related to Kierkegaard's existential angst or dread. This dread is explicitly connected with freedom and choices, with the uncertainties and unboundariedness that freedom entails: 'the dread felt by innocence, which is the reflex of freedom within itself at the thought of its possibility.'

That may sound ridiculously grand. I'm sure none of the members of the team felt they were experiencing existential angst. But there was a sense of panic at times, when the team realised that they could do anything, but that they only had six months to do it. And I also connect that panic with their need to find the 'big idea', the becoming-whale-of-an-idea.

So, the Red Stripe team sometimes wandered around without a clear sense of what was going to happen next and without clear rules about how it might be going to happen or what they should be doing about it. Jurgen Habermas talks about something like this when he discusses 'action oriented to success' and 'action oriented to understanding' and the different modes of thinking and communication that they require (logical and pragmatic for the first; rhizomatic and affective for the second).

Movement artist Sandra Reeve says much the same when discussing action preceding intention:

In Move into Life practice, I often start from movement tasks or moving with no
fixed intention in a natural environment and allow associations, feelings,
images and ultimately meaning to emerge from a constantly shifting context.
Sometimes I introduce a theme, in order to guide the direction of my creative
response... This corresponds with Gibson's theory of affordances: that is, how
we pick up information appropriate to our needs directly from the
environment.

In any case, the team was 'drifting'. Instinctively, that seems like an appropriate thing for an innovation team to do; but it's also an uncomfortable thing to do at any time, and especially in a business context.

For myself, I would choose this state of drifting as the most profoundly productive one. Others would say that safety is a prerequisite of productive enquiry or creativity. Arie de Geus maintains that 'fear inhibits learning'. Probably all these views are correct. Certainly there are many, including some members of the Red Stripe team, who work hardest and fastest when they know where they're going. Perhaps it depends on the make-up of your team, or perhaps your team can be invited to approach panic and safety in a new light. In any case, we could say that the issue of drifting and panic and over-determination needs to be addressed explicitly, at least if safety is intended.

One possible approach would be to invite team members to compare their situation to that of the participants in Erotourism where two lovers travel independently to a chosen city without mobile phones or any pre-arrangements and set about finding each other. There is a destination, but no map.

[Incidentally, I like these words of Borges: 'la inminencia de una revelación, que no se produce' (the imminence of a revelation that does not take place). They seem to me to characterise much of the early part of Project Red Stripe's existence and, perhaps, that of many other such innovation projects].

Weaving

Just before we leave the question of wandering around:

Tim Ingold, writing about String Bags and Birds' Nests, suggests that we might look at construction as a kind of weaving, rather than as a kind of making:

Whereas making defines an activity in terms of its capacity to yield a finished object, weaving focuses on the skilled character of the process by which that object comes into existence. Three important properties of technical
skill are highlighted. First, skill is not a property of the individual human body in isolation but of the whole system of relations constituted by the presence of the artisan in a richly structured environment. Secondly, rather
than representing the mere mechanical application of external force, skill involves qualities of care, judgement and dexterity. Thirdly, skilled action has a narrative quality, in the sense that every movement grows rhythmically out of the one before and lays the groundwork for the next.

Perhaps innovation, as well as construction, can be looked at as a kind of weaving.

Dilemmas:

Drifting 'aimlessly' can be a profoundly creative process, but it's also anxiety-inducing. Participants (and Finance Directors) may want something more regimented. Rules and guidelines can offer direction or serve as blinkers.

It's vitally important to ensure that you've picked the right idea before embarking on commercialising it. But equally important to know when to stop looking for the right idea and accept that the one you have is good enough.

As Oliver Burkeman says, 'attempts to induce good feelings through top-down effort are self-defeating - whether imposed on workers by management or imposed on yourself by your rational brain... you (or those you manage) get caught in the psychological trap known as the double bind - the unspoken demand whereby, in the words of the philosopher Alan Watts, "you are required to do something that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily"'. Just how do you direct people to do the right thing?

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Credits:

Wordle: www.wordle.net

Zoo signs: Paul Downey, Bell and Jef, Edinburgh Blog, Tup Wanders, Paul Downey, Kate Sheets, Tim Parkinson

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