Innovation and Engagement: Engage Me, Please

Yesterday morning I stood facing more than 100 people--some skeptical, some yawning, all business unit leaders from a big company that makes good cheese--about to help them gain insight into being more effective and innovative collaborators.

As a facilitator and educator, I had and have one primary goal: to fully engage the participants. I do this best when I move out of the way and coax them to step up, to risk, experience and reflect together. This "coaxing" is most consistently successful when participants are challenged to DO something. Not just listen or react, but to act. I ask them alone, in pairs or in groups to complete a task, to solve a problem, to creatively stretch their brains (and, ideally, their bodies), to make decisions together, under a time constraint but in an environment that supports risk and creativity. They tend to have no choice but to jump in and, before they realize it, they are engaged, learning and enjoying themselves as well.

We foster innovative practices by constantly discovering new ways to engage people. Historically, companies created a reliable, unchanging product and had customers adapt to them. No longer--one of the key trends in business innovation during the last decade is to collaborate more with customers and partners. That becomes your competitive advantage: to engage customers in the process and the product--i.e., customize for them as much as possible--in ways that other companies do not or have not thought to do.


"sorry, I'm not here right now" video installation documentation from Christian Matts on Vimeo.

Even art, I believe, is most successful by finding new ways to engage. This weekend I braved the frozen night and an eerie west-side Chicago warehouse district to attend the Motion Graphics Festival and an event called Mashitude, featuring innovative uses of projection, light, video and images. My friend and I were titillated by the unusual display of moving images on all sorts of surfaces--hanging ribbons, globes--but each held our attention only briefly. Then we came upon Christian Matts' installation (above). At first we were merely intrigued but suddenly we realized that the flickering, stop-motion people on the screen were not pre-recorded. They were us. They were strange but somehow hypnotizing images of those of us watching or walking by, slightly delayed and slightly jumpy. Art had become an engaging playground where we were not just distracted by something new but intimately involved in the moment's creation.

What are examples of surprising ways you have been engaged or have engaged others in learning, in business, in art?

Diverge with Me...

The first step in understanding creativity is realizing the distinction between divergent and convergent thinking. "Diverging" is your ability to open the door of possibility, to consider alternatives, to turn on your faucet of ideas. "Converging" is narrowing, closing, editing, using your judgment to decide on a single option rather than many. We need both ways of thinking to be creative, both to innovate, and as problem-solving humans we are constantly opening and closing, diverging and converging.

But here's the thing: diverging and converging are two completely different mindsets. Most of us have pretty well-developed censor-evaluators in our head that often and impressively demonstrate convergent thinking. But we learn at a young age that a divergent mindset--actively following our imagination without judgment, veering away from "normal," offering ideas that might not seem smart or rational or right--gets us laughed at in the classroom and shot down even now, with a sarcastic comment or deadly eyebrow, in the conference room.

Creativity practitioners like me often tell the story of asking a kindergarten classroom, "How many of you can draw, sing, dance?" and all hands go up. But just a few years later there are fewer volunteers, and by adulthood you don't dare raise your hand unless you're willing to publicly prove your expertise or talent. Over time, we not only diverge less but many of us lose the urge to diverge.

But we can't have that anymore. We no longer have the luxury NOT to be innovative. And there is no way around the fact that divergence is the engine of creativity and the divergent mindset is required for innovation. We need to practice, encourage, and develop the skills and competencies of divergence. So...how do we reclaim that childhood urge to diverge?

Inaugurating a New Mindset

“As President I intend to work with you to write the next chapter in the story of American innovation,” so said our now-President Barack Obama to a crowd at Google more than a year ago. And, on inauguration day, we usher in a new era in this country that I hope will foster a collective creativity, a renewed United States of Creativity.



This inauguration does indeed signal a great change of mindset: Bringing in new thinking as well as new actions, committing to innovation and new approaches to tackle problems we haven’t been able to previously solve.

To inaugurate this auspicious moment myself, I decided last night to go to the opening of a local Zen center here in Chicago, to clear out the clutter of my mind. It was the first time I had been to a Buddhist meditation in a while, and I was amazed that the Dharma teacher, following the sitting and short ceremony, focused in his talk about our need, individually, for a "change of mindset." That is the task for all of us right now, he said, and he referred to the great American poet Gary Snyder who said this:

We must act both as if our hair is on fire and as if we have all the time in the world.

Dancing with the Bird

What’s the best way to shake up your mindset and spark new perspectives? Try dancing with a bird.

I was introduced to my first dancing bird thanks to my Argentinian cousin Marcelo, whom I recently visited in Florida. There are many adjustments I need to make when I enter the go-with-the-flow world of Marcelo and his Argentinian friends--words and food and time and manners all change. And then there is Nelson the Cockatoo, always a main attraction in the living room.

“Do you want me to put on some disco?” Marcelo asks.
“Why not?” I answer and he puts on Chic. As “Le Freak” plays, I see Nelson vying for attention, doing the bob, the weave, the fake-left and the use-the-beak-to-boogie.

So I get up to dance with him, which is incredibly challenging: his moves are actually unbelievably inventive, and he starts and stops without warning. Usually, I try to keep up with him. Other times, he imitates a move I make. Just like hanging out with my cousin and just like the great art of improvisation, here are the rules:

Creativity Rules for Dancing with the Bird
1. Sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow.
2. The bird (and the Argentinians) will keep surprising you so it’s only fair that you keep surprising them (and yourself).
3. You have to be light on your feet so you’re ready to change.
4. You’re always forgiven if you do it wrong.

Creativity and Education with Sir Ken

I recently spent time with Sir Ken Robinson, the British thinker now living in L.A., whose message is one that I am trying to trumpet as well: We need to bring more creativity into our education system, our businesses and our lives. If you haven’t got to experience his hilarious wit and incisive commentary, check him out here speaking for TED:
I hung out with him as part of the Columbia College Chicago “Conversations in the Arts” in December. I talked to him about the need for building creativity competencies in education and organizations, and he shared with the audience two main points: 1. That we live in unprecedented times, revolutionary even, which have no historical precedent and that need creative approaches to address our challenges 2. That we have to think differently about our natural capacities—that we have a crisis of human resources and now is the time to tap our own resources more effectively. He said that “the great adventure of America” has thrived on its “multiplicity of talents” and that “like natural resources, human talents our buried deep” and must be uncovered. Too many of us are disconnected from what we are good at doing and love to do, and education’s challenge is to help each person access their great talents. To do that, he said, we need more than reform: we need to transform education. U.S. education, like many systems around the world, is still stuck in an “industrial mindset,” sending students through a linear progression of subjects and skills, hoping they pop out at the end of the assembly line to be properly employed. But the world doesn’t work that way anymore. Even a college education is no assurance of a job, so the “economic ideology” behind education is no longer relevant. Teachers should be hired to teach students, he says, not subjects, and our main goal should be to uncover and unleash the natural talents each of us has. I’m looking forward to reading his new book about talent, The Element, coming out this month.

Change: Curious and Challenging

I just saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a film both about getting younger and getting older, and I thought about the changes throughout my lifetime and the changes that I still want to make before I’m too old. Change: It's on our country's mind, and often the key challenge for organizations, teams and individuals I work with.

Your ability to change in the moment—to take a different route, to experience something new, to look at something differently—is directly related to your ability to be creative and innovative. But more sustaining change is something very different and one of the great challenges as we age.

As the Benjamin Button explains about life, “You can change or stay the same; there are no rules to this thing.” I find that to be very true but also not quite true. There are rules-of-a-sort that can help us invent new ways of doing things, be more innovative, change. As I design a retreat or seminar for a client, I might call these groundrules or principles or tools or techniques. Ask "What if...," build on ideas, give permission to fail, encourage unusual perspectives. The promise is: Learn them, follow them, adjust your behavior accordingly, and you will change.

But will you? Can we? While I can describe the mindset for innovation and provide insights and habits that might foster it, there is great mystery to how to really make change, particularly individual change, happen. Without a crisis or external forces acting on us: How do we really change our habits, behaviors, attitudes?

Can we Jam?

Here’s what I want: to help you and all Americans and everyone be more creative and expressive, and to help bring your unique talents out into the world.

Now, I have my different reasons for this.

Professionally, I will say that all organizations must be more innovative in order to survive and thrive, to change as the times demand, to have a competitive advantage, to build a workplace that engages and brings out the best in all employees.

Publicly, I will say that as a culture we must be more creative to solve the real challenges we face and to live more satisfying, authentic, successful lives.

But personally, I really just want to jam--get together to explore and share and experiment with our creativity in many forms. If you're musically inclined (or want to be) and are in Chicago, come join me the first Friday of every month at Old Town School of Music for our Creativity Jam and give it a go.