Letting Your Freak Flag Fly

"Creativity is basically subversive. So you have to have subversive elements in the organization to keep yourself awake and evolving." ~Dan Wieden

You're an original. And it is through originality (one of the three key competencies of creativity) that we make the breakthroughs, imagine new possibilities and create the commerce and art that sustains and enriches our lives.

But despite the general belief that we champion the individual in America and that we are each encouraged to follow our passion, the pressure to conform is powerful and everywhere. School, work and most families urge the practical path and end up, whether intentional or not, squelching originality and imagination.

But now more than ever we need you to let your freak flag fly, even in the stuffiest organization.

I was reminded of this when I recently facilitated a creativity session for a team of trainers at a rather conservative and highly regulated insurance company. The office was sterile, with little color and an almost morgue-like silence. But after closing the conference room door and facilitating a few exercises, I realized how creative the group was. One of the participants explained, "We are considered the freaks here, and while it is frustrating that we have to to rein in some of our imagination, we actually feel very appreciated." The more freakiness allowed, the more new thinking. Companies that find ways to harness originality--Google's policy of 20% passion time, where people can work on whatever they want one day out of five, leads to 50% of their new products--are constantly exposed to new ways of doing things and can naturally adapt and innovate better.

Now, creativity is not the same as freakiness; the divergence of freakiness has to be balanced with the convergence of value, meaning or appropriateness. Joaquin Phoenix has become the butt of this joke, proving in this video that just being strange and detached is not creative.

But we need to celebrate what makes us unique, what rocks our boat in a way that might not a neighbor's. We need to add color to the blank walls around us. We need this for our own well-being and to make us a more innovative culture. What can you do today or this week that lets your freak flag unfurl just a bit more?

Oscar Gets More Creative

Did you notice a more creative mind behind this year's Oscars? There was something a bit more fresh and original in last night's Academy Awards, particularly in the first half, beyond the always-welcome heartfelt speeches (Thank you to Penelope Cruz, below) and funny presenters (Ah, Tina Fey and Steve Martin).



It was a willingness to try something new, something untested, and in many cases something more authentic than usual. Creativity is most commonly defined as our ability to come up with both something new or original (to diverge, as I've described previously) and something that fits, that "works" (or converges). I found it very satisfying to see particularly fitting choices also be surprisingly new. I'm thinking, for example, of the introduction to the best screenplay categories, where we got to follow the actual words of the written screenplay while the movies scene played out. Never before had I seen something so aptly demonstrative of the actual screenplay process. We saw through the eyes of the screenwriter in a way we rarely do.

I also found the Hugh Jackman opening number to be fresh, thanks in large part to its improvisational (bringing Anne Hathaway up on stage) and recession-influenced feel. It demonstrated another helpful principle of creativity: using a creative constraint to foster more inventive ideas. By limiting the scope to a low-budget approach, the writers and set designers actually were able to turn on the creative faucet even more powerfully. By narrowing your choices, you often can tap into more--and more original--possibilities.

In my own creativity competency panorama, using creative constraints are part of the skill of experimenting, key to the competency of fluency, that is fueled by curiosity and playfulness. You try it: next time you're not sure what to do with a free evening, give it some constraints like: I have to stay in a six block area, I can't spend any money, I can't speak aloud. You'll tap into ideas you may never have considered otherwise.

I also loved the use of the five former winners coming out to praise the current nominees--something we haven't seen before and something that kept with a more intimate approach of the evening. What else did you find to be creative about the Oscars?

Calling for Silo-Busting Comprehensivists

"Man is designed to be a comprehensivist." ~Buckminster Fuller

Despite the Bush reputation to the contrary, we in America tend to glorify "experts" and look upon them as the ones to solve our most difficult challenges. I am indeed relieved that Obama is surrounding himself and listening to experts. But expertise in our culture is predicated on creating silos, where people speak different languages and build on theories that effectively ignore the other silos. We see this both in the academic world, where most disciplines cannot even speak to each other, let alone us regular people, and in the business world, where people in one department often have no idea what is happening in others.

Truly creative solutions--and real innovation--happens when we break down silos and make new connections among different domains. The great American thinker Buckminster Fuller (in the essay “Emergent Humanity”) warned that in evolution “overspecialization leads to extinction. We need philosopher-scientist-artists—the comprehensivist, not merely more deluxe quality technician-mechanics.”

I just had dinner with three creative friends in academia, all trying to break down silos in the academic world: Paul, bridging science and religion is his dissertation; Linda, bringing movement into the college learning experience; Michelle, helping business leaders learn from artists. They are trying to cultivate comprehensivists that will be better equipped to solve the complex challenges facing us. This is the kind of innovation we need in education.

While there is unquestionable value in expertise, we need a new legion of comprehensivists (whom I also like to call "Renaissance People"), who can faciliate conversations and connections between silos to help our culture leverage the best thinking available. In schools that means more multidisciplinary projects and curriculum. In organizations that means cross-functional teams and more people who distill ideas by drawing from different departments and stakeholders.

The Heart of an Original

Being single during Valentine's ain't no love song, but one thing I do know about the heart is that it is indispensable for your creativity, which, after all, might be best defined as the successful merging of the head and the heart. The most creative among us are the ones who are emotionally alive and who honor their passions and pursue what they love.

Isn't it funny, though, that in my business of helping organizations be more innovative--and colleagues be more collaborative--the surest way to lose a client is to use a word like "heart."

Leaders of adult groups often relay the same fear when we are discussing an upcoming innovation training or any teambuilding or learning occasion: "Nothing touchy-feely, please!" We might say we want to improve our creative or collaborative skills, but not if we have to risk embarrassment, access unwelcome feelings or reveal weaknesses (or, heaven forbid, sing Kumbaya).

We give lip service to the heart, but our culture supports an unbridgeable division between the head and heart--particularly at work and at school. In part because we have no formal training in emotional development, reason wins out over feelings, and being right wins out over being imaginative.

But your feelings and your heart are essential for creativity. The most creative splash around in the sometimes dirty waters of emotion. I've written about two other competencies for creativity: Fluency and flexibility. The third is originality, which requires us to access what is most unique and most reflective of the unexplainable impulses of our heart. The hallmark of originality in a person or organization is the ability to harness the heartful right brain--which houses your imagination, your intuition, your skewed perspective, your latest dream, your cockamamie theory.
Will Marre, an insightful commentator, civic and business leader, and founder of the American Dream Project, recommends three ways to best ensure your future success during these economic times:
1. Express your design. Only you, the unique you, can’t be duplicated. Be you.
2. Pursue your desire. Being amazing requires inner motivation.
3. Make love your prime motive.

We need to help individuals of every age access and build upon their natural talents and passions, where their heart is already active and where they can most successfully mine for creative gold. So please do us all a favor and cultivate your originality, Poncho.

Pardon my Mindset

I don't know about you but when Saturday comes along, I feel different, even if I am working, even if I am doing exactly the same thing I was doing during a weekday. This weekend mindset completely affects everything I do--it's a powerful (and, in my case, less stressful) lens through which I perceive, experience and evaluate my world.

"We don’t see the world directly," writes previously-blogged-about Sir Ken Robinson, who is trying to change our mindset about education and work. "We perceive it through frameworks of ideas and beliefs, which act as filters on what we perceive and how we perceive it. Some of these ideas enter our consciousness so deeply that we’re not even aware of them." See his recent ChangeThis article for more.

Most often our mindset ends up choosing us--and we each tend to have certain default mindsets that strongly influence our values, our choices, our feelings about life. The challenge is getting unstuck from certain mindsets that don't allow us to use our creativity and that limit us from opening to new possibilities.

I'm a bit obsessed about mindset but for a few key reasons. One is that a crucial part of being creative personally is your ability to move from one mindset to another, to explore not just different ideas, domains of knowledge and cultures but also different ways of thinking--being what I like to call multiparadigmatic, part of the flexibility competency of creativity.

The second is that being aware of mindset--which is invisible and about which we have little real conversation in our culture--may be the best bet we have for real transformation. I can't tell you how many times recently I've heard leaders use "mindset" to describe what is really needed to change politics, war, culture. The widespread popularity of the Law of Attraction, sometimes known as "the secret" in spiritually-oriented communities, is all about mindset.

I will continue to describe the mindset of innovation in this blog and in my upcoming book, but there are many other cases of mindset shifts that I believe to be crucial for sustainable change. I already mentioned the short-term/long-term shift needed for America and capitalism. Another is medical. Our current mindset: Block disease, take drugs to stop/eliminate what the body is producing. Future mindset: The body naturally seeks out health and balance, so we need to remove blocks, facilitate natural healing (for more, see Dr. Andrew Weil). More on that and other mindset shifts later.

Do you agree that we have at least some ability to choose our own mindset? Can we have more power over it rather than it having power over us? Here's to a lucky mindset for Friday the 13th!

The Unsung Skill of Initiation

Last week at a business lunch event, the start of the program was delayed because the one line for the buffet table (see similar one, right) was stretching way out the door. I joked about the problem with a colleague and wondered why, like in any traffic jam, the people in front of me are so dang slow.

But I'm sure you know how we could have speeded up the process, right?

The mindset of innovation is one in which you and the people around you are constantly considering how to make things better and encouraging each other to offer ideas. A creative person will both seek out ways to solve problems--how do we get people their lunch quicker--and initiate possible solutions.

Even if you thought to try to solve the lunch lag problem (would you have?), you, like me, probably thought it wasn't your place to do anything about it.

The first of three key creative competencies I write about is Fluency: Your ability to generate many ideas. Just like you are fluent in another language, this competency refers to your facility in turning on the faucet of your ideas. We often keep that faucet shut because we have learned as adults that we must edit before we speak, that it's not appropriate to point out flaws or inefficiencies, that it's safer not to question or to reveal our sometimes idiosyncratic imagination. The less frequently we turn on the faucet, the harder it is to do so.

The skill, then, that we need to practice is initiating. That might sound elementary but it's not. A common complaint I get from managers is that their employees don't initiate enough. Our failure to initiate, whether it be for fear of judgment or literally because we have stopped using the muscle, is what limits our creative scope for new opportunities and solutions. It keeps us in watching TV rather than out having a new experience.

Now, about ten minutes after I got my food, someone did initiate--thankfully--and solved the lunch traffic jam by...you guessed it, moving the tables from the walls to create two lines. But we wasted perhaps 15 minutes because no one initiated before that time. The more you initiate, the easier it gets, so why don't you give it a go by adding a comment right now below...

Short- vs. Long-Term Mindset

Innovation requires a shift in mindset--one that honors not only divergence and experimentation, but also one that embraces the long term rather than just the short. To be innovative, we have to be able to try and fail and learn and try again without giving up on the longer term vision.

American culture has been stuck on the short term. We have not been able to act on energy policy or health care or social security, because of this mindset. Short-term profits and a fickle stock market have a stranglehold on business decisions. Short-term promises dictate political decisions. The 24-hour news focuses only on the often-trivial latest controversy. We know we're an instant gratification culture, but that way of being has caught up with us.

During a crisis it's harder to worry about the long term, which is why innovation needs to be a consistent strategy for all companies and organizations, when times are good or bad. But I am struck by how many voices are now joining in on the long term emphasis that Obama has helped bring to the cultural table. Check out "the corporate experts" giving "survival tips" Feb. 9 issue of Newsweek (click on logo to read for yourself):

The general message is that while companies need to conserve cash, they can't just play defensive because the short term dictates; they have to seek opportunities out of economic adversity. Craig Barrett, former Intel CEO, urges more investment on research and new product development to get out of the recession: "It's time for long-term thinking in an environment that has too often been dominated by quarterly statements."

Having a long-term mindset is not easy for Americans and especially not easy during times of fear and insecurity--two qualities that are incompatible with creativity. How might we shift as a culture away from our obsession with the short term?

How many hats do you wear?

One of the key creativity competencies is flexibility--your ability to come up with different kinds of ideas, see from different perspectives, adapt to various and new circumstances. I am lucky to constantly build my flexibility because of how many different hats I wear and how much variety I have in my life as a consultant and as an explorer of experiences.

A few snapshots of my day today:
In a morning visit with a potential client, wearing my hat as innovation consultant, I got to see and experience the hyper-technology of the 21st century--a roomful of people who each sat in front of 12 computer monitors, stacked in rows of four, their eyes and fingertips analyzing up-to-the-second changes in financial information and news.

At lunch, wearing my hat as a diversity facilitator and board member of Leaders United, an African-American/Jewish coalition group here in Chicago, I sat in a corporate meeting room, incongruously listening to Sirak Sabahat, an Ethiopian Jew in a white head scarf, who told his story of walking on foot for a year, seeing others die of starvation along the way, to his eventual destination to his holy land of Israel. His story has become a movie, Live and Become, in which he acted, described here in an interview:



Then in the afternoon, I got off the El at 18th street and suddenly I was in virtual Mexico, surrounded by carcinerias and other Spanish stores in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. My exposed flesh froze for a few blocks as I made my way to a charter school serving Latino students. There I met with a group of teachers, wearing my hat as an education consultant offering in-service programs, and talked with them about building a more collaborative learning community.

Three different worlds, three different hats, three different experiences that challenged me and opened my eyes. What different hats do you wear and how might you try more on in your life?

"Not Knowing": The Gold of the Superbowl, Comedy and Creativity

What is it that makes sports so compelling? We just saw it in the Superbowl: the script is written only in the moment. Truly anything can happen next. My heart jumped when Larry Fitzgerald cut through the middle of the field, another clutch catch in hand, scoring the come-from-behind Arizona touchdown with less than three minutes left in the game. But then just a few breathless plays later, there is Santonio Holmes nabbing the ball in the corner of the end zone, winning the game for the Steelers, with his toes, like a ballerina, miraculously staying in bounds.

The great joy in sports is not knowing what will happen next. And finding that sometimes miracles happen.

The same is the case with one of the most creative of the arts--improvisational comedy. Conan O'Brien, soon to take the great comedic reins of the Tonight Show, explains the reality of his late show to James Lipton as part of the "Inside the Actor's Studio" series (click pic for a taste) on Bravo last week: “We don’t really know what we’re doing. And I don’t mean that as a joke. I mean, the show is in flux. We are fudging with it up to the last second. Nobody really knows what they’re doing. There’s two ways to go with that information: One is to be afraid. The other is to be liberated. And I choose to be liberated.”

You are liberated as a creator when you can embrace "not knowing" what is coming next. Conan explains he got good at improvising by “learning to listen, learning to react, learning to let things happen.” When something goes wrong or not as planned, he says, “Improv teaches you not to fear those moments—that’s where the gold is.”

Just like today's Superbowl, the gold of creativity is when you give up trying to control what's next and learn to be alive to each coming moment of unpredictable possibility.