Innovation Insights from our Pal Tom

A Tom Friedman-bashing comment last week spurred me to investigate the blogosphere for the case against the NYTimes writer and author of the World is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded (for a particularly venomous snapshot, check out Rolling Stones writer Matt Taibbi's perspective). Clearly, many take offense to the very predictions, ruminations, occasional thievery and metaphors that have helped Friedman become so popular.

Well, I haven't read everything Friedman has written, nor the volumes more of thoughtful and snarky criticisms of him. But I've heard him speak several times and read these past two books. I like hearing his ideas. He has access to people, cultures and ideas that I don't, and certainly his insights into the flattening of the world has helped many of us better understand the accelerating global changes these past two decades. If you don't know much about the World is Flat despite hearing about it the last few years, it is certainly worth checking out a video of Tom speaking, like the one below.

But, of course, I am most interested in innovation--and in particular trying to better understand what creative skills are needed for this century. I am biased toward appreciating Tom because he believes as I do, as he says around the 23 minute mark of the video above, that "the most important economic competition going forward is going to be between you and your imagination." As the outsourcing and automating of old middle class jobs continue, Tom asks, what will be the skills for the new middle in the flat world? He offers some particularly valuable ideas, with provocative evidence from his personal travels and interviews. Here is one list of desired skills from Flat--all of which require us to improve our right, creative brain and interpersonal intelligence--that he sees in a "Help Wanted" ad for future competitive advantage:
1. Great collaborators and orchestrators. "It is about being able to operate in, mobilize, inspire and manage a multi-dimensional and multicultural workforce.”
2. Synthesizers. He sees a new position--CIO: Chief Integration Officer--that brings together different talents, people and domains, such as artists and engineers, to create new value.
3. Great Explainers. Managers, writers, teachers, producers, journalists and editors that can explain all this stuff.
4. Great Adaptors. Versatilists--see my similar thoughts on comprehensivists--as opposed to specialists.
5. Green People. He addresses this throughout his latest Hot, Flat and Crowded book.
6. Passionate Personalizers. He explains that passion and curiosity will become more important than IQ.
7. Great Localizers. People who can tailor and translate products and services to needs of the local community.

Whether he is entirely right about these particular skills, can we have any doubt that it will be creative skills like these that will lead to innovation and prosperity wherever they are practiced in the world?

Our Entrepreneurial Imagination

From pundits on cable news to leading U.S. authors and politicians, it's getting easier to find support for innovation as the rallying cry for our future prosperity and happiness. From his seminal World is Flat to his recently released Hot, Flat and Crowded, Thomas Friedman describes how "we have lost our groove" as a country and how innovation is key to getting it back. He and Daniel Pink (in his A Whole New Mind) help us understand that innovation on a personal level is about developing new skills and mindsets--the right brain capacities such as imagination, collaboration and versatility--that will allow us to lead in a world that now has different rules and continues to change. We have work to do as educators on that front.

On a national level, Friedman in particular makes the case that we in the U.S. are still poised to be the leaders in innovation as well as any country, which last week's Economist corroborates. I have referred to the Obama presidency as a new opportunity for us to be the United States of Creativity, and in its special report on entrepreneurship the British magazine uses a similar title: United States of Entrepreneurs: America still leads the world (click on logo).The article explains that "America is still a beacon of entrepreneurship," which is deeply rooted in our history. We not only create more businesses than any place in the world (550,000 small businesses every month in a recent study); our cultural attitudes, adventurous consumers, mature venture capitalist industry and links between universities and industry all contribute to making innovation thrive. This is good news, important insight, and a nice boost for a little national assurance.

But the current economic crisis is giving us all--young and old, policymakers and small town clerks--a chance to rethink everything from our national system of capitalism with its many strengths and gaping flaws to our personal lives and careers. Here's what President Obama said at the Youth Ball on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009:

“Young people everywhere are in the process of imagining

something different than what came before.”

So I ask: What is a child coming of age right now imagining? What about us who are no longer "young people"? Can we, like them, imagine "something different" than what we've had, what we've done or what we've been?

Dancing with the Bird, Part 2

Here's your opportunity to truly test your improvisational skills with an actual trial of dancing with the bird. As I described previously, there are few things in the world more inventive and unpredictable than a dancing Cockatoo, and few metaphors more apt to describe the creative challenge of thinking-and-acting on your feet.
In the spirit of challenging you to try something you've never tried before, I am asking you to get up on your feet, right now, click on the picture and try to match moves, headswings and bobs with this bird. Frankly, there is always a benefit to dancing to Ray Charles for two-and-a-half minutes, so you really can't lose. But I want you also to experience how well you can follow, one of the great unsung (and often lost to know-it-all adults) skills of improvisation, collaboration and creativity. Come on, just do it. I won't tell.

If nothing else, click on the picture and go to the 50 second mark of the video to see this bird demonstrate a move with its head heretofore never seen on the planet.

Happy weekend, happy spring and may we all do a lot more bird-dancing this season.

Authentic Aspiration

In this blog (and more in my The Mindset of Innovation book-in-progress), I am fleshing out three key competencies to creativity: fluency, flexibility and originality. Each of these competencies has skills and mindsets that can help us all think and act more creatively.

While so much of our cultural innovation--and joy in life--comes from the competency I refer to as originality, it may be the trickiest to define and build. How do you fully embrace and unleash your authentic, original self? Authenticity is one of those you-know-it-when-you-see-it traits, and it always helps to be inspired by others who embrace their own originality. I felt that way when reading Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.

In her best-selling book of spiritual exploration, Gilbert's authenticity (and unpretentious honesty and intelligence) shines through, as you can also see above in this TED video. Last week she spoke here in Chicago, and a friend who saw her remarked how "real" she seemed, how authentically she revealed her own quirkiness by talking about things others might not. In one story she told about being on Oprah, she shared about the moments during the commercial, rather than the moments in the spotlight, where she nervously tried to get Oprah's attention (which, I was surprised to learn, wasn't easy).

While a state of fear is incompatible with creativity, part of her originality is how well she grapples with what she is afraid of. She asks in the TED video: Why are we afraid of the very work we feel we are meant to do on earth? She provides one key answer: Endeavoring to make our own creative mark in the world makes other people nervous. Our drive toward creative originality is usually met with skepticism and warnings from others, feeding into our own internal censors. It is scary to embrace--and usually much easier to squelch or avoid--our own idiosyncratic vision or passion.

We need each other, creative allies and supporters of originality, to fend off classic creativity killers coming from others, like this one Gilbert shares: "Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?" Can you help?

Taking the Plunge

Perhaps you were like me as a child at the swimming pool: I put a toe in, brrrrr, took it out, put the other toe in, walked around the pool, tried to psych myself up, splashed my arms perhaps, and 20 minutes later I still wasn't in. I knew it would feel good once I got in and was used to the water, but that was easier said than done. Starting, taking the plunge, was the problem.

It's the same for many of us now and it's a key part of making our creativity happen. Once we actually start the writing, the project, the creative endeavor, the work we've been procrastinating on, we usually can lose ourselves in it. But it's so dang difficult to start. Just like the swimming pool, we can feel the change of energy it requires--going from the nice warm air to the sudden shock of cold--and even though some part of us wants to do it, our short term reaction is to avoid. Without knowing what the right first step is, inertia loves to take over.

For years now I have brought people together for creative experimentation in groups, starting with years of "Kreative Evenings" in Northern California and now with monthly Creativity Jams at the Old Town School of Music here in Chicago. What I find in myself and others is that while many of us want to attend--have a goal to stretch our creativity and explore our musical selves--when the actual day comes there is a block to showing up. We may have the intention but it's much easier not to pull the trigger, to stay at home, to do something more familiar, safer, easier. To attend a Creativity Jam or to do something creative challenges us to change our bodies, our current energy system. While many report to me how much they enjoyed being there and want to return, they--and, frankly, me as well--are nevertheless blocked when the physical choice is again before us.

As I've explained before, this is the skill of initiation, part of the fluency competency of creativity. It may be odd to think of starting as a skill, but I believe it is and it is something to be practiced and developed. Here's what I did: About ten years ago in San Francisco, I took it upon myself to practice jumping in the pool at the gym where I worked out. It was psychologically excruciating, to be honest. Facing that open water, shivering, and daring myself to just take the plunge. But I got to experience, again and again, what that odd transition from inertia to initiating felt like, and I got better and more comfortable stepping into the fear. I'll never forget putting that to its real test at a midnight solstice event, stripping down to my underwear and running into the frigid Pacific, screaming all the way. But glad I did it. What about you? What do you need to jump into?

Finding Flow in Distracting Times

“The secret to a happy life is to learn to get flow from as many of the things we have to do as possible.” ~Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Even if you are an info-thriver and get fueled by what others (like me) might consider information overload, the fact is that all of us need time and concentration to be our most creative. At times we need to take a deep dive.

According to the gloriously named and famed researcher Csikszentmihalyi (as in, that "chick-sent-me-high"), any kind of distraction gets in the way of us being our most creative. His years of research attempted to understand how we get into those deeper moments of creativity--what he called the "flow" state--when we are most engaged, and, he found as well, most happy. The kinds of digital distractions we are all faced with clearly prevent us from getting into flow, so we need to carve out the time when we don't check email, don't multi-task.

Another insight about flow that I've found helpful is demonstrated in the chart above related to the tasks we set up for ourselves during our day. When the task is too easy for your skills, you're bored. When the task goes beyond your skills or knowledge, you're stressed out. Much of us spend our workday in one of those two states. But you can help yourself get into the most creative state by adjusting tasks so that they better match your skills (or are just a bit more difficult). Just as you play your best tennis when you are challenged by someone of the same or slightly better skill, you can help yourself get into flow by setting up your tasks similarly. The more challenging the task that can be met by your most exceptional talents and skills, the more satisfying the flow state.

Here are six key conditions that Csikszentmihalyi found helps people find flow:
1. Clear goals/purpose
2. Immediate/relevant feedback
3. Well-matched challenge/skills
4. Minimal distractions
5. No worry of failure
6. Sense of autonomy/control

More on Digital Fidgetal

In his 2001 Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Marc Prensky brought attention to the great divide in the country: A younger generation has grown up with technology in a way that older folks, like immigrants who never completely pick up the language or lose their accent, can never match. But I think there is a slightly different divide, between the Twittering "perpetual-taskers" I mentioned last time and others, that powerfully impacts creativity.

The division, I believe, is between people who thrive on constant information and those who are depleted by it. The Info-Thrivers need the juice to keep them connected and to keep their ideas sparking. Plenty of older folks--supposedly the immigrants not the natives--are just as addicted to digital fidgeting (Yes, I see you constantly updating your Facebook status) as anyone else. The Info-Depleters, though, need a break from information in order to recharge and be more creative (not to mention sane). Personally I find being hooked to technology and being fed continuous information as, overall, an assault on my creativity. Not a happy-making drug for me. There are two clear research reasons that help explain this:

1. Incubation. Much creativity research has found that we need to move away from an idea, clear our heads of it--let it incubate--in order to have our Aha moments and the most profound insights.

2. Constant distraction is a hobgoblin to creativity. We all know how difficult it is to concentrate, to complete an idea, when we are constantly interrupted--by checking emails, hearing texts, people coming by. One of the five key conditions to foster "Flow," which I'll write more about next time, is having time and space away from distractions to be most engaged, productive and creative.

I'm wondering: Are Info-Thrivers just junkies for constant stimulation, news and connections who know it's distracting them from being more creative--or might it be the fuel they need?

Multi-Tasking: r we twittering our cre8tivity away?

We as humans are always evolving, adding new capabilities all the time, and perhaps the most generationally obvious one is a leap in multi-tasking skills. From a young age I always liked to get as much done as quickly as possible, doing-my-homework-in-front-of-the-TV-on-the-phone-brushing-my-teeth, and know that my longtime practice has enabled me to accomplish more things at once than other people. Indeed, I believe that our ability to multi-task reflects an important skill--part of the flexibility competency of creativity--that fuels innovation.

But we all know that multi-tasking has its downfalls and dangers, from increased traffic accidents while texting to name your own pet peeve. Many intelligent folks argue that multi-tasking is dumbing us down (click on picture above for a good Atlantic Monthly article by Walter Kirn). Newsweek columnist N’Gai Croal describes it as not just multi-tasking “but rather a new form of mobile perpetual-tasking, where moments of spare time are steadily filled in by constant communication."

And it's in this "perpetual-tasking," which the growing popularity of Twitter continues to feed, that I believe lies the greatest assault on our creativity. I have no doubt that these instant, short missives sent out to a growing number of people who agree to be interrupted by them are a great breakthrough for on-the-scene news reporting. But constant distraction diminishes our creative engagement in a way that cannot be made up by the feed of new information, as idea-sparking as they could be (though, in my experience, rarely are).

More on tweeting and engagement next time.