Are you creative at work?

Hey!

I’ve got a question for you:

“Are you creative at work?”

The answer will depend a lot on your identity- do consider yourself a creative person? And does society consider your job a creative one? Let’s save this for later and try a different question.

What if, instead, I ask you:

“Do you have space to be creative in your work?”

Well, that changes things… the answer won’t say much about you. It’s going to say a whole lot more about your organization and its culture.

And here’s where I’m afraid most of us are really blowing it.

Creativity is absolutely vital to an organization, and when I say “organization” I mean company, of course, but also: team, department, division, group, club, etc. Ask any leader and they will tell you they want more creativity. In fact, here in the AI era, creativity is damned near trendy. 

Stop me if you’ve seen companies…

• Bringing in new AI tools to help employees “brainstorm” (AI Trend)

• Hand drawn graphics, mixed-media and personal images  (Human touch AI anti-trend)

• Dropping the minimalist aesthetic in favor of bold, imaginative, and visually rich design

• Using memes and GIFs to communicate with customers

Creative culture and creative marketing…. so what’s missing? The answer is in a search term:

 Problem solving and creativity

If you try to type that into google trends, or search for it on Redditt, you’ll get mostly this:

And that’s why we’re blowing it. We’re focused on the wrong outcomes. We’re thinking about culture and marketing, which are important. But those things don’t change what’s possible in your organization. Creativity can.

How? By building two often overlooked skills that radically improve your organization’s capacity to anticipate problems and solve them.

Here’s what Steve Jobs had to say about the first one:

Thanks, Steve. Spot on.

Creativity allows you to see non-obvious connections.

When you can connect dots that others can't, you can see opportunities and anticipate problems that others don’t. You are going to get farther with this skill than with any AI brainstorming tool.

In fact, the only way you’re ever going to be able to do anything interesting with those AI brainstorming tools, or brainstorming in general, is if your team has this connections skill. Do they?

To find out, try this exercise with your team.

Connection Challenge

Form a team of 5-7 people and have 1-3 people act as judges.

Your team will take turns creating connections between items from two lists. Use your imagination to describe a unique and interesting scenario or invention.

The judges will count responses and assign points.

• Your team has 2 minutes to think (without talking) and 5 minutes to respond.

• When it's your turn, choose one item from List A and one item from List B to create a connection.

• You can go in any order, and each team member can go multiple times, but the team can only give a maximum of 35 answers. You should keep track.

• The game is over when the 5 minutes response time is up, or all 35 answers have been given.

• For each common answer, your team will receive 1 point. For each creative answer, your team will receive 3 points. For each highly creative answer, your team will receive 5 points.

• It is up to you to maximize the points awarded with your answers.

• An example of a common answer would be: "Imagine a smartwatch that contains a virtual tour of The Great Pyramid.”

List A: Modern Technology

1. Smartphone

2. Drone

3. Virtual Reality Headset

4. Smartwatch

5. 3D Printer

6. Electric Car

7. Solar Panel

8. AI Robot

9. Bluetooth Speaker

10. Fitness Tracker

List B: Ancient Wonders

1. The Great Pyramid

2. The Colossus of Rhodes

3. The Hanging Gardens

4. The Lighthouse of Alexandria

5. The Statue of Zeus

6. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

7. The Temple of Artemis

8. The Great Wall of China

9. Stonehenge

10. The Parthenon

What did you learn about your team’s ability to make novel and interesting connections?

I generated this little challenge for you using my skill at spotting connections. It’s called a “spontaneous problem” and solving it is one of the challenges in a creative problem solving competition called Odyssey of the Mind.

I coach my daughter’s O.M. team- in fact, I believe in the value of this competition so much that I run the program at her school.

I was fortunate to be handed an elite program - and last year, my first year running the program, we kept the streak alive. All of our teams competed at State competition, and one went to World Finals. 

But Spontaneous problems are, well, a bit of a problem for us. We consistently underperform, and I want us to get better.

I saw a connection between our spontaneous challenges, the work I’ve been doing here on creativity, and my recent experience collaborating with AI. I wanted a way to spin up spontaneous problems fast, and really understand the game mechanics behind them. So I used Chat GPT to create OM GPT - a custom GPT to generate and analyze spontaneous problems. 

Here, try it out.

Thanks to my skill at spotting connections, I now have a solution to my problem. But I’m not going to stop there.

Which brings us to Creativity’s second problem-solving skill. And here, I don’t even need to quote Steve Jobs. You already know what he has to say about this one:

Creativity fosters divergent thinking. 

That means coming up with several possible solutions to a problem, rather than focusing on finding one best solution. 

If you’re not using divergent thinking, it’s super easy to fall into groupthink - which is the color wheel of death when it comes to company problem-solving. (Apologies for the MacOS reference… I just mean it will make your problem solving crash).

There are lots of ways to test your team’s divergent thinking, but in Odyssey of the Mind, we use a different kind of Spontaneous Problem called a “Hands-on Problem. You can ask OM GPT for one of those if you want. Here’s a video of a team solving one.

Divergent thinking is critical to finding new approaches to solve problems. But you obviously can’t engage only in divergent thinking, or you would never get anything done. A healthy system of divergent and convergent thinking looks something like this:

It’s a two phase process. Step one, you start with a question and use divergent thinking to generate many possible ideas. Step two: you use convergent thinking to narrow the options down to a set of optimal solutions.

How to inject creativity into your organization

So that all sounds great to you - you want your team to be able to spot connections and engage in divergent thinking. But how…

It goes back to where we began… most leaders think about creativity in terms of output (what they can produce) and brand (how they appear).

To build creative problem-solving into your team, you have to make space for your team members to practice being creative. And that means building three different things into your culture:

1. Creative process

Whether you’re writing a song or designing a building, all creative processes follow the same basic structure.

Look for opportunities to embed this process into your work and, even more importantly notice where it already is. Most creative blocks come from not understanding where you are in this cycle, and where you’re going next. Talk about where you are, and set expectations based on it.

My favorite book to recommend to help with this is The Creative Act by Rick Ruben. Ruben is a celebrated music producer. He doesn’t write music, he doesn’t play an instrument, he doesn’t sing. What he does is help creative artists get the most out of their work. His book is very… daoist, which I love, but that’s not why I picked it. This book is a detailed, easy to read, description of how Ruben utilizes the cycle above to produce creative work. The book is called The Creative Act because it’s about action - process.

I kid you not, I’ve got a giant bag next to my desk with copies of this book. I hand it out to people because I think it’s so valuable for understanding creative process.

2. Revision and critique

If you want to create a culture of creative problem-solving, you have to get really good at critiquing your colleagues work, and receiving criticism. Like everything else I’ve been discussing, this is a skill.

Similarly, you’ve got to get used to iterating and revising. Work doesn’t get completed, and it doesn’t meet its potential, if it isn’t revised. Unless you set up expectations and culture around revision, it won’t be your team’s instinct. Especially when something is challenging, we have a built in belief that once we squeeze it out, anything we do to change it will make it worse.

I don’t know where that comes from (I have it) but it’s just not true. When people don’t believe me, I show them this video.

The power of proper critique and revision is undeniable when you watch that video. I learned about it in one of my favorite all time books on revision, Think Again, by Adam Grant. If you’ve never read this book - run, don’t walk. It’s going to change a lot of things about the way you approach your work and your life.

3. Shipping

It seems elementary, but one of the key elements of infusing a creative process is shipping. That means actually completing the work and releasing it.

I work with a lot of companies run and staffed by experts - law firms, financial firms, etc. I work with them to create internal processes for making video content - I call them “content pipelines.”

Each of these companies has strategy meetings and working groups that establish goals, and yet the transformation that happens when we apply a deadline always amazes me. If you are producing a weekly or even a monthly show, you are focusing your goals and positioning around a fixed product that will be released on a fixed date. In this context, all that brainstorming and consideration of goals suddenly has a point of focus. This is incredibly valuable at creating goal alignment and improving communication around those goals.

The simple ability for an organization to work through a creative process and actually ship a creative work (be it a piece of video content or a deck for investors) is a huge level-up in creating a culture of creative problem-solving.

For this, I would recommend a book by Seth Godin. Not only is he a marketing sage, with dozens of books under his belt, he is a shipping monster. His book about the creative process is appropriately named The Practice: Shipping Creative Work.

All this is great, but I just don’t think I’m a creative person

When I say I built OM GPT, I mean I trained GPT on 100s of spontaneous problems, gave it rules, worked with it to categorize problems, gave it more rules, honed it, refined it, and taught it how to train itself to get better.

Where I got it to was pretty darned good, but the process of building it taught me a lot about personal creativity, and left me feeling like we have a long way to go before AI crosses  the uncanny valley.

I would never give an OM GPT created spontaneous problem to a team I coach without first editing it extensively. I can get the GPT to follow the format precisely, and to come up with clever ideas. I can tell it how important divergent thinking and connecting the dots is and it can get pretty good with those skills

But it still lacks the spark.

There is something fundamental about human creativity that can’t be replicated no matter how many corrections I make to OM GPT’s instructions. The spark, the subtext, the unpredictability that comes from our relentless urge to question the universe around us.

That Bob Dylan quote sat at the top of my myspace profile. And when I first set up a facebook account, I used that quote too.

Creativity is defined as novelty + uniqueness.

I used that quote because I never felt like my ideas were novel or unique. Dylan’s exasperation felt like my own.

And still… I’m not sure I can name someone else as novel or unique as Bob Dylan. If he can feel like he’s not creative, should I be surprised that I can feel that way? Or that you can?

At the top of this article, I said whether or not you felt creative was a question of identity. I also think it’s something we decide about ourselves very early on in life.

Last year, I was working on spontaneous problems with a middle school OM team, when a 12 year old boy turned to me and said, “I’m just not very creative.”

Here’s a kid who is in every extracurricular activity the school has to offer, he’s sitting at that moment in a practice for a creative problem-solving competition… and he’s the same kid who, days later at State Competition, would turn in a magnetic, completely original performance that helped catapult his team to World Finals.

But he does a lot of sports, society tells him he’s not really on the creative side of things…. And he tells himself he’s not creative.

Just like Bob Dylan.

The truth is that we are all creative. We have a well of creativity running through us. We just need to learn to tap it. 

Creativity is not a skill, it’s a trait… like breathing. But learning to harness our creativity is a skill. And skills take practice.

If you make space in your organization for creativity, you are creating the opportunity for your team to practice those skills. The better they get, the more unexpected connections will be made, and the more divergent thinking will be applied to your problems.

That’s a lot of value you can return to your organization at very little cost.

Just as long as you don’t blow it. 😝

Now read this…

This edition has been far too long, likely because I didn’t do enough revising. So we’ll close out today with a few odds and ends I thought you’d find interesting:

So far, humans and AI work better when they’re not collaborating. So sayeth a new study from MIT.

I don’t know about you, but for me the Olympics have been an excuse for this Gen Xer to pretend it’s 1994 and watch network television😱. Here’s a cool article on how AI is helping to secure the Paris Games.

If you’re like me, you’ve been thinking about how Generative AI is poised to take a baseball bat to traditional search and SEO. Game on now because Open AI just launched it’s Google killer.

That’s all for now. Until next time…

Be Spontaneous, ae

☯️

ps. If you’d like help injecting creativity into your organization, reply “help” to this email or schedule a call.