Be More Creative

Linda Rottenberg: We can do it! We can embrace our crazy. If you're not being called crazy, then you're not thinking big enough.

Rachel Salaman: But according to Jonathan Fields, the lawyer turned entrepreneur who wrote the book "Uncertainty," we don't all embrace creative challenge.

Jonathan Fields: We tend to label ourselves either creative or non-creative based on whether we're a big idea, sort of a blank canvas person or not. The truth is we're all creative – we all create on very intense levels throughout our day.

Josh Linkner: We've been taught in school, and perhaps by parents, that we should never make a mistake and perhaps we're not very creative because we weren't good at drawing in elementary school.

Rachel Salaman: That's Josh Linkner, another creativity expert – and a professional jazz guitarist!

Josh Linkner: In fact, as people we're just hard-wired to be creative, that's our natural state. And while we may need to dust off the cobwebs a bit, we can all reconnect and rebuild those natural assets very quickly.

I always like to say that creativity is like your weight, not your height. Try as I may, I probably won't grow 12 inches by next week. But, on the other hand, I can change my weight based on how I behave. And your creativity is the same thing: we all can build and expand our skillset with respect to creativity.

Rachel Salaman: Linda Rottenberg wrote the book "Crazy Is a Compliment." She says we all need to have more confidence in our creativity – especially when our ideas challenge the status quo.

Linda Rottenberg: The only people that can give us permission to move forward with our crazy ideas are ourselves.

Rowan Gibson: We shouldn't think, "OK. I'm not creative. You know, that's something for other people."

Rachel Salaman: That's Rowan Gibson, author of "The Four Lenses of Innovation" – and someone else who's wary of creativity labels.

Rowan Gibson: I mean, I've been amazed at some of the creativities that I've seen, especially in the sessions that I run around the world, from people that… are not traditionally thought of – and they don't even think of themselves – as creative. Someone from HR, somebody from IT, somebody from Finance, and… they're coming up with more creative ideas than the people that are in Marketing and R&D and whatever, particularly if they're coming at something from a completely different perspective than those people who are stuck in that way of thinking.

Rachel Salaman: And according to Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, from the IESE Business School in New York, it's not just people who get labeled as creative or not. In many organizations, only some activities are deemed to be creative. And that's dangerous.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg: You go two days off to an off-site, and they can be great, only it's not really the two days that matter, it's the other 363 days a year. That's where you need to make innovation happen. And the problem with a lot of these methods is because we isolate them, then we have a tendency to make them super flamboyant and very different from what we do every day, and that's counterproductive.

The question is not really, "How do we squeeze in another brainstorming meeting every second month?" The question is, "How do we take our daily meetings and make them a little bit more creative, or a little bit better at fostering or developing new ideas?"

Rachel Salaman: I talked to Thomas about his book "Innovation as Usual." He's a big believer in collaborative creativity, which only happens, he says, when creative thinking is encouraged at all times. And when people are encouraged to step out of their silos.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg: Just the connection between two different departments can suddenly start to spin off new ideas. Good ideas tend to come when new worlds meet.

Rachel Salaman: Organizational-design expert Diane Stigmeier told me about making the physical environment suit this connected creativity.

Diane Stegmeier: There's more work being done by fewer people, so those teams need to join and disband, join and disband, throughout the workweek. So these mobile whiteboards are a very inexpensive solution to help support those employees in the way they're working today.

And then probably the least expensive way to add a little bit of energy to offices that seem to be unproductive is a couple of gallons of new paint! We take a look at the office environments from, you know, a decade ago. We're looking at the sea of gray cubicles – pretty boring environments. And you can add some pizzazz with color to have the space much more inspiring. And that's probably the least expensive solution you can do at this point in time.

Melanie Katzman: I also encourage people to create spaces where these conversations can happen.

Rachel Salaman: That's psychologist and business consultant Melanie Katzman.

Melanie Katzman: Sometimes we get into a room but it doesn't feel conducive to having [those] kinds of conversation once we've invited someone in. Sometimes we have to sit in a circle. It's a little unusual in some companies. But, you know, it's OK! Move the furniture around. [It] opens up the air and opens up the space, literally and figuratively, for people to be able to start to connect.

Rachel Salaman: Creative connections was a big theme for many of our experts. Here's Josh Linkner again.

Josh Linkner: In software engineering, they say, "If you want to change the output, you have to change the input." So, I spend literally one minute a day just gobbling up creative inputs. I might watch a live musician play on YouTube, I might look at a painting, I might read a poem, but essentially, I'm absorbing the creativity of others to get my juices flowing.

Rachel Salaman: Rowan Gibson describes this as a way to keep "rewiring" your thinking.

Rowan Gibson: Come to a new insight that really, fundamentally, shifts your perspective, and you use that insight as a trigger, basically, to build a new idea, which is a leap of association, a new connection of different thoughts and concepts and domains.

Rachel Salaman: And Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg told me some practical ways to start boosting our creativity like this.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg: The second you start learning something that's different from your own world, that's when you start to get inspired. You know, on your daily commute, watch a 20-minute talk by somebody who works in the marine field or whatever it is, as long as it's really about something very different from your world.

And then the exercise is a little bit to try to see is there something here? Is there a nugget of an idea that perhaps could be relevant to me in some way? A different tip: simply, if you have your weekly Monday meetings, could you start these off with a two-minute session by somebody getting up and explaining a new trend from outside the industry? Just a very simple thing and easy to integrate into the routine, and just a way to get a little bit of new knowledge into the organization every week.

Rachel Salaman: So Thomas is keen to get everyone on the team involved in creativity. And Vijay Govindarajan from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth takes that one step further.

Vijay Govindarajan: You should empower everybody in the organization to come up with ideas for growth. Because too often companies think that the CEO should be the person who should be thinking about ideas. We should empower every employee to say, come up for ideas for growth. And the reason that's important is… innovation and innovative ideas is about responding to change. So, if you want to get ideas, plug into each and every employee in your company.

Rachel Salaman: Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg told me that listening to customers can also boost a company's creativity. But you have to do it carefully.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg: Starbucks created what they called [the] "My Starbucks Idea" website, where customers from across the world could submit ideas to Starbucks. Of every 500 ideas that came in, 499 were put on hold. Now, that's not necessarily an incrimination of Starbucks. In my view, it's really just a reflection of the fact that most ideas are bad ideas. When you look at where good ideas come from, it's very rare to see that customers just submit them to you and they are brilliant. In reality, very often, the people that get the best ideas are your own employees – in the context of being in touch with the customers.

Rachel Salaman: And Vijay Govindarajan also advises care when we're choosing which colleagues to ask for ideas.

Vijay Govindarajan: Suppose you're an automobile company, and you want to innovate a new automobile concept, say, in China. Now, who understands the automotive market and its dynamics in China? How fast is the Chinese consumer evolving, how fast [are] local competitors building capabilities, what is happening in the technology front and distribution front in China? [Is it] the so-called front-line employees in China, or the CEO of an American car company sitting in Detroit? So, we must really empower people close to the action, the so-called "doers" out on the field. Actually you can get a lot of creative ideas.

Rachel Salaman: For futurist April Rinne, this kind of creative thinking also requires freedom: freedom from anxiety about what the future holds, and from the urge to control it.

April Rinne: The way I have framed this is, in order to thrive in a world in constant flux, we need to be able to let go of the future, get out of our own way, in order to allow a better future to emerge. And what this gets at is really our obsession with wanting to predict and command and control the future and know exactly what's going to happen. And the fact is, that's never been the case, but especially a world in flux – we're looking at more, not less change in the future. So this is the kind of thing we need to really gear up for, the long term.

To some degree, you know, we've never been able to control the future – we simply like to believe that we can! What we're really after is a kind of illusion of control, and a world in flux though makes it really clear how little we actually control. At the same time, when we believe that it really has to be one future that's going to play out, and it needs to go this way because that way is in my favor, etc. – we are blinding ourselves to a whole bunch of other futures that could play out, that probably will play out, or at least are equally likely to play out [as] the one that you have in mind. And, as a result, we're leaving opportunities on the table, we're not seeing all of the amazing things that could happen as well.

Rachel Salaman: April is one of Forbes Magazine's 50 leading female futurists. She specializes in helping people find creative solutions to challenges that are still hazy.

April Rinne: So it's a lot of horizon casting, it's a lot of what we call "scenario mapping." So, mapping out different scenarios for what could happen, and then starting to prepare for them. Not, you know, bulletproof, watertight solutions, because that's never possible, because we don't know what's going to happen in the future. But, to help organizations prepare, and just be ready for the kinds of things that could happen, as well as some of the macro forces that may be outside your radar, may not be in your sector or in your discipline, but absolutely are going to have an effect on what happens to your industry, to your organization, moving forward.

Rachel Salaman: Linda Rottenberg also warns against trying to control everything – if you want to free up your creativity.

Linda Rottenberg: I think that disruption, craziness… use those to your benefit, because – by definition – being an entrepreneur is a little scary and hard because no one's done your idea before.

Rachel Salaman: Linda's company, Endeavor, supports entrepreneurs to have faith in their ideas, and to take creative risks.

Linda Rottenberg: The emerging markets have an advantage in this new world because they're used to disruption, they're used to chaos, and here we prize stability, and I think it hurts us.

Josh Linkner: This principle is called "reach for weird."

Rachel Salaman: Josh Linkner again.

Josh Linkner: It's challenging people to not just gravitate towards the tried-and-true, the things that we've done historically, but rather to push your creative boundaries and look for those oddball, misspent, unorthodox solutions – the unexpected approaches that can make all the difference in the world.

Rachel Salaman: But there's a problem here. However much we might want to have groundbreaking ideas, they don't always come easily. According to Rowan Gibson, a big part of that is our love of patterns.

Rowan Gibson: One of the things we know about the human brain is that it's kind of like this pattern recognition machine. That's what it does: it recognizes patterns. So, if you see a face in a crowd… you're recognizing a visual pattern. If you see a chair, you recognize it as a chair because you've learned that that's what a chair looks like.

The problem with it is, first of all in school we learn a whole bunch of patterns that rob us of our creativity, because they tell us there's only one right way and there's a wrong way of doing things, and… there's a place to go to find all the answers, in books or on the internet or whatever. But also, as we go to work, we then learn new patterns. We learn the way things are done in a certain industry or inside a company, and what happens is that they blind us to new opportunities.

Rachel Salaman: Rowan Gibson, with some neuroscience that's not great news for creativity. So what can we do to escape familiar patterns and start being more creative? Josh Linkner gave me an idea for turning idea-generation on its head.

Josh Linkner: The first 10 minutes of the meeting is spent not coming up with good ideas, but coming up with bad ones. In other words, you brainstorm, "What's the worst idea you can think of, what's a terrible idea, what's an ineffective approach?"

But then the second part of the meeting is where you examine each of those bad ideas and ask yourself, "Wait a minute, is there a little kernel, is there a nugget in there that I could take and flip a little bit, polish the edges off, and make it a good idea?"

So, by starting with bad ideas, you actually challenge yourself to get more creative, more weird, and then you can always ratchet those ideas back later on, to make them appropriate.

Rachel Salaman: But Jonathan Fields knows that challenging yourself like this can be scary. He's noticed that the best creative thinkers work hard to build a safe environment to do it in.

Jonathan Fields: They're ritualize, and they create these little moments of certainty throughout the day, and then they'll do it within the work process as well. And it changes the underlying psychology by feeling like they have enough of a tether to these moments when they know what comes next. So that when they're charged during the work with the responsibility of really going to that place where they don't know what's going to happen, they feel more comfortable that they do have these touchpoints and they'll have moments where they feel more... basically safer.

Rachel Salaman: Jonathan calls these routine, familiar actions "certainty anchors."

Jonathan Fields: It can be sort of a few seconds, [or] as long as minutes or even hours, where we pretty much eliminate the decision-making part of that moment or activity… create known outcomes that we can expect to always happen the same way at the same time, and they allow us to essentially repeatedly touch psychological stone throughout the day – to create a space that we can lean into while working.

Rachel Salaman: Jonathan told me about what he calls a Creative Hive, where people can think and invent freely – and everyone's in problem-solving mode.

Jonathan Fields: Instead of operating in an environment where very few other people are taking risks, very few other people are trying new things, and those who do and fail are largely judged, we create an environment where we say, "This is all in, everybody's responsible for doing this. Everybody will be transparent and sort of… be held accountable to reporting on what you're doing on a weekly basis." So nobody's left out, it's all in.

Rachel Salaman: Blogger and business consultant Jonathan Fields. So what are some of the practical things we can do to fully play our part in this creative process? Let's get some quick tips from our experts, and we'll start with two from Josh Linkner. First, cut out the distractions.

Josh Linkner: I turn off the internet, I shut down my phone – my wife knows how to reach me in an emergency, so that's about it – and it gives me the space and time to really express my deep creative work. I'm not spending more time, I'm not actually adding more hours to my work week – I'm just reorganizing it in a way that supports the creative process.

Rachel Salaman: And the second tip from Josh: keep challenging your creativity.

Josh Linkner: Another thing that I do is that I spend one minute giving myself a bit of a creativity challenge. It's sort of like working out your creativity muscle. So, the challenge might be something like… take 10,000 ball bearings and market them as a new type of product. What might that be? And the goal isn't to necessarily create [a] tangible work product, it's more to give yourself creative practice in a low-pressure situation.

Rachel Salaman: Next, a tip from Chris Lewis. In a nutshell: make creativity fun!

Chris Lewis: It's very difficult to get people to become good at something that they actively dislike, and the tragedy of the modern workplace is that so many people don't seem to have fun with either what they do or the people that they work with. Once you have the creative process operating, people can reach their potential. They can also be more productive.

Rachel Salaman: Futurist April Rinne says don't get bogged down in details, or too focused on what's right in front of you.

April Rinne: When life feels uncertain, or the future is blurry, focus not on what's straight in front of you – what often again society tells you, "focus on what's right in front of you, what you can see" – but focus on what's invisible, what's beyond your horizon, oftentimes what you don't know.

Rachel Salaman: And one of Jonathan Field's top tips was about boosting your physical health to do your finest creative thinking.

Jonathan Fields: There's tremendous research around the impact of movement and meditation on the creative process, on cognitive function, on problem solving, on creativity. If you are an individual who works in a team or an organization that's driven by innovation, to integrate daily exercise and mindfulness and meditation – they're the two probably most powerful force multipliers on the planet for that.

Rachel Salaman: Jonathan says that our best ideas often come when we're so relaxed we're not even trying.

Jonathan Fields: Those moments where we pull ourselves away from… what we would linearly define as the work are the moments where very often the greatest ideas, ideation and insight comes to us. Not when we're working hard within the work, but when we work hard and then create deliberate spaces and step away, and give moments for the amazing stuff to bubble up.

Rachel Salaman: So there are plenty of things that we can do to boost our own creativity, and to empower great creative thinking within our team. But our experts are also keen to emphasize the responsibility of leaders to drive creativity from the very top of organizations. But do you have to be a natural, confident creator to do that? Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg thinks not.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg: You don't necessarily have to be the Steve Jobs of this world. It's actually fine even if that's not your core strength, to go in and help other people become more creative.

Rachel Salaman: Chris Lewis agrees.

Chris Lewis: If you look at orchestra conductors as a model of leadership, the orchestra conductor can't play the violin better than the people in the orchestra, or the double bass. They're there to try to get the best out of the people.

Rachel Salaman: And Diane Stegmeier told me that you don't have to be a multi-million-dollar company to make the physical environment right for creativity to flourish.

Diane Stegmeier: Look at very low-cost ways to create a more inspiring environment, an environment where there's a greater ability to mentor the younger generation, to capture good ideas and share them with others. And those are things that are very inexpensive. So you take a look at adding a number of very very inexpensive team tables that are on castors, so that teams can form and disband very quickly as they're talking about different work paths and projects they're working on.

Rachel Salaman: So leaders need to do their bit to empower their people's creativity. But, as we've heard from our experts, we can all take steps to be more creative, whatever problems we need to solve. By boosting our confidence, gaining new inspiration, embracing uncertainty, and making creative thinking part of everyday life, our possibilities are endless! We can be more creative – if we let ourselves!

Linda Rottenberg: Most of the best ideas die in the shower, because we don't even get out and… give ourselves the permission to pursue them.

Josh Linkner: The research is crystal clear – that all human beings have huge reservoirs of dormant creative capacity.

Rowan Gibson: If you give people the opportunity to bring out… their inner genius, literally anyone on this planet can be an innovator.

Rachel Salaman: Linda Rottenberg, Josh Linkner and Rowan Gibson, ending this episode of Mind Tools Expert Voices: "Be More Creative."

You can listen to in-depth interviews with all the people you've heard here – along with hundreds more conversations with leading writers and thinkers – in our Expert Interviews collection in the Mind Tools Club. Remember what Josh Linkner said about "gobbling up creative inputs"? This could be the perfect place to start!

I'll be back soon to tackle another workplace topic with more great guests. For now, I'm Rachel Salaman: thanks for listening.