Too Fast To Think

Chris Lewis: I think one of the things we have to look at is what we mean by creativity. In the modern context, creativity should really be taken as problem solving and one of the things that we have in a post-industrial society is that we've got a lot more people that are working on problem solving. And this is not just the domain of those who work in the so-called creative industries - problem solving is something that everybody needs to do these days.

Rachel Salaman: You touch there on the modern world and how that's changed the world of work. What in particular stifles creativity, and how do you see those trends developing looking ahead five or 10 years?

Chris Lewis: I think we're going to have to understand a little bit more about so-called creative provenance, about where these ideas come from. I've grown up in a creative business where the received wisdom about problem solving has been the brainstorm as a technique, where you pull people together at work to concentrate with other people on solving a problem quite consciously. And yet I know from my own experience that my best ideas, the creative epiphanies, have often come in exactly the opposite circumstances.

And in "Too Fast To Think," we've set out to try to challenge that hypothesis by interviewing people from all walks of life. And in the book it contains interviews with military people like Admiral Sir George Zambellas, the head of the Royal Navy; it has Sir Martin Sorrell, a businessman, in there; it has the clergy, Reverend Alistair Coles; it has film directors like Tony Palmer. We asked a wide variety of people about where they are and what they're doing when they get hit by their best ideas. And the results are strikingly similar. They all report that they have their best ideas outside of the office, very seldom in the workplace. They are on their own and frequently, and this is the most interesting part, they're not trying.

Now this suggests that, and a lot of these people are highly educated in the western reductionist tradition of analyzing things, that, if their solutions come when they're not trying, this suggests that the subconscious has a role to play in problem solving and the subconscious will appear whenever we give it time to be able to do that. And my thesis in the book is with people being so disrupted by modern workplace culture – emails, social media, the pace of the office environment – that seldom do they allow themselves even an hour to go by without checking email or checking something which is going to interrupt them. Yet we know, in order for the subconscious to come forward, it requires a sustained period of solitude, of a lack of distraction.

So, when we measure knowledge workers on their problem solving, we can't treat them as if they are in a Victorian factory. We have to trust that their subconscious is going to solve those problems and, if we really want to bring forward this creative potential in people, then we have to allow that time really to work.

Rachel Salaman: That sounds like a complete shift in the way most businesses work. It would almost be a revolution, wouldn't it?

Chris Lewis: Yes. And I'm not a revolutionary but I do believe in some ideas which are perhaps gaining ground. I believe in employee ownership, I also believe that, if you want people to get good at something, then they have to have fun - all competence follows preference. 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.

Rachel Salaman: For a manager, in particular, what can be gained by focusing on creativity in their work life?

Chris Lewis: As a manager of people, your job is to get the best out of the team. Anybody that's elevated into a position of leadership in an organization earns their salary on the basis of them being able to leverage the abilities of the people around them. That means, very simply, that people have got to be able to reach their potential and there is a very close link between potential and prosperity. [It's] very difficult to get people to become prosperous without reaching their potential. What makes people reach their potential is, when they enjoy what they're doing, they have fun in what they're doing. They want to do it more and consequently get better at it.

Now, this speaks to what managers actually do at work every day, and the difference between doing and being is quite important for a manager. Let me explain what I mean by that: most people have a To-Do List, very seldom do people in leadership positions have a To-Be List. When you ask a child to describe their parents, they usually use phrases or words which can only go with the verb "to be" – my father was inspirational, my mother was reassuring and supportive, they both drove me nuts! These are things that go with the verb "to be." If you ask parents to describe themselves, they say, "I get my children up in the morning, I take them to school, I help them with their homework, I bathe them in the evening, etc. I'm there to make sure they don't forget anything on the way to school." They describe themselves by what they do.

This is very important, that most people, when they look at their managers, they don't just want them to do something, they want them to be something, and that's quite important for values in the workplace. You can have a list of values but if somebody doesn't follow those values, it's very difficult to tell people that they should follow the values. You have to show it. And so this is the difference between being as a manager or leader and doing.

Rachel Salaman: In your book, you talk quite a bit about the left and right sides of the brain and that they have different functions. You also mention some research that suggests that might be a myth. Could you just share your thoughts on this?

Chris Lewis: In the 1940s and 50s, it was quite a common hypothesis that the brain actually was split into a left brain and a right brain process and when you look at the physiology of the brain, as Jill Bolte Taylor does in her excellent video and book, "A Stroke of Genius." She actually holds up a brain in her lecture, which is a bit gruesome but it shows that the brain itself is two separate structures linked together by the corpus callosum. And it's generally acknowledged that the corpus callosum's main job is to keep the two hemispheres apart. So the brain itself is almost two separate organs, which led some scientists in the 1950s to believe that left brain, or logical reductionist, processes were done on the left side and that conceptual processes were done on the right side.

We've learnt since then that the left and right brain work very closely together to be able to process different thinking in different ways, so physical parts of the brain on the left side contribute to the righthand-side process. What's become known as the left- and right-brain process is really what we know as the difference between logic and conceptual thinking. So, typically, when we educate people in universities, we teach them a large subject and then we break it down into separate subjects and then we break that down further. Seldom do we tell them to do the opposite, which is the synthetic process of building things up, which is where the subconscious comes in. The subconscious is very good at joining the dots.

Now, most people would recognize that they have these two processes. Now, why is this useful for us in 2016? Well, because we keep getting surprised. We got surprised by Brexit, we got surprised by Donald Trump, and my question in the book is could it possibly be that we have become so analytical and drilled-down that we are actually starting to lose the capacity to join the dots or look across? And my thesis is that I think we've gone as far as we can into Big Data, data analytics, drilling down more and more and more, and we've stopped looking across.

Now, this is partly down to the fact of how we consume information. Most people are checking their emails somewhere between 50 and 100 times a day, which is already a big chunk of their working day. and every time they're distracted and disrupted – and sometimes people will check their email in the middle of work, in the middle of a session of concentration, and that forces them back into the logical reductionist process because we know that the way people get these ideas is quite frequently when they have a 45-minute period or an hour of doing nothing. And, of course, these days it is very bad for your career to be seen to be doing nothing! Nobody wants you to be doing nothing. My thesis in the book again is, when you're doing nothing, you're actually doing quite a lot because your subconscious is getting to grips with some of these bigger issues.

Now, this also speaks to the issue of how people are allowed to have fun and to interplay, in some respects, because, if you take any task that you enjoy doing and you reduce the amount of time available for that task, so you enjoy eating a delicious meal, how would you enjoy it if you had to do it in 10 percent of the time? It would probably be less fun and my thesis also is if you really enjoy the creative process, and you should because it is arguably the most fun you can have with your clothes on, that you actually should be involved in it, then you have to allow time for it. If you don't allow time for it, then you're going to have less fun and these two things are not mutually exclusive.

Once you have the creative process operating, people can reach their potential. They can also be more productive but in a world which is moving too fast to think, people are very short-term. We see this in the stock market, working on a 90-day cycle where companies and people are pushed to achieve just numbers in the short term, and they have to remember that the philosophy of making profits – and there is nothing wrong with that, capitalism can be a very successful process, but we have to remember that profits are a byproduct of happy, successful, contented, fulfilled people and cultures. It's not the other way around.

Rachel Salaman: I was interested to see that, in the book, you included a whole chapter on sleep. Why?

Chris Lewis: Because of its direct effect on wellbeing and creativity. This is something which was illuminated for me by my friendship with Professor Russell Foster, who is the Head of Circadian Neuroscience at Brasenose College at Oxford. He's one of the most remarkable people I've met. He has researched very deeply into the sleep patterns of people and not only does he notice that, quantitatively, people are getting less sleep over a longer period of time but, qualitatively, he is identifying the different types of people. Broadly speaking, he classifies people as early chronotypes or late chronotypes, and most people will tell you they are not a morning person or they are an evening person. And this is quite important in how it's best to engage with them and get the best out of them.

Now, in Russell's work, he points out also that adolescents go through a phase of being a late chronotype. Irrespective of what they eventually become, the adolescent phase is generally late chronotype and so I tested this theory with Steve Frampton, who is the excellent head of Portsmouth College. He deals with students aged between 16 and 19, typically adolescent late chronotypes. And he understands this intrinsically, and he moved back the entire academic day so that students could start later and therefore were far more receptive and far more productive and far more creative in their process. And consequently, by his brilliant leadership and his excellent culture within that college, he's raised the performance and the grades by a quantum leap forward.

Obviously, when you talk about things like sleep, the science does matter because, sometimes, you have to be able to prove it. Now, we know the effect that sleep or lack of sleep or badly phased sleep has on people in the airline industry, for instance, and some of these things need to be understood from a creative process because the evidence suggests that, when people are terribly short of sleep, not only do they eat more, their levels of nutrition suffer, the body releases a hormone called ghrelin. Russell's the expert on this, that when people are jetlagged and when people are tired, the body produces ghrelin, which forces the consumption of sugars and fats and so, if you're not sleeping properly, it's very difficult to be healthy or to keep your weight down. And the same is true if you're creative. Creatives often can be a bit manic in the way that they work and they can do three or four days at a very high level and then have to switch off. The sleep is quite an important process. Dror Benshetrit, in the book, who is an Israeli architect living in New York City with his practice, even goes to the point where he takes problems to bed with him and sleeps an extra hour in order to wake up with solutions. His creative provenance is around sleep and, when he's asleep, he dreams shapes and he is very visual in his sleep. And then he wakes up, he writes the shapes down, draws the shapes, and they become the buildings that he subsequently designs.

Now there are many paths here and they are as individual as the people involved, but sleep is essential to this because it is not only affecting people's nutrition, people's perception, their creativity, but it also is quite clear that there is an epidemic of people with sleep problems and a lot of psychological disorders. The usual sign as a precursor to some psychological problems like schizophrenia is lack of sleep.

Rachel Salaman: Let's talk about your eight creative traits now, which anchor your book. These are quiet, engage, dream, relax, release, repeat, play, and teach. How did you come up with these?

Chris Lewis: Really by distilling what other people were telling me, because they all seemed to have an emphasis on one trait or another but they all seemed to be geared around non-logical factors. So I didn't speak to anybody in the book who wasn't playing to some extent and it's always a good question to ask people who are at the top of their profession, "What percentage of the time from zero to 100 are you playing, enjoying yourself, being playful?" For those who were the most successful, that was well over 50 percent, often 80 to 90 percent, where people are so enjoying what they do they feel very playful about it. And this is illustrated sometimes by their sense of humor.

When you say you play in the workplace, well play is associated with children and it's not associated with adults. And that's a great shame because when you ask a class of five-year-olds who can draw, they'll all put their hands up. You ask a crowd of 15-year-olds who can draw, who's creative, and only one or two will put their hands up. The difference in that 10-year period is they become what we call educated. They seem to have lost the capacity to play.

Now, this is an important question, and one of the questions that very seldom get asked at interview in the world of work is, "What's your sense of humor? What makes you laugh?" It's something that we at Lewis take deadly seriously, paradoxically, because a sense of humor says that you've have the same terms of reference. You have the same timing, the same judgment. We've all been there when someone's made a joke which has been inappropriate, so you need skill, you need judgment, you have to be confident. It also shows you're relaxed. It shows you can handle stress. It's something that we should take very seriously and when people meet, if the first thing they do is share a joke or share a laugh over something, then normally they have to spend less time really going through the details of what somebody's done.

Of course, that's not logical but it is something that we all intuitively know is true and that, again, speaks to the subject of the book, which is, is our world really just to be based on logical analysis? Are our work relationships all about sitting down with people and discussing how much value they've added? After all, if we went home of an evening to our partners and we had a discussion like we have in the workplace, it would seem pretty bizarre to sit down and discuss how each person has added value to the other over the last six weeks or so. I have to say, though, I have been on the receiving end of that so I'd better shut up!

Rachel Salaman: One of the traits is quiet, which is interesting. Personally, I like to work quietly but some people say they work best around other people, with music playing. Are they wrong or is it just a matter of personal preference?

Chris Lewis: So this is a matter of balance. Again going back to Alistair Coles, the reverend, he said that one of the things that he sees amongst students is very seldom has anybody listened to them, and I said, "How do you solve these problems?" And he said, "Well you have to create a powerful space." I said, "What do you mean by a powerful space?" And he said, "You have to remove things from it." He removes the noise, he removes the furniture, he removes the interruptions, the distractions, and he puts people in a space sometimes that they have never been in before, which has no other distractions to get in the way of them speaking.

And he says that people have two states. The human being has two states: either they are communicating or they are listening. He said that people can't wait to be communicating, they can't wait to talk, but very seldom are they very good at just being quiet and listening.

So it's great to be in a workplace. I love being social and I certainly wouldn't want to be lonely, but I personally do need solitude for a period of time but this is the balance. Of course workplaces can be tremendous fun and very noisy, but there also needs to be quiet spaces because not everybody feels like being part of the crowd all the time. And this is particularly the case when you're in meetings because if you're conducting a meeting, often the loudest voice prevails. And sometimes a quiet meeting can allow much more engagement across of the people in the meeting room because sometimes physically, for instance, women participating in meetings have a softer voice and it is physically harder to hear. And when you're in a meeting with men, you will probably have noticed that you are never really short of an opinion.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned the word "engage" there and that is one of the traits. Who should be engaging with whom or what to maximize their creative potential?

Chris Lewis: Well, firstly, you have to engage with yourself. In Eckhart Tolle's book, "The Power of Now," he points out that if you can develop a dual conversation where you listen to yourself talking, your own critical voice, and treat it as if it were a third party, sometimes that can allow you to engage with yourself. And this is quite an important point and it is particularly the case where you see the relationship in young professionals, between the genders.

So it will be difficult to illustrate this in terms of audio but often men have a lot of confidence but less skill and women are quite frequently the other way around. They have higher skill sets but less confidence. But when we look at this lack of confidence, that's right at the heart of how you get more potential out of people. Men generally, and I speak very broadly here, don't tend to lack that confidence but when we're talking about engaging, we have to be able to engage with ourselves and listen to this critical voice and recognize it sometimes for the impostor that it is and ask ourselves why we are saying this. Why are we having this dialog?

And it's the same outside as well, that, when we want to engage with others, sometimes the very best people are enormously self-critical. And when you ask very good leaders what's their relationship with the people around them - are they harder on the people that they work with or are they harder on themselves - normally it's the latter. They are much harder on themselves than they are on the people around them.

This is an important thing that, if you really care about sustained creative performance in the long term, you have to be able to get that balance right between the internal and external critique. There's very little that I've seen in my experience that comes from cynicism, of people being endlessly critical, and we do live in a world that is very critical all the time. The news media particularly is full of very bad news with an implied criticism of some form.

Rachel Salaman: Another of the traits is teach, which is an interesting one to see among the eight traits. Could you elaborate on that?

Chris Lewis: This is particularly important, and it's not my idea. I think it's an idea that was first developed by Plato, and he pointed out that the tutor is always the student. This is particularly important in what we do, ie I spend a lot of my time teaching within the company academy rather than walk around. Management by walking around, it's very difficult to do with 28 offices around the world and 700 staff. I prefer to spend my time teaching, so we will bring people together for a couple of weeks, usually in San Diego or a nice sunny location, and spend some time teaching. And when you teach, first of all you become aware of what you know and, secondly, you actually start to understand a subject much more when you teach it. And so, if you start teaching a subject, then you tend to learn more yourself about teaching that subject and you also learn what other people don't understand about it.

The two modules I'm involved in are teaching financial balance sheet analysis, which is often quite mathematical, but I'm also involved in teaching people to paint, which is also part of the course. To extend this sort of parenthesis and when you teach people about financial analysis, first of all you have to work out what intimidates them about it and show them that actually when they are trying to master a subject. If you can get them to be interested in it and like it, then you are 50 percent of the way to getting them to understand it. Most people tend not to understand a subject because they don't like it or they don't like the person, and I found that, at school, sometimes I just didn't like a subject because I didn't like the person teaching it. And that's a great tragedy because, if you find the way into a subject – and often it is by having fun in that area and building your confidence and interest in it - then you can get better at it.

Leaders, in my estimation, shouldn't just be there to tell people to do things. They should be there to be something and they should be there also as teachers and coaches. There is a big difference between being a leader and a coach. A leader tends to be more around their values but a coach is actually there building people's confidence, building their spirit, building their belief, and, again, these things aren't logical.

Rachel Salaman: So if a manager wanted to coach their team in, let's say, becoming more creative by nurturing these eight traits, how might they go about doing that in practice?

Chris Lewis: Well, this is a show not tell. They have to be prepared to embrace the values themselves and you can't really tell people to have fun otherwise you look like an idiot but often that happens, and so, first and foremost, you've got to start with whether you trust people, whether you trust your team. And in order to get them to be engaged, it's really quite simple. You can engage people by just asking them, using the phrase, "What do you think?" And so, often from senior leadership, nobody actually goes round and says, "What do you think? We've just bought this company, what do you think?" Nobody does that and so, sometimes, going to the quieter people and asking what they think and allowing time for them to give you a response, really matters if you care about engagement.

Rachel Salaman: In the book, you say that we should be prepared for some skepticism about this approach. What are some common objections that you've come across and some ways to overcome them?

Chris Lewis: We live in an environment where, if you come up with a new idea, you will walk into the left-brain critique. If we are becoming more analytical and more drilled-down, then you're met with the full force of somebody's judgment immediately. Again because people are under huge pressure, they are feeling overloaded, they jump to judgment and part of this process is to say, "Is all of the logic that we have, is that all there is? Is that all there is that defines our life, just pure logic? Are we all just numbers? Is finance there, is money there, to be our God? Or is finance there to be like fire? Is it a good servant but an evil master?"

That's one of the things that, when we create a short-term look at the world, we make finance our God. We make short-termism our master and we bow down before logic and we miss the longer-term traits that actually suggest that your life is there to be lived and your spirit is there to fly. It should be fun. It should be fun and, if we make it all highly logical, we make it all highly rationa,l then sometimes that critique that we pour upon other people's ideas does nothing to either elevate the critic or the person that's receiving the criticism.

Rachel Salaman: So, in an office environment, it's about open-mindedness as much as anything, by the sound of things.

Chris Lewis: I think you have to accept that you can be wrong. I don't know anybody who's been right all the time and also recognizing that, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're probably in the wrong room. The leader's job isn't to be the smartest person. A lot of times people think the leader has to be the smartest person in the room. The leader is there to make other people feel like they're the smartest person in the room. It should be there to lift the confidence and the spirits of the people around them, not to be the cleverest person.

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 are there to try to get the best out of the people.

Rachel Salaman: Great thought to finish on. Chris Lewis, thank you very much for joining us.

Chris Lewis: My pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Chris's book again is "Too Fast To Think: How to reclaim your creativity in a hyper-connected work culture."

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.