As I have written here before, my favorite book on corporate creativity is Orbiting the Giant Hairball by the late Gordon MacKenzie. For me, nothing nearly as good has been written since.  I was searching for insights on creativity and came across this old — but still very fresh — Fast Company interview with him. Check out the whole thing (and read the book).  But here are a few gems:

‘In the mid-1980s, MacKenzie founded an oasis for creativity —
called the Humor Workshop — just outside the walls of Hallmark
headquarters. “I wrote a one-page, handwritten description of the
department,” MacKenzie recalls. “Without telling my boss, I called his
boss, the vice president of the creative division, and we had lunch. By
the end of the meal, the VP was telling me, ‘We’ve got to do this!’”

Eventually MacKenzie shifted his orbit and returned to company
headquarters, this time with a title of his own invention: Creative
Paradox. “My job was to be loyally subversive,” he explains.’

That phrase “loyally subversive” is so delightful, so much cognitive complexity in this those two little words. Like this old story about Chuck House at HP.  Or how about this one:

I became a liaison between the chaos of creativity and the discipline
of business. I had no job description and a title that made no sense,
but people started coming to me with their ideas, and I would listen to
those ideas and validate them. When you validate a person, what you’re
really doing is giving them power — like a battery charger.

A battery charger!  Another great phrase, and consistent with Rob Cross’s research on energizers.

Finally check-out his answer to the interviewer’s question:

‘What is the biggest obstacle to creativity?

Attachment to outcome. As soon as you become attached to a specific
outcome, you feel compelled to control and manipulate what you’re
doing. And in the process you shut yourself off to other possibilities.

I got a call from someone who wanted me to lead a workshop on
creativity. He needed to tell his management exactly what tools people
would come away with. I told him I didn’t know. I couldn’t give him a
promise, because then I’d become attached to an outcome — which would
defeat the purpose of any creative workshop.’

This last point is remarkably similar to a point that I heard from Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, make just a few months back.

Finally,note that these are arguments about how to spark creativity.  I would be the last person to argue that organizations need to be all about creativity all the time.   Doing routine things well requires an entirely different mindset.

Robert
Sternberg is a psychologist who has studied an astounding range of topics,
from wisdom, to intelligence, to creativity, to love, to leadership.  I’ve been doing some reading on creativity
this morning, and I ran into this quote from Sternberg in a comment that he
wrote in the American Psychologist in
2002,  which he titled “Creativity as a Decision”
(This was published in the May issue on page 376):

 

“If psychologists
wish to teach creativity, they likely will do better to encourage people to
decide for creativity, to impress on them the joys of making this decision, and
also to inoculate them for some of the challenges attendant on this decision.
Deciding for creativity does not guarantee that creativity will emerge, but
without the decision, it certainly will not. As a mentor, nothing makes me
happier than watching at least a substantial proportion of the students I have
mentored make this decision. They decide that they may pay a price but that it
is a price worth paying. By making this decision, they transform both their own
lives and the lives of others. What greater reward can life hold?”

 

I like this both because it doesn’t sugar coat or over
glorify creativity.  And its simplicity
reminds me of Karl Weick’s
lovely insight that people move through three stages as they gain knowledge
about a subject: From overly simplistic, too overly complex, to – in rare cases
– elegantly simple.  Sternberg seems to
be getting to the third stage!   Sternberg argues that there are many studies
and complex findings about creativity (e.g., does it require high or low
self-esteem?), but the common theme he sees is that creative people have made
the decision to be creative, regardless of setbacks and frustrations.  And his simple insight that deciding to be
creative does not assure creativity, but without that decision, it is sure not
to happen is intriguing.

As I
wrote a few months back, Huggy Rao from Stanford, Allen Webb from McKinsey
and I interviewed Pixar’s  Academy Award
winning director Brad Bird for the McKinsey
Quarterly.  Brad was one of the most lively and insightful people
I’ve ever had the privilege
of interviewing.  You can read it here  (there is also multi-media
with it).  It seems that the Quarterly readers love Brad Bird too,
as this article was the most
popular among readers last quarter.

The two main things about
innovation that Brad reinforced for me are the value of tolerating and
celebrating constructive friction and of never being satisfied with good enough
— he made very clear about how the mediocrity of the once great Disney
animation studio could be traced directly to the attitude that “we are satisfied
with our work, it is good enough.”  In contrast, my daughter and I
were lucky enough to see a preview of WALL-E earlier
in the week at Pixar (an astounding movie, especially the first 30 minutes are
pure magic), and although the Pixar people we talked to were clearly very proud
of this film, the main thing they seemed worried about was that all their
success would make them complacent and less creative.  That kind of
paranoia and hungriness is, I think, a hallmark of people and organizations
that are creative over the long haul.