Episode Details

In a world that's unpredictable, creativity is more important than ever. But we often treat creativity like it's an inherited skill - something you're either born with, or not. Does that then rule us non-creative types out? Or can we make ourselves more creative?

Hello and welcome to episode 77 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we tackle one of today's biggest leadership challenges. This week we explore ways to make ourselves and our teams more creative.

In a world that's unpredictable, creativity is more important than ever. But we often treat creativity like it's an inherited skill - something you're either born with, or not. Does that then rule us non-creative types out? Or can we make ourselves more creative? While the field of creativity research is a bit of a mess of conflicting models and ideas, most research supports that people can make themselves more creative. So how do we do that?

Well, first of all, let's define creativity. Creativity is about producing something genuinely new, even if we eventually take that new thing for granted.

A great example is the development of the first iPhone. The iPhone was announced in January 2007, and launched later that same year. It's worth watching a recording of the launch and I've provided a link as a reference in the show notes. In the video, Steve Jobs takes to the stage and announces that Apple is launching three revolutionary products - a widescreen iPod with touch controls (and there's some enthusiastic cheering), a revolutionary mobile phone (louder cheers), and the third a breakthrough internet communication device (muted cheers). He then keeps repeating "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator" and then asks "Are you getting it?" He then blows people away by saying "These are not three devices, these are one device". When he demonstrates the multi-touch screen by using his finger to scroll through a list of songs, people in the audience gasp. In a world where all smart phones had keyboards and extremely convoluted software, the iPhone was something completely out of the box. But now we take all those revolutionary features for granted. Now every smart phone looks pretty much the same as the next.

All of this plays to the narrative that people like Steve Jobs are the exception. Surely they are creative geniuses from birth and mere mortals like us could never be that creative and smart. And we often equate being creative with being smart. But being creative can also be about being unrestrained, and that is something research suggests we can learn and develop,

For example, research was conducted with jazz musicians with varying levels of experience. After they had warmed up, each musician was asked to improvise over a pre-recorded track as they "normally would in a jazz setting". This was the baseline. They were then given three more tries, but told they should "improvise even more creatively than your past performance". Those with less experience did markedly better when consciously deciding to be more creative. For the musicians the key was actually about less effort and worrying less about judgement, both their own and others'.

Daniel Kahneman talks about two ways of thinking in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow - system 1 and system 2. Neither system is perfect, and both are necessary.

System 1 - thinking fast - is fast, automatic, emotional, unconscious, and biased. System 2 - thinking slow - is conscious, effortful, logical, and calculating. One of his arguments is that we think of ourselves in terms of system 2, but the reality is we can never turn off system 1. Creativity involves using both of these systems to make the most of our experience and intuition.

Here are five tips for being more creative, whether it's individually