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Book excerpt: Ten creative business myths debunked

The Spark: How To Ignite and Lead Business Creativity by business leadership specialist Greg Orme is a step-by-step guide to building and running a business bursting with passion, creativity and new ideas.

I wrote this book to help people who want to boost innova- tion in their business. One obstacle is that business creativity is shrouded in unhelpful myths. The folklore gets in the way of leaders thinking clearly about how their teams and people can be more creative. Managing for ideas is full of intriguing tensions; but there’s no reason to add more complexity. My mission is to simplify. So, here’s some clarity on some popular untruths about commercial creativity.1

Myth 1 Brainstorming works best

Advertising legend Alex Osborn (one of the Bs in the global agency BBDO) invented brainstorming in the 1940s. Osborn boasted that brainstorming doubles the quantity of ideas from any group. He stipulated two rules:

Everyone in the group should get involved: Throwing in ideas in an explosion of almost random thoughts. The thinking is, if you sift through sufficient quantities of grit, mud and dirt, eventually you will find glistening nuggets of gold. He advised groups to: ‘…focus on quantity. Quality will come later.’ Participants must avoid negative feedback on what they hear: The assumption is that people will not risk embarrassing themselves if they are likely to hear their idea being trashed by others. Osborn called creativity a ‘delicate flower’.

Brainstorming is now the most popular creative technique of all time. It is used in advertising offices and design firms, the class- room and the boardroom. But there’s a small problem. It doesn’t work. A famous test in 1958 found people working alone came up with a far greater quantity of ideas (twice as many); their solutions were also of a higher quality. It turns out that brain- storming has the opposite effect on people panhandling for ideas: they find less gold, and the gold they do find is of an infe- rior quality. It speaks volumes about the state of creativity in modern business that brainstorming is a dud. It means the lim- ited amount of time companies devote to being creative is not being managed effectively. It’s worth saying this again; it is, after all, quite startling:

• Creativity is the root of all new ideas and profits.
• Most businesses don’t spend enough time and energy on being creative.
• When they do, they use a technique that doesn’t work as well as the most obvious alternative.

It’s as if we were running modern businesses on a 1940s size- of-a-room Bakelite computer with less processing power than a modern wristwatch. Worldwide deputy chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Richard Hytner acknowledges the reservations about brainstorming but still uses it with his teams and with cli- ents: ‘I’m a fan of brainstorming. I think the reason it’s become debased is because the people running the brainstorms have run out of ideas, run out of juice. Brainstorming at its best is where people are really skilfully facilitated.’

I would still advise you to use brainstorming with teams. Not because it is the most efficient way to come up with ideas; but because it encourages people to collaborate and engage in non-judgemental electric conversations. One warning: make sure to practise your facilitation skills first – brainstorming needs a listening and skilled group leader who understands the divergent- convergent nature of the creative process (see Habit 2 Break the management rules). Forget the myth, but embrace the positives of brainstorming.

Myth 2 You need to be a genius

People touched by genius dominate our perception of creativ- ity: Albert Einstein, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, da Vinci and Picasso. The way their life stories get told often perpetuate the idea that creativity is the preserve of a handful of slightly unhinged titans. The mythology of creativity being the sole preserve of the lone genius goes back a long way in Western thought – from Plato’s ‘divine madness’ through Romanticism and Freudian psy- choanalysis. Clearly, some people are very gifted. But that should not act as a stop sign for others. Academic Robert Weisberg ana- lysed the genius myth of Mozart, Picasso and Coleridge and argues that their stunning achievements can be explained through logi- cal progressions, memory, training, opportunity and hard work.3 Malcolm Gladwell provides even more context with ‘Outliers’, his study of the factors that contribute to success. Taking Bill Gates and The Beatles as examples, he argues success in any field is often a matter of practising a specific task for a long time. The magic number, according to Gladwell’s research, is 10,000 hours. That’s eight hours a day for about five years. To become innovative in a particular business sphere, first work hard to master your craft.

Myth 3 You need to be very clever

Intelligence correlates with creativity only to a point. And, it’s a fairly modest point at that. To put this into context, two-thirds of us have an IQ between 85 to 115, and the average IQ in an industrialised country is 100.5 The ability to be creative is posi- tively correlated with IQ only up to an IQ of 120. Above that the link evaporates. If you’re intelligent enough to read this book, you can be very creative indeed.

Myth 4 You’re either creative, or you’re not

The ‘myth of the genius’ also leads to a general condemnation by some of any techniques or approaches to help ‘normal’ people to develop a more creative attitude. This isn’t useful, as far as I’m concerned. Clearly, some people are brighter than others. Some people will run the 100 metres faster than 99.9 per cent of the population, however hard the rest of us train. That’s life. And, some people are more creative than others. Business should try to hire as many of these creative powerhouses as they can. Meanwhile, we should all try to develop a more creative outlook on life – and develop what gifts we have. Think about your career and work out when you were creative – and what opportunities you might have missed. How can you be more creative inside and outside work – as well as encouraging creativity in those around you?

Myth 5 All businesses must be creative all of the time

All businesses can benefit from being able to encourage more creative ideas from their people. But no business can be creative 100 per cent of the time. That would be ridiculous. It will always be a balance between exploiting well-trodden processes and proven products and investing time and resources in developing new ideas.

Work out when and where you would like the creative sparks to fly:

1. agree the time in the business cycle your people need to be at their most creative – and when it’s ‘all about delivery’;
2. identify the teams that need to have a more creative attitude than the rest of your business.

Myth 6 Creativity belongs to the young

Creativity often comes from outsiders, people who don’t know how things ‘should be done’. The young are naturally sceptical of the status quo. But age is not a predictor for creativity. Counter- intuitively, it is expertise that inhibits it. Experts find it difficult to see or think outside the patterns they have learned. The tragedy is that our school system seems to want to produce expert minds, rather than creative ones. Creativity and education expert Sir Ken Robinson tells the story of a little girl busily sketching in class when her teacher stops next to her desk to ask what she’s drawing. ‘It’s a picture of God,’ the girl says. The teacher patiently explains that nobody knows what God looks like. ‘They will in a minute,’ the girl replies. It’s a shame most of us have that kind of creative confidence knocked out of us. Shake things up by inviting people into projects who have no experience in the area being discussed – they won’t be constrained by how things normally get done.

Myth 7 Creativity is a solitary act

When we think of creativity we see Van Gogh in his Parisian garret, Archimedes in his bath and William Wordsworth wander- ing lonely as a cloud sniffing the odd daffodil. But, as I’ve argued in this book business creativity is by definition a team sport. And the increasing complexity of the modern world means creative collaboration is required more than ever before. The myth states that creativity is for individuals, not a team. Embrace the fact more and more of the world’s new products come from creative collaborations. This is only likely to increase.

Myth 8 You can’t manage creativity

Creativity doesn’t respond to many people’s perceptions of tra- ditional hierarchical management. True. Organisational culture plays a big part in encouraging creativity. But there are manage- rial interventions to lead the culture in the right way – see Habit 7 Build a business playground. Also, management skills make it easier for ideas to get a fair hearing and be developed further. Practise the approaches in Habit 2 Break the management rules. Leadership and management makes a big difference. And it can be positive, or very destructive, to business creativity.

Myth 9 Creativity will happen only in ’creative departments’

This is the idea that creativity can happen only in marketing or R&D teams – or at the offices of your advertising agency. Of course, businesses will always have some teams that are hotspots for creativity. And ideas do need a special climate to grow. But, one of the biggest barriers to break down in any business is the one in peoples’ minds – the barrier between who is creative and who isn’t. It’s the same rationale that means everyone should be aware of the bottom line, whether they are an accountant or not. Creativity is too valuable to be left to the experts! Encourage everyone in all departments to approach their work in a creative way.

Myth 10 It’s important to distinguish between ’applied’ and ’pure’ creativity

There are agonised and divisive debates in the halls of academia about the nature of creativity. The divide is around the difference between problem solving: what often happens in business, con- nected with intelligence and reasoning – what could be called applied creativity and pure creativity: what artists do, connected with the unconscious aha! moment that creeps up on you and then announces itself. Pure creativity is cartoonist Matt Groening inventing the idea of the Simpsons in 1987.6 Applied creativity is the writing and animation teams trying to make it funny and rel- evant 25 years later after 500-plus episodes.

I have not got bogged down in this because it’s not a valuable dis- tinction for the real-life leaders of businesses I work with. There are specific problems to be solved: everything from responding to a client brief, to improving how a production line runs, to devel- oping a new product. And there are creative leaps: the so-called aha! moments. Aha! moments produce solutions to problems ‘we never knew we had’. In the arts world we have the Mona Lisa, Don Quixote and The Great Gatsby. But, transformative pure-creativity solutions to problems we never knew we had also crop up in busi- ness: Pixar’s Toy Story, Kindle’s e-reader, the bar code, self-service supermarkets, Velcro and Google, to name a few. One thing is cer- tain: people tend to make huge profits if they manage to innovate and commercialise good ideas. Human creativity plays its part in both pure and applied creativity. Both are highly valuable and lead to innovation and new revenues. Practise the organisational and managerial habits in The Spark. They will encourage pure and applied creativity.

The Spark: How To Ignite and Lead Business Creativity by Greg Orme (Pearson) is out now, priced £14.99, from Amazon and all good book shops.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Greg Orme .